Aside from my children, there are two great loves in my life: My wife, and Baseball. I played baseball from just about the time I started walking. My parents have tons of photos of me running around with my little plastic bat and ball. When I was four I started Tee-ball, and I played nearly non-stop all the way through college. A knee injury ended my hopes for playing in the Majors, but I still love to play casually with my friends. After all of these years, if there was one piece of wisdom I’d like to pass on to the next generation, it would be this: Baseball practice sucks!
Yes, baseball practice sucks. No matter what anybody tells you, and no matter what your coaches say, it sucks. It sucks having to get up early in the morning to go workout. It sucks having to do cardio and conditioning drills. It sucks when it’s 94 degrees outside, and the humidity is making it feel like you're in a sauna, and breathing feels like someone has a pillow over your face, yet you’re still running laps around the field. It sucks when you're running up and down every row, all the way around the stadium, and the muscles in your legs and in your back are screaming and burning, and you just want to stop and lay down but you can't because practice isn't over.
It sucks spending countless hours in the batting cages. It sucks spending countless more doing Fielding drills. It sucks when you have to spend hours snagging ground balls. It sucks when you have to run the same damn drills over, and over, and over again. It sucks having to practice covering second on a pick-off or taking the throw from the plate to practice tagging out a runner. It sucks that when all your friends are hanging out at the beach during the summer, you're either at training camp, or playing Summer Ball.
It sucks when you jam a finger, or roll an ankle, or take a hard slide and rip the flesh off your knees. It sucks when you run so hard that you puke, and then you have to get up and run some more. It sucks barely being able to move when you first wake up in the morning, because your muscles are so sore from the day before. No, I don't care what anybody tells you, baseball practice absolutely, positively, and in all other ways, sucks. But you know what sucks worse than baseball practice?
Losing.
Now I know not everyone plays baseball, and not everyone plays a sport at all, but no matter what it is in life you do do, the principle is the same: Practice sucks, but losing sucks more.
