Category: sports

The Simplicity of the Difficult Game of Baseball

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Baseball is an embarrassingly simple game … on paper. Pitcher throws ball, hitter tries to hit it where they ain’t, and fielders try to catch it. If we introduced the concept of the game to aliens from another planet, they wouldn’t understand how such a simple game found its way into the fabric of our world. “You mean to tell me that your national past time, and the game that is one of the most popular games in your world, involves one human being throwing a ball and another hitting it?” this alien might ask. “And humans find it so entertaining that you not only watch it, play it, and read about it, but some of you devote your lives to it? That’s pretty much all we need to know to go ahead with our plans to take over this planet.”

Anyone who has played the game of baseball, or tried to coach it, knows it’s anything but simple. A player doesn’t have to be 6’6” 250 lbs. to play it. Hall of Fame inductee Wee Willie Keeler was 5’4”. He proved that anyone and everyone can do it, but most can’t with regular success. As hard as it is to consistently throw a ball accurately, it’s harder to hit it where they ain’t. Even relatively young hitters learn that they can be heroes one day and zeroes the next. The simple complexity of hitting a ball consistently can prove maddening, demoralizing, and even a little humiliating to a young kid, because it seems so simple. They cannot figure it out for themselves, however, they need coaching, guidance, and as much support as we can offer.

These three ingredients to improved play, and the resultant character development that follows, are essential, but the three most mandatory ingredients to accomplishing anything in life, are time, patience, and repetition. The latter might be the hardest for a child to grasp, as the typical nine-year-old complaint to mind-numbing repetition centers around, “I can hit, catch, and pitch now. Why do we have to keep practicing them so often?” As I’ve written elsewhere, there is little-to-no room for creativity in sports. There are quick-fixes, they’re out there, but my guess is their efficiency numbers pale in comparison to kinesthetic learning, or the knowledge gain by doing it so often that we know what to do when there is no time to think.

Time, patience, and mind-numbing repetition turned an eight-year-old named Isaac into a decent fielder, so the coach put him at shortstop in year one, but he struggled with hitting so much that the coach put him at the bottom of the batting order. He had the typical problems an eight-year-old experiences of looping under the ball. He had so many strikeouts in year one, and he reacted so emotionally to each one, we began to think that baseball probably wasn’t for him.

“Why does he get so upset?” one of his teammates asked. “He shouldn’t get that upset. It’s just baseball. It’s supposed to be fun. No one else gets as upset as he does.”

We wanted Isaac to lighten up and enjoy himself. Baseball is a game, and when we play a game, we’re supposed to have fun. We’re out there with our friends, and we’re supposed to enjoy playing with them. “Don’t get mad, learn,” was a line repeated so often in our backyard that we both got sick of hearing it.

The answer I would now give Isaac’s teammate is that Isaac wanted it more than his teammates. Some might find this a character flaw in need of correction, but in order for Isaac to have fun doing something, he has to be good at it, and he thought he would be good at baseball before he stepped on the field. His first year was supposed to be nothing more than a display of his athletic talent. When that didn’t happen Isaac did not want to do the elementary things he needed to accomplish his goals. What eight-year-old does?

Why can’t I hit the ball? 

Nothing came easy for an eight-year-old Isaac. The core problem for Isaac was that he had a counterproductive image of himself as a good hitter. He thought he should be there before he even picked up a bat, and the evidence he saw to the contrary (in his first full year playing baseball) was demoralizing. Every failure, to him, was an epic denunciation of his ability and his character. The eight-year-old world is dramatic, traumatic, and fatalistic.

Our motto entering year two was keep it simple and overcome adversity. Things happen in baseball. A batter can hit a ball square and a fielder can catch it. A hitter can strike out three times in a game. What happens next defines that batter. How does the batter respond in their next at-bat? “The best batters in the world go 1-3,” I told Isaac, and “baseball is the second hardest game in the world behind golf. What happens after we commit an error in the field?” I asked him, adding, “I’ve committed every error in the field that you have, and I’ve done some that were far worse. I’ve committed errors in front of other people that still keeps me up at night, twenty years later.”

Most of the coaching, consolation, and support I offered Isaac went in one ear and out the other, so I’m not sure if anything I said worked. I think time and repetition had more to do with it. Isaac and I spent time doing an exercise I called 40-40-40. Forty ground balls, forty flyballs, and forty reps doing whatever he wanted, usually forty at bats or forty pitches. We also went to batting cages.

