Category: sports

Was Michael Jordan the GOAT?

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“If you think Michael Jordan is the greatest NBA player of all time, by far, you’re probably between the ages of 40-60,” blared one reddit commenter.  

Some call it recency bias, but seeing as how Jordan took his Bulls’ jersey off for the final time 25 years ago, we could say that the recency bias exists in the pro-Kobe, pro-LeBron arguments. I’d call the pro-Jordan argument a generational bias. The generational bias suggests that everything that happened before and after my prime is not as great as it was during this relative window. With all these biases rolling around in everyone’s, it’s almost impossible to arrive at a final objective answer.

Some might also argue that the most instrumental bias in such arguments is the emotional bias. Those of the 40-60 demographic cheered harder for and against Jordan than later generations did Kobe and LeBron. That’s an almost impossible argument to debate, of course, as it’s all relative, but we do have statistics to argue and counter. That’s still impossible to argue, as Mark Twain once said, “There’s lies, damned lies and statistics.” It’s true, both teams can argue their statistics in the Jordan v LeBron argument, but there are stats and there are advanced metrics. Before we get into that argument, however, we must discount longevity, games started and played, and minutes, as LeBron entered the NBA straight out of high school, and Jordan played three years in college. Longevity and games played are valuable stats in our determination, but LeBron never retired, and Jordan did three times. LeBron obviously wins all of these categories.  

The advanced stats dig deep into actual games played, and they include value over replacement statistics, player efficiency rating, and fifteen other advanced statistics of the players’ respective careers that favor Michael Jordan 9-6, by category, in the regular season and LeBron James wins these metrics 9-8 in the postseason metrics. LeBron beats Jordan by a substantial number in win share, or the total number of wins contributed by a player, in both regular season and playoffs, which is surprising, but Jordan barely beats him in a majority of the regular season categories. It’s also surprising to see that the deep metrics in the postseason favor LeBron, as I would’ve guessed that would’ve been flipped. Big Game Mike, to my mind, took his game up to stratospheric, untouchable levels in the postseason. LeBron was better. If postseason is far more important than regular season stats, and an overwhelming number of people agree this is the case, LeBron actually has a slight advantage in most cases against Jordan.

Another publication used a more comprehensive approach, regular season and postseason combined, with advanced stats compiled by various publication. Their categorical verdict: dead even.

In the Clutch

Whenever Kobe or LeBron missed, and misses, a clutch playoff shot, some of us hit that “He’s not Jordan!” button. We don’t even consider that a bias at this point. It happened. We don’t remember Jordan ever missing a clutch playoff shot, but we do remember the many misses by Kobe and LeBron. The Bleacher Report developed a very simple formula for a definition of clutch shots in the playoffs. “Playoff games only (no regular season), go ahead or game-tying shot attempts (free throws, turnovers, and the like were ignored, [and the shot attempt had to occur in the]) final 24 seconds or he fourth quarter or overtime.” Within the constraints of this definition of playoff clutch shots, Jordan, they found, was 9-18 in clutch, playoff attempts, for “an astounding” 50% clip. LeBron is 7-16 for a 43.8% rate. (Not Jordan, but it was a lot closer than some of us remember.) Kobe was 7-25 for a 28% (or 5-17 for a 29.4% in the chart they provided).     

Player Makes Attempts FG%
Michael Jordan 9 18 50
LeBron James 7 16 43.8
Kevin Durant 5 12 41.7
Dirk Nowitzki 5 12 41.7
Kobe Bryant 5 17 29.4

Microsoft’s Co-Pilot program lists the following clutch field goal percentages for NBA greats in the playoffs. Jordan 45%, Kobe 41%, Bird 40%, Lillard 42%, Wade 42%, and Horry, LeBron, Magic were all at 40%. So, although, Jordan leads the pack, it’s not by as much as the 40-60 aged demographic remembers. 

One contrarian argument I read online, states that the disparity between the elite talent and average player the 90s and the 2020s, favors the 2020s. They argue that the worst teams of the 90s were far worse than the worst teams of the 2020s. They argue that “There’s no question that the average player is more skilled today than in the 90’s.” They also write that The Chicago Bulls were able to achieve total dominance of the regular season thanks to expansion and a difference in defense rules. Another decent argument I’ve heard is that no one in the NBA, prior to Mike, had the marketing and promotion packages that he would receive.

