From father to son through baseball

Editor’s note: In time for Father’s Day, TheStatehouseFile.com is rerunning this classic John Krull column from 2012. Last month, the 8-year-old of the story graduated from St. John’s University.

The summer afternoon heat beats down on this Little League baseball diamond. Ian, my 8-year-old son, stands in the batter’s box, a Texas Rangers cap on his head and a red and black baseball bat cocked over his right shoulder. I stand at the pitcher’s mound, glove in hand with a small bucket of baseballs at my feet.

I toss a pitch toward him. Ian swings, misses, and frowns. He takes a practice swing and then nods for me to throw again.

A year ago, Ian started playing baseball. He didn’t like it. The game made no sense to him. He wanted to give up. During games, he knelt in the outfield and stared up at the clouds in the sky. Once, he was pulling up grass when a well-hit line drive flew over his head.

Ian probably wouldn’t have played this year if a good friend of his hadn’t wanted him on the Rangers. Even that didn’t seem to encourage him to try much harder. Until Easter Sunday.

That’s when some family members played a ragged game out in the yard. We marked the bases with sticks and old T-shirts. Someone hit a line drive and, without thinking, Ian reached up with his glove and snagged it.

He stared at the ball in his glove and then began to grin.

Not much later, Ian asked me how he could get “really good” at baseball. I told him that, for guys like us, excellence was not a gift. It was an acquisition. To make our actions look effortless, we needed to spend many hours of unseen effort acquiring the grace that makes something look easy. He needed to practice—a lot.

I throw another pitch. He swings, and the ball chips off his bat foul into the backstop. Ian shakes his head and gestures for me to throw another one. I toss the ball. He swings and hits a weak grounder. Ian nods. Better.

After that Easter afternoon, Ian started asking the same question whenever I got home from work. Dad, can we play baseball? Can we, Dad? See, I’ve got your glove.

He struggled at first. The ball scared him. He flinched every time one was hit in his direction. He also had trouble hitting. He chopped at the ball and rarely made contact.

We worked on the fielding first. I rolled ground balls in his direction. He lost some of his fear and began scooping them up. Then I started tapping them to him with a bat. Finally, I began hitting them to him harder to force him to chase after the ball.

Not long ago, during one of Ian’s games, a player on the other team pounded a grass cutter just to the right of Ian’s position at third base. Ian backhanded it with his glove and then scrambled over to touch third for the force-out.

The smile on his face was as big as his glove.

The hitting took work, too. We started with a batting pole. I swung the long, flexible stick with an orb the size of a baseball into Ian’s strike zone. Ian swung at it. We did this until his swing began to level off.

Then, I lobbed pitches to him underhand. After that, I started tossing them overhand. Finally, I began mixing up speeds. With practice, he got so he could recognize the strike zone. When he got a pitch in the right place, the ball came off his bat like a bullet.

Last week, during his game, he went to bat four times. He got four hits.

The sun pounds down. The rim of my cap is damp with sweat. Ian rubs his arm across his forehead to wipe the sweat away from below his batting helmet. I ask him if he wants to quit and go get something cool to drink. No, he says. Throw some more.

I throw one across the plate, just above his waist band. He lines it back toward my head so fast that I just barely have time to get my glove up. Good hit, I say. He smiles and nods for me to throw another one.

We tend to think of excellence as a moment, a performance. It isn’t that. Excellence is a process. It is a set of demands a person makes of himself or herself, a mindset, a willingness to accept and meet challenges.

It is a cliché to say that sports offer men—fathers and sons and now fathers and daughters—bonding rituals. But rituals exist for a reason. And clichés often spring from seeds of truth. Sports teach us the value of repetition, of fighting through fear, of working through boredom, of sweating the small stuff. Of doing all the things—large and small—that lead to excellence.

What Ian is learning now is that excellence rarely is exclusively about inspiration or native talent. Excellence is about habit. It is about commitment. It is about discipline. It is about swinging and missing—and not getting discouraged. It is about learning not to flinch when something comes your way hard and fast.

Ian has learned those things, but he also has learned something else. And that is that excellence is its own reward. He has more fun—a lot more fun—playing baseball this year than he did last year because he is better at it.

The bucket of balls is empty. I trot out to the outfield to scoop up the ones that Ian has sprayed out there. He picks up the ones along the backstop and rolls them back toward the pitcher’s mound. He steps back into the batter’s box.

If anything, the sun has grown hotter. I wipe the sweat away from eyes. I can see lines of sweat running down Ian’s cheeks. Dad, throw the ball, Ian says.

I put it a touch low. It crosses the plate right at thigh level. He gets his bat under it a bit. The wood hits the ball with a solid thwock. The ball flies in a shallow arc into center field and lands just short of the fence.

Good hit, I say. That’s a good one to quit on. Ian shakes his head and steps back into the batter’s box.

Dad, throw some more, he says. Please throw some more.