Whatever it was we did clicked. His turnaround, from year one to year two was so 180 that the coach eventually put Isaac in the coveted three hole in his batting lineup. Isaac started the second season in his customary position at the bottom of the order, and he gradually worked his way up to the two hole. This is a summation, as the progression proved painfully gradual, but he was in the two hole by game eight. Before the start of game eleven, Isaac believed he was the best hitter on the team, but instead of putting Isaac in the leadoff spot, the coach put him in the three hole.

“I’m getting on base coach,” Isaac said. “Why are you putting me in the three hole? Why am I not in the leadoff spot?”

“We need your power in the three hole,” the coach said.

I’m going to try to be objective here and say that in year two, the nine-year-old Isaac was one of the three best players on his team throughout the 15-game regular season. He might have had one bad game all year.

Isaac was one of the primary reasons that his team won their divisional playoff game. He went two for two, drove in two runs and scored two, in a 5-2 victory. He also, and more importantly, pitched the final two innings, and he only gave up one run.

He didn’t do too well in the final playoffs, but the rest of the team carried them to victory.

In the championship game, however, Isaac went absolutely nuts. He went 3-3, with 5 RBIs, and one run scored, in a 9-8 game. Isaac accounted for six of his team’s nine runs. He was cracking these hits into the outfield, whereas most of his hits, and his teammates hits, barely clear the infield.

Isaac’s best at bat occurred in what could’ve been his final at bat, and possibly the team’s final at-bat of the season. Before the inning even started, I began counting the batters before him, worrying that Isaac might be the final at-bat. My worst fears came to light as two batters walked and two batters struck out. Isaac stepped up to the plate, down two runs, with two runners on base, and two outs. The score at the time was 6-8, and the opposing pitcher was throwing a surprisingly lively fastball for a nine-year-old.

For two innings, Isaac’s teammates couldn’t come anywhere close to hitting this pitcher. The pitcher was the other team’s ace, brought in to close the game out and secure their championship. Isaac and the pitcher battled to a 3 balls 2 strike full count. Isaac fouled a couple of hits off that told me he might be overmatched. Then, he uncorked at unbelievable hit that ended up tying the game and forcing the opposition to bat in the bottom of the inning.

Isaac pitched the final inning and gave up one unearned run to lose the game.

Earlier in the season, Isaac pitched an almost perfect two innings, striking out 5 of 6. I told him that he would probably never come that close to perfection again. I said that to try to take the pressure off him in his attempts to duplicate that performance. Guess what, he topped it. That final at-bat was so clutch.

We all went nuts on a catch Isaac made in the outfield, earlier in the game, but I told the other parents that that catch was nothing compared to delivering a tying hit in the bottom of the last inning. Isaac’s nickname around the household is either three for three, or Mr. Clutch.

As Isaac walked out of the dugout, his coach stopped him: “I just want to say how enjoyable it’s been watching your development these last two years.”

How does a nine-year-old develop the skills necessary for some sort of progression in athletics? They have to want it, first and foremost. No matter how much comfort, coaching, and support we offer, if they don’t want it, they’re not going to get it. The next ingredient, as I spelled out earlier, is time and repetition, or as one famous basketball player once said, “Practice!” The more time we spend doing anything, the better we will be at doing it. As Malcolm Gladwell suggests, we can master just about anything with 10,000 hours of concentrated practice.

Keep it simple. No tricks. Don’t worry about velocity or location, and don’t think about the future. Someone suggested that Isaac might, one day, play in the majors, and others whispered other, sweet nothings in our ear. If a three-year-old plays with a rocket, we’ll probably hear someone in the room say he might become a rocket scientist. People do this to be nice, and because they probably can’t think of anything else to say. Smile, say that’s nice of you to say, and walk away, then return to the mind-numbing repetition of playing catch, fielding ground balls, and throwing the ball around. They’ll be proud of their progress, and they’ll want to quit when they regress. They’ll learn, and they’ll make tiny adjustments, until some sort of muscle memory develops over time. That might sound simple, but think about all of the mechanics involved in muscle memory. A young baseball player can be coached, taught, advised, and tweaked, but until a kid does it so often that they know it, they’ll never learn it. These principles, and this whole article, are devoted to baseball, but we can just as easily apply the principles discussed here to just about anything in life.

To Like or Dislike, That is the Question

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I might be old-school, but I don’t care if someone “dislikes” what I write in a text. I don’t care if they “like” it either. It means nothing to me. If they dislike my point, tell me why? I write an opinion, and their obligation should be to either write an opinion that is contrary to mine or tell me why I’m wrong. Within that chain, someone will eventually write, “Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree on this one,” and we’ll move onto discuss whatever trivialities make us friends. How is it that all we have to do now is “dislike” a point? I don’t find “dislike” a quality refutation, but I concede that that I might be old-school. 