In terms of marketing alone, I won’t even hear arguments about Bill Russell, Wilt, Kareem, or Dr. J. The only NBA marketing argument that comes close to that which Jordan received was Bird v Magic. If Bird v Magic saved the NBA, on a national level, however, Michael Jordan took it to the worldwide stage. Larry Bird was allergic to the press, and he only gave interviews begrudgingly, so that leaves the media-friendly smile and laughter of Magic Johnson. He was a hero to many, but his media attention paled in comparison to the worldwide, superstar treatment afforded Jordan. Kobe and LeBron later had a taste of it, of course, as they were the best players of their era, but they could never escape the cloud of “the chosen one”. The implicit statement is that Kobe and LeBron may have been as good, or better, than Jordan, but the 40-60 demo wouldn’t allow anyone to flirt with that notion. As a person who doesn’t follow the intricacies of the league, I must concede to the argument that part of Jordan’s impenetrable image as the GOAT revolves around how much the media adored him. The only marketing push that could come close to Michael Jordan was that of the “King of pop” Michael Jackson.

The Competition

To get to the core of this particular argument, we must dismiss the regular season records and the stats they achieved against average players. Even playoff teams have average, role players in every lineup, but if we were to stack the elite teams of each era against each other, let’s go seven deep on the various rosters, how would the late-80s, 90s Bulls, Pistons, Knicks, Jazz, Rockets, Sonics, do against the 2000s Spurs, the Shaq, Kobe Lakers, or the 2010s Warriors, Heat, Celtics and Lakers?

If we could somehow move the Jordans’ Bulls forward a decade or three, how do they fare against the elite teams of latter decades? First question, whose rules do they play under? Does Jordan operate better or worse in the wide-open rules of latter decades, or did the Warriors play an almost indefensible offense at their peak? On the flips side, if we could move the elite modern teams back, under the rules of yesteryear and Detroit’s “Jordan Rules” become “Kobe Rules” or “LeBron Rules”, do they overcome them in the manner Jordan eventually did? Would Tim Duncan, Ginobili, and Parker survive against Pat Riley’s brutal lane enforcement rules carried out by Charles Oakley, Anthony Mason and Xavier McDaniels? Do Jordan and the Bulls 4-2 Shaq and Kobe in championship series? If Jordan and LeBron play in the same era, does Jordan kill LeBron’s legacy the way he did so many others? As with just about every sport, it’s almost impossible to compare eras. The game changes, evolves, and adapts with rule changes. The brutal nature of the game in which no one was allowed a layup, became a wide-open, almost 3-point dependent game.

Focusing on the elite level alone, one reddit writer submits that: “There’s no evidence to support [the idea] that the [elite] players from the 90s are any better or worse than the [elite] players of today. In 632 games, Jordan never lost three games in a row, went 27-1 in playoff series [during that span], won three consecutive championships twice, 10 scoring titles, nine 1st-team all-defense awards. Led the league in steals 3 times, was the first player to ever record 200 steals and 100 blocks in one season and he did it twice [This stat, some would argue is timeless]. Won 14 MVPs (6 Finals, 5 regular seasons, 3 All Star game) plus 2 dunk contest championships. [He] was outscored once in 37 playoff series (in 1985 Terry Cummings outscored MJ by 1 point in the first-round series, 118-117), and [he] is 1st all-time in the number of times a player averaged 40 or more points in a playoff series. He did it 5 times and there’s a 4-way tie for 2nd place who have all done it [once]. [Jordan] also has outscored 982 out of 983 total opponents in career head2head match ups. (Alan Iverson being the only player ever by avg 27.1ppg in 7 games vs MJ who avg 24.4ppg). And this was all in 12 full regular seasons and 13 playoff appearances (15 active seasons). It’s basketballs greatest resume by a mile and those who weren’t there to see it do not want to believe it so, that’s why the 90s era gets no respect.”

The reddit user ends with a compelling argument. Most of the argument centers on the idea that we, the 40-60 demo, suffer from a number of biases, but the same could be said of those in the generation where Michael Jordan officially became a grandfather. If all you know of Michael Jordan are the YouTube videos, the “If I could be like Mike” commercials, the idea that Jordan was the GOAT might sound like “The Three Stooges were the greatest comedians of all time” or “The Andy Griffith Show was a greater sitcom than Seinfeld” arguments did to us. Unlike Curly or Barney Fife, most of Jordan’s exploits occurred between the highlights, on nights when it seemed like he couldn’t seem to miss midrange shots that only counted for two points. These weren’t the dramatic shots that we see on YouTube, but they don’t show what those in the 40-60 demo know.

