The Fundamentals

Dear Joel,

I play on a city rec league softball team with some co-workers, and it's a lot of fun. Our last regular season games are this evening, so softball is on my mind.

I said that it's fun to play on this team, and it is. However, it's also extremely frustrating to me.

You and I grew up with a great baseball coach, who happened to be our father. He coached fundamentals almost exclusively. I don't remember working too much in baseball practice on anything other than fundamentals. We worked on base running and bunting on offense. We worked on backing each other up, communicating effectively, hitting the cut-off man, and situations on defense. We worked on keeping our butts down and making sure -- above all else -- that we kept the ball in front of us on defense. We both played on pretty good ball teams all the way through high school, and I'm sure we both agree that it was largely due to having been coached on nothing but fundamentals for the first 14 years of our lives.

It's taken me a long time to realize that most people who play adult rec league softball had no such upbringing.

We have some incredibly athletic people on our team, but they repeatedly do things on the field that I just can't understand. Our outfielders rarely throw the ball to the cut-off man. Half the time they don't even throw it in right away. They stand there with the ball waiting to see which base the runner is going to try for. Almost all of them regularly use the "do-or-die" method of fielding grounders in the outfield. This is the method where they'll try to scoop it off to the side in order to be in a good throwing position, so they can field it and throw someone out in one smooth motion. But 90% of the time they don't cleanly field the ball because of this method. And when an outfielder lets a ground ball get by him, a single or a double turns into a home run quite easily.

Our brother, Jase, who didn't play nearly as much baseball growing up as you and I did, plays on our team too. It's fascinating to me to watch him play, because even though he lacks the experience (and the athleticism of many of the guys on our team), he's every bit as valuable. Just having been around the game a lot growing up, and being a very smart guy in general, has produced in him the appropriate instincts and head knowledge. He makes plays that the super athletic guys on our team who played college football don't make -- because he uses his head.

To you and me, backing someone up, or hitting a cut-off man, or dropping your butt and staying in front of a grounder is all second nature. It's instinct. For most (it turns out), it's really not. As someone who struggles to be patient with others even in the best of situations, playing softball each week has become quite the test.