I Don’t Need To Work on My Baseball Swing

For the last seven years I’ve been working frequently with identical twins on the hitting mechanics of their baseball swings.  This past weekend was the opening round of the state tournament here in Washington State and I went out to watch the two seniors perform in what could be their last game as high school athletes.  As the baseball gods would have it, it was.  One of the twins had an amazing season hitting over .450 and has signed to go play community college baseball and work on getting his academics up.  The other will pursue golf in college.  The kid who hit .450 had two great hits off a lefty throwing upper eighties.  His brother, the golfer has had some troubles with is baseball swing as of late and had a rough game.  The reason I’m sharing this brief story with you is because of the irony of the ending to this story and what you may take away from it.

Last Thursday I met the twins to hit prior to their state opening game two days later.  We were taking a few swings in their garage into a net.  One was ready to work on his baseball swing and the other stayed up in his room.  Towards the end of the hitting mechanics lesson, the kid who’d been struggling came down and said he wasn’t hitting because the coach was only using him as a runner, since his bat has been cold.  He figured he only had a handful of games left and would ride it out; then focus on golf.  I left that day warning him that he could never know what circumstances might change that would see him thrown into the game.  No luck, he never took any hacks that day.

Back to the game I was watching.  Top of the second, a guy drives a ball deep to left.  The hit carries the left-fielder to the wall where something wrong happens and the kid goes down.  After things shake down, the outfielder is out of the game with a severely sprained ankle.  Guess who gets the call to fill in?  You got it, the kid who didn’t work on his baseball swing two nights earlier.  He finished the game with two k’s at the plate…

Here is what you need to take from this:

1.  Never stop preparing.  You never know when you may get called on to fill a role.  Put the time in now on your baseball swing because mark my words, you’ll find yourself in a scenario where you will want to be well-prepared.

2.  In the theme of the first point, be willing to work harder than those around you.  I was fortunate to play a little ball with Willie Bloomquist.  Not a household name but he’s got 9 seasons in under his belt at the MLB level.  The only reason he’s still on a MLB roster is because he can play anywhere aside from pitcher.  He works extremely hard at being marketable if someone should go down with an injury.  This makes him valuable and insures he’ll collect his $1.7 million Big League check this season.

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