The 90s Knicks

The best team the Bulls beat during this era would have to be the New York Knicks. Those Knicks 90s rosters may have been the best assemblage of NBA talent to never win an NBA Championship Ring. During Patrick Ewing’s run with the Knicks, they had John Starks, Charles Oakley, Anthony Mason, Xavier McDaniel, Greg Anthony, Gerald Wilkins, Derek Harper, Doc Rivers, Charles Smith, Mo Cheeks, Bill Cartwright, Bernard King, Hubert Davis, and the later rosters included Larry Johnson, Allan Houston, Marcus Camby, Anthony Bowie, and Latrell Sprewell, and they never won a ring.  

Jordan and the Knicks faced each other five times, in this era of their respective primes, and Jordan and the Bulls went 5-0 in those matchups. If the reader doesn’t consider that record eye-popping, go read Blood in the Garden to get a grasp on how talented those Knicks’ teams were.

Jordan retired (the first time) to play baseball? and Ewing and the Knicks lost to Hakeem Olajuwon’s Rockets then Reggie Miller’s Pacers. Jordan retires again, and the Knicks lose to Tim Duncan, David Robinson, and the Spurs. I still cannot believe Patrick Ewing, and his Knicks’ teams never won a ring.   

The Late 80’s Early 90’s Pistons

The late 80s/early 90s Pistons’ run was not near as lengthy as the Knicks’, but they packed a whole lot of winning in that shorter time frame. Some rightly blame the talent around Jordan, but the Pistons beat Jordan and the Bulls in three straight playoff series from 1987-1990.

We can all admit to some type of bias in these never-ending arguments, but those of us in the 40-60 demographic will never be able to get passed “The Run”. When Jordan and the Bulls finally found a way to beat the Pistons, no team could stop them. They won six championships in a row (not counting the retirement years), and no one, outside the 60s Celtics, have been able to match such a run. Those of us in this demo will listen to arguments about stats and advanced metrics that suggest the argument between LeBron and Michael is a lot closer that we thought, and we might even entertain the idea that on many of those scales, especially in the postseason, LeBron was statistically better, but LeBron was never able to amass anything equivalent to “The Run” of six championships in a row (not counting retirement).   

If Michael Jordan never existed, how many rings would Hakeem Olajuwon, Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, Clyde Drexler, and Malone and Stockton have? How many more would Magic, Bird, and Isiah have? How many different legacies would have been cemented with a ring, if he never existed? There’s a reason they call Michael Jordan the legacy killer.

The counter argument might be, that if Michael Jordan had to compete against “The virtually unstoppable” David Robinson, Tim Duncan combo, the Kobe, Shaq combo, the LeBron, Kyrie combo, or Steph Curry and the Warriors ability to shoot the ball from outside the arena, he might not have had such an almost unprecedented run. Before we strip Jordan of his crown, however, we do need to go back those names of elite, hall of fame names from the era’s elite teams of its own “virtually unstoppable” combos and elite talent that Jordan and the Bulls defeated. Our conclusion matches that of the Reddit use who claimed: “There’s no evidence to support [the idea] that the [elite] players from the 90s are any better or worse than the [elite] players of today.”  

Of all the biases involved in these arguments, the toughest to overcome is the emotional one. We can all argue our generational biases, as we all deem the best players of “our” era as the best to ever play the game. Others, from other eras, might argue that Bill Russell, Wilt, Dr. J, Pistol Pete, Oscar Robertson, Kareem, Magic and Bird, Isiah, Tim Duncan, Kobe, LeBron, Steph Curry, and Nikola Jokic were/are better, but these arguments focus on tangible elements of the game. No NBA player I’ve witnessed, in my life (and I admit to many biases to arrive at this conclusion), has combined elite talent with elite levels of doing anything and everything he had to to win better than Michael Jordan. His own teammates talk about how vicious and downright mean he could be to them during practice. He played psychological games with them, his opponents, and himself in order to gain some kind of edge for that series, or that night, for one win in a series. On some level, we have to throw the idea of biases and metrics out the window and put ourselves in Michael Jordan’s shoes. He had all the money in the world, he couldn’t leave his hotel room in most countries around the world, because of his fame, and he had every creature comfort a human being could dream up, but when one of his teams needed a win, he almost always came through in the final six years of his career as a Bull (the one series loss to the Shaq, Penny Hardaway-led Magic being the sole exception). Five of the six championships, during his much talked about run, were 4-2, six game wins. Each of them required him to dig deep to help his team find some way to overcome his opponent, and I’ve never seen another player will his team to win as often, or with as much consistency, as the greatest basketball player who ever lived, Michael Jordan.