If I tried to “dislike” my 8th grade teacher, she’d stop the class and drop the 25th alphabet on me: “Why?” 

“What?”

“Why do you dislike my point?” she would ask. “Why do you disagree with it? Saying that you dislike something someone says, or them for saying it, is not enough. You have to refute their opinion.”  

I understand that some think they’re saving time and space by texting back, “Dislike,” but if I’m going to invest my time and resources into providing a detailed, well-thought-out opinion, the least they could do is invest some time and effort into refuting what I write. 

The modern “dislike” is so narcissistic that it’s almost the imperial equivalent of a king saying, “I am not pleased.” Who gives a crud if you’re not happy with what I wrote? Am I right or wrong? Disprove me. 

“So, you’re telling me that you don’t want to hear my opinion?” they ask if we tell them to drop the dislikes.

“Have you ever told me your opinion?” we ask. “If not, bring it brother. If you need an instrument to help me help you trumpet an opinion, let me know. Right now, all I’m getting is a “dislike” button.”

“Have I offended you?” 

“I’d have to check my log book, but I think the last time someone offended me was about 37 years ago.”

“What did they say?”

“I have a rule,” I said. “Never tell anyone what offends you most, because they will be fixated on that, until they accidentally bring it up. It’s the “don’t think pink” principle. If I tell you to avoid thinking pink, pink will be the only thing on your mind.”

“Well, if I want to avoid offending you, shouldn’t I know what to avoid?”

“Again, I’d have to check my log book, but I think it involved the great Almond Joy/Mounds debate. Some fool stepped up on me telling me that sometimes he feels like a nut and sometimes he don’t. I’ll spare you the profanity that flowed from my mouth, but I will say that I was so out of control that I couldn’t control the spittle that followed it.”

“Really?”

“Like I said, I’m not going to tell you what offends me the most.”

Sports Romance

I love sports, but I no longer I’m no longer in love with sports. We’ve agreed to maintain an amicable relationship for the children, but the unconditional love we once had is gone. 

I can’t remember being so passionate about my team that I dropped all rational thinking, but I’m pretty sure I did, way way back to a time I can’t remember.

A friend of mine remains trapped in the irrational throes of love. “[That player, who committed the infraction,] should be suspended for this season, the next one, and beyond. He basically committed a felony on the ice. That play should be banned from hockey, sports, and life in general.”

“Would your feelings on such a hit be just as intense if one of the players from your favorite franchise committed it?” I asked him. “10 years ago, a cross-check was a cross-check. Everyone was real sad when a player got hurt, but they said, “Unfortunately, it’s part of the game. You’ve gotta keep your head on a swivel.”

“And don’t listen to modern analysts and announcers,” I added. “They’re comparing the cross checker to John Wilkes Booth, as one of the worst villains in human history for a reason. They’re corporate shills following the corporate policy on hits in hockey and football. 

“And I know you’re going to “dislike” my opinion. Save it. I don’t care, unless you want to offer me solid refutation to my point save it.”

The Sports Marriage

At some point in our courtship, we develop unconditional love with our team, its players, and the sport in general. We vow to have and to hold, from this day forward, until death do us part. After we certify that union, we want to know everything we can about our players, and our team. Our passion is no longer limited to plays, stats, and wins and losses. We now want to know if they’re getting along with their wife, and if not, we want to know why? We want to know if he loved his mother, how he played with friends on the playground, in grade school, and what his teammates think of him. I may be old school, but I don’t care about any of the plotlines of the soap opera brought to us by every sports channel on the web, and on TV. I don’t care if his mom cheers him on in the stands, and I don’t care if his parents never attend a game. I don’t care if the cornerback on the other team is a bad guy, or if the long snapper on my team is one hell of a good feller. I understand that the leagues, as good corporate stewards, want to promote and punish their own, for goodwill, but I don’t understand why we the fans care so much about the personal lives of these people. Perhaps we don’t. Perhaps it’s all about filling three hours of pregame shows that I haven’t watched for over a decade now. 

“The NFL analysts are saying that your left guard is so talented he might go in the first round of the NFL draft,” I told a friend of mine, regarding a player on her favorite college football team.

“He’s made over thirty visits to our local Children’s Hospital in just the last year,” she said. 

