Monday, May. 09, 2005
Learning Coach, posted at 9:38 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com I learned tonight that baseball is a game that is based upon more than just talent. It's based upon leaders. You can't just plug fairly talented guys into spots in a lineup and expect a decent result. If you don't have leadership on the field, there's nothing that any of the moderately talented guys can do. They'll just flail away until I rescue them. And I didn't even do the rescuing tonight; it was the team's leaders.So we're playing a bad team tonight. It's a team that we beat by the slaughter rule the first time we played them a couple of months ago. They didn't seem to have a clue then, and I figured they hadn't gotten any better. I decided last week, and announced last week, that I would be starting a lot of reserves in this game. I penciled in nine kids in the starting lineup who have showed up to practice every day and had good attitudes and had almost zero playing time all season.
My Assistant Coach, a father of one of the benched players, asked me if I was sure this was what I wanted to do. He then said maybe it would be a better idea to let the starters get off to a big lead and then put the reserves in. I disagreed, telling him I wanted some of these young guys to have some at-bats that mattered against a team that was trying. Plus, all were decent players, just not starters.
It didn't work. By the third inning, we were down 9-2. I was sweating it out badly. I was getting yelled at by spectators. Guys on the team were frustrated. I was frustrated. I wanted to hide somewhere. I was already writing my post-game speech in my head, the speech in which I take all the blame for the defeat. I was already chalking it up to a learning experience when the kids bailed me out.
It wasn't even that the reserves had played that badly. There were four errors in three innings, and one of them was by a starter who had entered the game in the third. This is bad, but it's high school ball and it's not unheard of. The other team had made a few by then, as well. But nothing could be done offensively and there just seemed to be a general unagressiveness to the team, such as it was.
The kids bailed me out, though. Big time. As one lady shouted at me, "You underestimated this team and now you have to do something about it." I changed the players and kids did the doing. We came back in a big way, scoring three runs, then seven runs, then another four. We had two steals of home and a lot of smart clutch hitting, and flawless defense. Over the last four innings, we outscored them 13-0 and won handily.
So, yeah, I learned a lot tonight. I learned not to underestimate a team. I learned that any team can always beat another team on any given day, especially if their coach has his head up his ass, as I did. I learned that a baseball team isn't just a game board, its pieces able to be changed at whim. On-field leadership cannot be underestimated, just as shitty westside teams with two or three decent players cannot be underestimated.
The kids all are telling me that I owe them pizza for bailing me out like that. Little do they know I have about $200 to live on for the next two weeks after paying my student loan bill. And then, I returned to our locker room to find it broken into. Five cell phones - including mine - were stolen, plus some cash - including mine. That sucks. I don't think I've ever really had anything stolen before like that.