When Kids Lose in Sports

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“We stink coach!” kids in movies say after a baseball game in which they got slaughtered. These kids are sweaty, dirty and dejected.  

“C’mon fellas,” the coach, and the star of our movie, says. “We can turn this around. It is just one game.” The coach might use some quote from Vince Lombardi or Winston Churchill to inspire them, but the groaning kids tell him that it’s no use. We all know the coach will find some way to save the team in the movie, but I’m here to tell you that the scene of the sad, dirty, dejected players does not happen, at least among the 5-8-year-old range kids I know. The kids on my son’s baseball team might want to win, because who doesn’t, but they’re not as wrecked by failure as much kids in movies. Those kids read lines written and directed by middle-aged men who basically want to help us rewrite our past in a disaster-turned-glorious theme. 

It might be tough to remember our childhood as it actually was, as opposed to the way we want to remember it, but we didn’t really care if we won a game or not. We enjoyed doing all the things we could do with a ball when we were young, and we enjoyed running around and playing a sport with other kids, but did we really care how many points we scored? The way I played, to a certain age, was as if it were almost a coincidence that my friends, and our opponents, decided to get together to play a game on this day. It’s almost as if our parents decided that instead of letting us play in the backyard, they signed us up to let play here. Again, winning is always better, but did we, and do they, truly understand the difference between those who can and those who can’t. If they learn the difference, will they seek private coaching sessions to take them to the next level? Did we care? I know I didn’t.  

We see the natural abilities they have, and we know them as well as we now know how naturally gifted we were, even if we weren’t. We know the difference between us and those who succeeded on the field was that we were never “coached up”. So, we want them to maximize whatever natural gifts they might have, but the crucial ingredient we forget is that it’s all about us. They don’t truly care, no matter what they might tell us.

We care, the parents and coaches care, and to some degree it is about us. It’s about our super-secret, unspoken comparative competition about who is a better parent. It’s about my kid can catch, yours can’t. One plus one equals I’m a better parent than you, because I’ve spent more hours in the backyard with him. Most parents aren’t like this, to be fair, they just cheer their kid on, and they’re often just happy to be there.

The full impact of parents watching their kids play sports didn’t fully hit me, until I watched a micro soccer game involving kids significantly younger than mine. A part of me knew it was kind of silly to get so into a game involving humans who just learned how to walk about 1,800 days ago, but I obviously couldn’t shake the sports’ spectator viewpoint I gained watching adults play for decades. I didn’t gain proper perspective on this, until I saw those parents scream their heads off when their five-year-old kicked the ball. Then, when he kicked it, they encouraged him to kick it again, and they encouraged him, at high-volume, to continue kicking it until it crossed the goal line. 

When they lose, especially when it’s a blowout, we parents don’t care for their post-game smiles. We don’t want to see them dejected, and we’ll “It is just a game Bruno” them in the aftermath, but we don’t want to see them smile, laugh, or enjoy playing with their friends afterwards either, and it just rubs us the wrong way when they run with excitement to the concession stand with their post-game food tickets.

In a number of leagues my son was in, the coaches gave them concession tickets to “buy” products available there. The kids humored him long enough to hear his post-game wrap up, and they nodded through his appraisals of their play, what they did well, and what they needed to work on. When the tone of his voice suggested he was near completion, and they knew his tones well, they got excited. They were right at times, but there were other moments when they grew overly excited over what happened to end in a hard comma. In the end, they weren’t excited by a victory or dejected by a loss, but what concessions they managed to find with their tickets. It was, for many of them, their first taste of purchasing power, not limited by parental consent.  

Middle-aged screenwriters often love to depict the spoils of victory and the agony of defeat, even in the form of eight-year-olds, because they want the arc of storytelling. They depict them as dirty, sad, and dejected after a loss, so they can depict them as clean, euphoric, and worthy in the end. It all makes sense to us, the middle-aged men in the audience, because that’s how we remember our childhood. 

