Bad Hops Aren’t Errors

Baseball was the only sport I played while I was growing up.  I lived in the south and the weather permitted leagues to operate year-round.  The high school team’s season lasted from January to May and then summer league continued through August.  After that there was usually some low-key winter league that played in Fall.  I loved baseball and played that ten-month schedule for a solid portion of my life.  Of course, at that time I didn’t understand how important it was to me.  And, as the cliché goes, I never realized how much it meant to me until it was gone.  After high school, I just quit playing.  I didn’t play in college and there weren’t any recreational leagues that I knew of.  It was just gone.  But even to this day, I still think about it all the time and, to continue with the clichés, I think about how sports can instill lessons you carry throughout your life.

I played short-stop.  I loved playing in the field.  I loved taking ground balls.  I actually enjoyed that more than I enjoyed hitting.  I would do it for hours if possible, or for however long someone was willing to hit me ground balls.  When I was little, I couldn’t wait for my Dad to get home from work so that we could go in the back yard and he could hit balls to me.  At the time I didn’t grasp how much that meant.  My Dad worked 12-hour days and traveled at least three nights a week, every week of the year.  I can only imagine how dog-ass tired he must have been when he came home, but he would still suck it up and come out there and dribble off grounders to me.