How do you relax when you play the game?

I recently had a conversation with a kid who was going to his first all-star tournament and was nervous about it. Here is what I told him:

You will fail. That's baseball. If you were a quarterback and completed only three of ten passes, you would be considered a poor player. If you only shot 30% in basketball, you would be horrible. However, if you could constantly get a hit in baseball 30% of the time, you would end up in the hall of fame. Think about it, you will fail seven of ten times if you are very good.

You will strike out, you will make errors, you have to learn to accept that. Baseball is a game of failure, how you deal with that failure will directly impact how well you play.

In the end, this is a game. At least thirty-three outs are made every game. Making an out is not the end of the world. Go have fun, enjoy the game. Don't get so wrapped up in your personal success or failure that you stop enjoying the game. That would be the big failure.

Baseball is a hard game and some aspects of it, like hitting, are about the most difficult thing you could find in any sport. To paraphrase a set of lines from one of my favorite movies: Of course it is hard, it's supposed to be hard. If it weren't hard everybody would be doing it. It's the hard that makes it great.

Now THAT's the essence of baseball.

Splitter