If it were possible to attain a video of us failing in a crucial moment in our youth, at around eight-years-old, we might remember that crucial failure, because it haunts us to this day. What if we had some extended minutes that followed us to the dugout? What if, in those extended minutes, we saw ourselves laughing and playing with our friends. My bet is 9.678151 out of ten of us would be shocked. “That’s not how I remember it,” would be the theme of our response.   

An overwhelming majority of the kids I see on fields, playing games, don’t care near as much as we do whether they win or lose. If the movie makers depicted this reality, however, they fear that we might not care about their movie either. Kids have this annoying-to-the-point-of-frustrating habit of wanting to have fun while playing games. We know we were different. We were winners, even at their age, who cared far more than they do about winning, because we’re winners now. If we had that video of ourselves, as a kid, laughing with friends after a disastrous loss, we might find that we just loved playing the game. We were having fun playing it, and that’s why we kept playing it, until we became better at it when winning and losing actually meant something to us. If we remembered that correctly, our kids might look something like this:

Wishing and Baseball

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“I wish my son was more aggressive at the plate,” a friend of mine said.

You wish your son was more aggressive? I could go through the list of pseudo-humorous things I wish I had, but you know that joke. I want things, and I need things, but I’d feel foolish suggesting that I wish something were true, because I know that that someone would turn on me and say, “Well, go get it!”

This has always been one of my least favorite responses because it’s obnoxious, tedious (because everyone says it) and true. Yet, who is more tedious and obnoxious, the person who says, “Go get it!” or the person who sits down and whines and wishes?   

Wishing is for small children and people who find genies in a bottle. For the rest of us, it’s a waste of breath, unless we’re going to “Go get it!” A couple of years ago, I wished my kid wouldn’t strike out so often. I wanted him to do better, so we went out to the backyard, then we left the comfy confines of home to open baseball diamonds and batting cages to go get it. Did we get better? We did, because we did it so often that it happened. 

Prior to all that, my kid was shocked and devastated by the fact that he wasn’t the athlete he thought he was, and aren’t we all? Our delusional dreams and projected images of greatness eventually, and painfully, hit a controversial wall called reality. I label the wall controversial, because soon after I told my kid he wasn’t better than he thought, I knew that would get me in trouble with positive reinforcement crowd. After I introduced him to the reality of the situation, we set about getting him better. The latter, needless to say, doesn’t happen after one, two, or three twenty-minute sessions. This is a time-consuming, frustrating, and eventually rewarding process.

I’m the type of guy who thinks, perhaps unreasonably at times, that everything is my fault. If I can’t access a website, for example, I think it’s my fault. It might have more to do with the site’s administrator, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking that I did something wrong. When my son struck out so often, I knew it was partly my fault. The kid was so young that he didn’t know how to do things himself. He had to be taught, and I wasn’t teaching him. I forced him to endure mind-numbing hours of hitting, fielding, and pitching so often that he begged for it to be over. He wanted to play Mario Odyssey, watch YouTube, and do anything and everything he could find that was less taxing. We called our workouts forty, forty forty. Forty hits, forty ground balls, or pop-ups, and forty swings. After doing this for years, when I now see a kid on a baseball field have trouble with the fundamentals of baseball, I can tell just how much time their dad has spent helping them get it.

My job, and your job, if you wish it to be true, is to source the problem and correct it. Baseball is a game, and ten and unders are going to make a ton of mistakes. If they make the same mistakes, over and over in a manner that cries out for resolution, I see it as my job to find a way to help him fix it. If you don’t have the time to personally see to it that the error is corrected, do you have the money to hire an instructor, and if neither of those avenues are available to you, what can you do to try to make it happen, other than sitting in the stands, wishing it were true.  

Some of us are visual learners, some are auditory, and others are reading and writing learners. If your goal is to help your child learn how to play baseball, there’s no avenue better than just doing it so many times that he learns how to do it. It’s what psychologists call Kinesthetic Learning, or what the rest of us call doing it. 

