While I do enjoy many sports, baseball, up until now, has been one I just don’t get. Well along with golf, but that’s a different rant.
Baseball, while yes the American pastime, I just never really got. You run you stop you run, wait no go back. Try again. Fail. Now switch positions. What? That was my basic understanding of the sport.
Well my experience with the boys’ baseball team most definitely changed my perspective of the American pastime.
I arrived at the baseball diamond after school one very nice spring afternoon to meet the team and participate in their
training. Right off the bat I was welcomed and given a glove. Since I have basically never played baseball (except in the back yard with my brother when I was about 9, and that was enough for me to figure out baseball was not my sport) I have zero skills, talent, or anything really to give me a little support in the practice.
We started the practice with a quick warm up: partners throwing a ball back and forth. So I partnered with Matt Spirek
and started throwing. My catching skills were not up to par at first and I missed the ball quite a bit but towards the end I was able to catch most of what was coming at me. Unfortunately my throwing was about the same level as my catching and I could throw a little over half the distance the rest of the team was throwing.
We next had a meeting with the whole team with coach Freelhing standing center. He gave us a quick rundown of how
practice would go down, and introduced me to the team. We then split up JV and Varsity; with Varsity starting on the field and JV in the batting cages.
I went with Varsity. Everyone threw down their gloves and started jogging over to one side of the field and pulling giant net things and a rolling giant net thing to the center and home base of the field. I stood around and looked pretty for this part of practice…
We then had another meeting, this time it wasn’t the game plan for the day but the game plan for the rest of the season. Coach Frehling was very clear in emphasizing that while the game is a physical one, it is also a mental one. They needed to clear their heads of past losses, and focus on what’s happening now.
After the meeting we divided into outfield and infield, and started batting. There were 3 stations for batting practice.
The first was “air batting” at a wiffle ball, basically you swat at it with your hand. It stings. Bad. But not too bad. After a few rounds of the swatting practice, I moved onto the next station. Hitting a wiffle ball with a baseball bat. At first it was rather disastrous however once again I was able to get the swing of it it turned out ok. The third and final stage was of course a real bat with a real baseball inside the giant rolley-net-thing which turned out to be a kind of portable batting cage.
I came up to the plate, rather nervous, after all I was about to make a fool of myself in front of the entire boys varsity
baseball team. I looked at the umpire, Dylan Dwyer, who gave me some weird facial gesture, and faced the pitching
mound. “I can’t do this I can’t do this” was all that was running through my head. And finally it came out my mouth.
“We never say cant” said coach Frehling, “you can do it”. So he came over and threw up the ball a few times right in front of me and I hit the balls. Then when I miraculously hit the ball from that position, he moved back to the pitching net-thing the boys dragged out earlier and pitched (a little slower) just like he would with any other member of the team. And I hit it! Wow, let me tell you I was extremely surprised, and am still. Me, with zero coordination, who tripped over the bucket of balls in the middle of the field later in practice, hit the tiny little baseball! Yes! And all in about a minute too. Now that’s good coaching.
We did this drill for a while, switching off infield and outfield. Outfield was less intense for me than infield, mostly because I just got all the baseballs and threw them in a bucket. And then tripped over the bucket… but in any case, I was in the outfield. When we finished this drill we did some conditioning. Which is basically the same sport to sport: Running. So we ran around the diamond and came back and stretched and then did the “relaxation exercise”. Now this was a first for me.
We were instructed to lie on our backs and look up at the clouds, the sun was setting and so it wasn’t too bright any more. “Close your eyes” coach said, “Arms at your sides”. “Now breathe, Buddha belly! Breathe into your stomach. Now keep breathing, hold it for 4 seconds, and exhale.” So we breathed for a while, it was very relaxing; I thought this might be all but then… “Now, visualize all the things that are stressing you out. School, homework, girls, (boys) and now exhale. Exhale it all away”. This was nice; exhaling all my ridiculous homework, projects, and stress, very nice indeed. He then said to “visualize all the things that make you happy, a great homerun, your best game of baseball”
etc. etc. When we had finished with our happy visualizations, he had us tense different muscles of our body, starting
with our head and ending with our toes, one section at a time. And finally, he had us visualize a cold bucket of water being poured on our head and going down the rest of our body. I must have visualized this very good because I don’t really know what he said after that due to my shivering in the grass from the cold bucket “dumped” on my body.
Practice finished with the relaxation exercise, around 6 o’clock. While everyone was relaxed, it was still easy to see the tiredness in the faces of the team. Practice was long, it was hard, and it pays off. The baseball team has done really well this year; excluding a loss from Pomona the guys have had a great run of games. The season is almost over, but you can still catch a piece of the action April 20 when the guys play Dakota Ridge at 4 pm.