It’s been over 18 months since I last published a blog post. I’ve received a number of inquiries over the past year. Why no more baseball posts? Am I okay?
Yes I’m okay.
I stopped posting partly because I was busy with a new baseball-related job. But then my son developed a new passion in life, leaving baseball behind. So what more could I write about baseball?
Shortly thereafter, COVID-19 entered the United States. One of many impacts of COVID-19 on my life is that I set aside blogging. I intend to resume blogging in 2021, but probably not about baseball. It’s time to bring closure to my baseball blogging.
In this post, my 56th and possibly final post about baseball, I share my thoughts about leaving baseball, going into much more personal detail than usual.
Destined for Baseball?
At the age of 20 months, my son saw a brief baseball video. Within minutes, he grabbed a broom and said, “ball, ball, ball!” Baseball was his greatest passion for the next 13 years of his life as he made his way through 10 years of rec baseball as well as travel ball. Though always behind in physical development compared to his peers, he could throw. Clearly he had a future as a left-handed high school pitcher. Depending on how his body developed and how hard he worked, it even seemed possible he could pitch at the college level.
We met and befriended many youth baseball players and their families along the way. Every year, some would quit the game.
For some kids, baseball was never much fun to begin with. Maybe their parents got them to try it for a year or two and they didn’t enjoy it. Maybe they tried other activities they ended up liking better.
Some kids liked the game for a few years, but then something would shift and they would leave the game. Maybe a coach they didn’t like. Perhaps the fear of getting beaned by wild pitchers after the shift to kid pitch at the age of 9. Maybe the fun got driven out of the game by growing coach expectations for discipline and/or too much travel ball.
By the age of 13, two-thirds of my son’s baseball peers over the years were no longer playing baseball. It was the big field, the 60/90 diamond. Some kids who had enjoyed baseball for many years thought the game had become too hard on the big field. Keeping up would require making the game seem more like work than play, so the remaining players had some combination of talent and/or work ethic.
My son was still smaller and lighter than his peers. His hitting results tanked when he was required to switch to heavier, deader bats. However, he continued to pitch well on both PONY and travel ball teams. He began to workout in support of pitching, both to prevent injury and increase velocity. By the end of 2019, a few months before the age of 15, he was working with a terrific physical therapist to prepare his left arm for his first year of high school baseball.
It seemed as if he was destined to be a lefty “pitcher only” baseball player in high school and everyone was expecting it—his coaches, his peers, his family, and himself.
Leaving Baseball
Though we didn’t realize it at first, the turning point was December 8, 2019. Traverse Fitness opened just a 10-minute drive from our house, and we went to check out their open house on Sunday, December 8, a soft opening of the largest Ninja Gym in California.
My wife and son were familiar with the concept as they had watched the past few seasons of the TV show American Ninja Warrior. On the show, contestants (ninjas) navigate athletically challenging obstacle courses, competing to reach the final course and win a cash prize.
It seemed kind of cool to try out some of the obstacles at Traverse Fitness. But it was more than cool. He immediately fell in love.
Within weeks he was going to the gym 4-6 times per week. One by one, he completed obstacles that were far beyond him when he first started. As his interest in Ninja grew, the amount of time he spent on baseball rapidly declined.
A month later he was questioning whether he wanted to continue with baseball. Mostly it was because he wanted all the time he could get for going to the Ninja gym. But it wasn’t just that.
For a while, he had not been feeling enthusiastic about what his midsized high school baseball program had to offer. He had friends a grade higher than him so he knew there wouldn’t be a developmental program for pitchers (typically, only the largest and most athletically ambitious high schools have pitcher-only programs). If he was going to continue to develop as a pitcher, he was going to have to do it almost entirely on his own, with the help of dad, private lessons, a private workout program (maybe Driveline?), etc.
As his passion for Ninja rapidly grew, his high school baseball concerns grew in importance in his mind. By mid-January, just 5 weeks after his first visit to Traverse Fitness, he decided he was not going to try out for the high school baseball team. His reasons were:
- Time consuming (likely taking away time from Ninja training)
- Not as much fun as rec ball
- Not enough learning in return for his time
He said that if any one of these three things had been different, he would have wanted to do high school baseball.
Are these good reasons to stop playing baseball? They were for him.
I’m fine with anyone who wants to cut back on one activity to spend more time on something they love more. That’s a good reason to quit baseball.
On the other hand, I freely admit that I would have enjoyed seeing him pitch in a few high school baseball games.
I Missed the Signs
I’m writing about this 11 months after he made his decision. With the benefit of hindsight, I can now see that high school baseball was not something he was looking forward to.
My son loves to pitch, but I think he gradually lost enthusiasm over the past few years for all the other stuff you have to do in order to get to pitch in games, such as:
- travel
- conditioning
- arm prep in January
- the warmup routine before throwing the first pitch
- hitting practice
- swinging a too-heavy, dead, BBCOR bat
- practices geared mostly towards position players
- etc.
He told me a number of times that he wished he could pitch hours per day and in many games without getting injured, while doing a lot less of the other stuff on the above list. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.
Since he made his decision to not play baseball in high school, he has rarely thrown a baseball, though he did have a little fun between May and July hitting home runs over a 210 foot fence with his (much more fun!) drop 10 Axe Bat. He still loves baseball in other ways, as he follows the goings on in the MLB closely and has spent many hours playing MLB The Show on his PS4.
His passion for Ninja continues. He loves the gym, the culture, and most of all the people. And, unlike baseball, it is an activity where he gets to spend most of his time doing the parts of the sport he loves most.
Ninja has been a lifeline during the pandemic because he became an assistant coach at the gym for camps and after-school programs. As an employee, he has had opportunities to train even when the gym was closed due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Working during a pandemic has been tough for many people. My son feels very grateful to be doing the Ninja work he loves while continuing his training.
As a parent, I am happy to support my son’s passions. My son is the type of person who has one major passion at a time. It was baseball for 13 years. Now he is training to be a Ninja Warrior.
After Baseball
So what will I write about next?
I really like data science. I expect I’ll be writing more articles like Handedness in Youth Baseball that tell a story based on data that I process, understand, and make visual. Topics will vary. But they probably won’t be related to baseball.
The post Leaving Baseball (in a Good Way!) first appeared on FilterJoe.