It’s possible for a kid to learn another way, I suppose, but I’ve never explored it. What’s the best way to learn Math, swimming, bowling, or baseball? They have to do it so often that they learn. Malcolm Gladwell suggest we can do anything to a decent level of prowess by investing 10,000 hours into doing it. It sounds so obnoxiously simple that it can’t be the solution, so we read books on it, watch YouTube videos, and invest in some sort of professional tutoring. All of these elements are instructive and can be used to supplement doing, but it’s so obvious that it hardly seems worthy of mentioning that nothing beats doing something so often that we do it better. 

***

Once our kid learns and earns a certain level of prowess, how do we take them to the next level? 

“If you want your kid to advance, get him into a select league,” they say, and they’re right. But, and there’s always a but, a kid learns by doing. We can say he might get better playing a higher level competition, but what if he’s not having fun at the next level? My son is currently on a team composed almost entirely of his friends from school. On this team, my son plays, and he strengthens his relationships with his friends while playing. He looks forward to games, and he has a lot of fun playing in them. That’s far more important to me than advancing him to the next level with the hope that it will strengthen his abilities in such a way that he might continue to play baseball in high school, college, and the Majors. This is the dream, but is it their dream or ours? When we take a look at the numbers, we know that the chances of him playing beyond high school are minimal, and while looking at those numbers we need to ask ourselves who are we really aiming to please? Are we seeking a way for him to be the exception to these ratios for his eventual happiness, or are we looking to satisfy our dream of one day being one of those parents who have front row tickets to our kid’s first major league start? If we follow the plan of making sure he’s having fun, we’ll turn down that invitation for a select league to keep him in a league where he’s having the most fun. We also do this to prepare for the day when he meets the extent of his talent and ability, and our dreams come to a crashing halt. When this happens, we want to look at our son and say, “Well, we had a lot of fun along the way.” 

Last season, a kid named Jimmy received an invitation to advance to a select team over my son. My vicarious impulse was jealousy. I thought my son was better, but I’m biased. Jimmy was, at least, comparable to my son in talent. Flash forward a couple games into this season and Jimmy is not playing on that select team. He’s sitting on the bench. I have no idea if this is a commentary on Jimmy’s ability, compared to the rest of the team, but bottom line, he’s sitting on the bench, and if he’s not playing, he’s not learning, and he’s not advancing. But playing at a higher level lifts all boats. The classic example, in another sport, is Sidney Crosby. Crosby was the youngest brother always playing with his older brothers and their friends. Crosby needed to be better just to compete with them. Crosby became better, and he became so good that he was a first pick in the NHL Draft, and he became one of the best players in the NHL. Crosby, however, was playing against them, as opposed to riding the bench. My guess is this kid named Jimmy is experiencing some next-level play in practice, but nothing beats doing it in a game.  

The select teams also requires a greater commitment to baseball, and I don’t think this commitment will be advantageous. Right now, my son plays a number of sports and he is learning the art of taekwondo. If he commits more of his time to baseball, he will have to sacrifice those other sports. Why would we do this? He has a lot of fun doing all that other stuff too. I think playing those sports, and learning the art of taekwondo, provides him a well-rounded learning experience, and if he chooses a sport to focus on at some point, that will be a decision for him to make. Right now, he’s just having fun, and I see no reason to advance the needle. 

As with everything else in life, there are no easy answers, but there is one easy question. What are we doing with our free-time? Instead of watching the latest docu-drama on Netflix, or flipping through our phone for the next twenty minutes, why don’t we take a trip into the backyard and flip the ball around with our kid for twenty minutes a day, three-to-four times a week for a couple years. 

Baseball is baseball. It’s a sport, and some observe that the obsessive devotion to sports and games is trivial compared to all of the other, more important activities in life. If you think that, you’re right in general terms, but what are you currently doing with them that is so much more vital and crucial to their life? And what were your plans when you held them in your arms that day in the delivery room? Did you plan on letting them watch YouTube for another hour, so you could have a little more “me” time? What we’re talking about when we talk about baseball, soccer, flag football, or whatever ten and unders can do for a couple hours when they’ve not gaming, is committing to something so thoroughly that they develop a discipline, and a character-defining devotion. We’re talking about developing a discipline and a devotion to something they might remember, and they won’t remember conquering Mario Odyssey or flipping through various YouTube influencers. They will remember the days they spent playing sports with others, and the countless hours they spent playing in the backyard with you. It takes a level of commitment, a discipline, and devotion from both of you if you wish want him to get better, or more confident, the next time he steps on a baseball diamond, and that may prove trivial in the grand scheme of life to everyone in the world except for the two of you.