For those of you that regularly read my stuff you have probably heard me mention in an almost braggart type of way about how as a youth I excelled at almost every sport that I played. I wasn't just capable of playing, I was almost always considered a very valuable part of a team in every sport that I played. In both football of the soccer variety and American football I was MVP of both sports around the age of 13 in the city that I lived in. I have some tiny BS trophies that were probably thrown away 20 years ago to prove this.
There was one sport that was always elusive to me though and that was baseball. My family wasn't very focused on baseball for some reason, my father didn't even tend to watch the World Series whereas he would watch almost any other sports playoffs. This probably shaped a big part of why my family never got involved with it. It wasn't just me, my 3 other siblings who were also excellent at most sports also experienced great frustration with baseball and none of us played it beyond being very young.
It was a frustrating sport for me and this was compounded by the fact that it was just kind of expected of me to be good at every sport I tried. My peers and other parents were perplexed with why it was that I was so terrible at this sport but basically just dominated at soccer, football, swimming, basketball, you name it. Hell, one day I was just screwing around with the high school track team after school and managed to beat 50% of the squad at their own events. So why was baseball something that I absolutely sucked at?
I think the last year I played in an organized league I was around 10 or 11 years old. This was a city league so they couldn't cut you from the team. Regardless of how terrible you were the coaches had to play you in both the batting and fielding lineup. I was always in left field, which is where all teams at a youth level put all of their worst players because unless something crazy happens the only balls that fly out there are hit by left-handed batters and there aren't a lot of them. I recall the ball heading my direction only once or twice in the years I played and thankfully, I caught both of them. Not a great deal was expected of me but trust me, I was nervous.
Since I was so good at all the other sports I gave up on baseball entirely and never played it outside of a picnic event in the park or some sort of team building exercise for companies I would later work for. Then one day my job put me on assignment in Chicago in the early 2000's. I was in the city in a part of town called "Wrigleyville" because of the proximity to the Chicago Cubs stadium which is called Wrigley Field. This entire part of town revolves around baseball and nearly all of the bars had batting cages upstairs from the bar. I frequently went to bars because well, what else are you going to do when you don't know anyone. I tried my hand in the batting cages and even watched some videos that they had in the area outside of these cages to try to figure out what the hell was wrong with me and why I couldn't bat after all these years of excelling at almost any other sport.
Essentially every bar that wanted customers in this part of town had to have one of these in order to get people in the door and it is crazy to me to think that we were allowed to get smashed on Old Style Beer and then have 90 mile an hour fastballs thrown at us.
I watched a few people who were good and after a while I started to notice certain aspects of their stance and how they rotated their entire body to swing at the ball. One really big thing that I noticed was that everyone was using aluminum bats, not wooden ones. Perhaps this is the main area I screwed up in when I was playing as a youth because I used my own wooden bat, not an aluminum one when I played. It is significantly easier to hit the hell out of the ball with an aluminum bat. I guess this was never recommended to me as a kid because my father showed little interest in the sport and probably didn't care, and my coaches just assumed I was going to suck no matter what I did. In retrospect this was pretty terrible coaching on the part of the adults back then.
Anyway, after a couple of weeks of being on assignment in Chicago, I actually had a pretty decent idea on how to swing and at balls thrown by a machine that is a lot faster than most of the pitches I was likely to encounter growing up or at some of these park pick up games the adults would normally have.
The next time my company had a softball game in the park, I was looking forward to trying out what I had learned over the weeks at the pubs in Chicago.
In our company softball games the pitcher was always someone who wasn't on either team and every pitch would be something slow and over the plate. This is designed so that everyone can hit the ball easily. So this would be considerably easier than the batting cage 60-70mph pitches that I was accustomed to hitting.
The first pitch the guy gave me that was above the plate and hittable I used all of what I had learned in Chicago pubs and absolutely obliterated the ball into the outfield over everyone's heads. I was pretty excited but I kept that hidden and pretended as though it was easy to me. The reality was that I got a bit lucky and hit the thing just right and nailed it.
So I scored 2 runs for my team because one person was already on base for my team.
The next time I was at bat the other team called for everyone to move way out in because they thought I was going to swing for the rafters again and trust me, I wanted to. However, it doesn't do you much good to bang the hell out of the ball if everyone is in the outfield waiting to catch it. There was no fence here so getting an automatic home run was not an option.
Standing there, I had my bat high behind my neck and was swirling the bat like I intended to hit the hell out of it, everyone took the bait and even the basemen backed up a bit because only one person was on base and stealing bases wasn't allowed since the pitcher is a neutral player. So when the pitch came in i quickly switched stances and surprised everyone who was in "downtown" waiting to catch the ball.
It was kind of a sneaky move but I bunted the ball about 3 feet down the 1st base line. Everyone was ages away from this thing and I managed to get a double and batted the runner in who was on 3rd already. The players on the field got a laugh out of this and unfortunately there wasn't enough time left for me to have an at bat again. I don't know what I would have done but I think I was leaning towards hitting the crap out of it, because that was a lot more fun than bunting.
So they say that you don't accomplish anything by going to pubs or bars but seriously. In just a couple of weeks I was able to solve the mystery of being able to bat reasonably well in baseball. I suppose it is important to point out that in actual baseball against a competent pitcher, they are not going to lay the ball right at hitting level on every pitch, so I never really got to experience that part of the game.
It was a fun day though and I would later visit batting cages again in the future. If you are ever in a city that has batting cages, even if you don't like baseball, I highly suggest you give it a try. It's a lot of fun and at least for me, provided the missing link about how it was that I was so terrible at this one sport all of my life.