Now, there aren’t many stats for a left guard in football, so I understand how a pseudo fan would know nothing about them. The left guard never touches the ball, and obviously doesn’t score. His best games are those in which no one ever hears his name (no penalties), when a quarterback is allowed time to pass the ball, and when a running back gets extra yards. When the QB and RB look good, he looks good, but very few fans will ever know his name. Those in the know track how many pressures, hurries, and sacks they allow, and they keep track of how many pancake blocks an offensive lineman makes. They also track how successful a team is running to one side versus the other. She didn’t know any of that. She only knew he was a good fella. 

My prescription for anyone who cares too much about sports, to the point that it affects their relationship with their family, their dogs, and their sanity is to try cheering on a losing franchise for the next forty years. The one great thing about cheering on a team that doesn’t seem to care if they win or lose is that they teach you that unconditional love for a sports’ franchise is pointless and it will inevitably lead to pain. It might take forty years, but everyone has a threshold. Cheering on a losing franchise your whole life can also teach you to invest emotions in the other things life has to offer. You can treat your favorite franchise right by buying up any memorabilia you can find, then wearing it; you watch every game they play in, and scream at the TV; and you can defend their honor when some gob of goo at the end of bar forsakes them with a “dislike”, and it won’t do one damned thing to effect the outcome of their season. If you treat your wife right, however, play with your dog, and spend as much time as you can with the kid, it can pay such huge dividends that it might help offset the unending pain your favorite franchise inflicts on you just about every Sunday in your life.   

Jack McKinney: The Forgotten Man

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“He created “Showtime!” Norm Nixon said. “That should never be forgotten. You can talk about me, Kareem, Earvin, and Pat Riley all you want. But Jack McKinney created “Showtime!”

If you were paying any attention at all in the 1980’s, you knew the Lakers, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Pat Riley, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and “Showtime!” A fella didn’t have to watch the NBA to know the names Magic Johnson or “Showtime!” We didn’t even have to enjoy watching sports to know these names. They were in the news, on the news, and the news. Decades later, the names “Showtime!” and Magic Johnson still resonate so well that networks like HBO and Apple+ are willing to pay top dollar for retrospective broadcasts that recall how special this era was in sports and entertainment. 

Lakers former head coach Jack McKinney on the sidelines cheering on the team from sidelines in first quarter action.

The term “Showtime!” is still so flashy that this writer feels compelled to surround it with quotes and follow it up with an exclamation point. Even though we weren’t yet teenagers, we knew the names Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Norm Nixon, Byron Scott, Michael Cooper, Jamal Wilkes, James Worthy, Kurt Rambis, Pat Riley and Earvin “Magic” Johnson. We knew the big names, we couldn’t escape them, but as with all sports franchises, title runs, and dynasties, those names not in lights often contributed far more than we ever knew. The name almost criminally absent from this list was the architect of the “Showtime!” game plan of the run the Lakers enjoyed in the 1980’s: Jack McKinney.

Jack McKinney might be the last name we think of from this era, but the first name that comes to mind when talking about the Lakers 1980’s “Showtime!” run is Magic Johnson. He was the superstar, the smile, the face of the franchise, and a celebrity on and off the court. He was one of the few athletes of his era who lived up to such over-the-top billing. Prior to the ’79-’80 Laker season, Magic lead his college basketball team, the Michigan State Spartans to a college basketball championship, then he was the number one pick out of college. In his rookie season with the Lakers, Magic was one of the few to prove the hype machine correct when he awarded the Lakers for using a number one draft pick on him by winning an NBA Championship in his rookie season. He had some help, of course, including a man named Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who many argue was the best basketball player of all time, and if statistics matter, Jabbar still has the most points ever scored by an individual over the course of his career.* In the 1979-1980 season, however, the 21-year-old rookie from Michigan State had every spotlight the national media owned on him, and he succeeded beyond all expectations. 

Just about every highlight of the Lakers in the 80’s contains something Magic did. Whether it was some crucial shot, powerful dunk, or one of his highlight reel passes. Magic Johnson could get anyone the ball at any time, at just about anywhere on the court.  

Was Magic the best fastbreak point guard of all time, perhaps, but we might also ask the question was Magic Johnson so great because he fit McKinney’s scheme so well, or did owner Jerry Buss hire McKinney, because he wanted the scheme, and he knew his first draft pick would flourish in it?

As Jeff Pearlman wrote in the book Showtime, the Lakers’ strategy prior to the arrival of Magic and McKinney, was “See Kareem, wait for Kareem, pass to Kareem, watch Kareem shoot and hope ball goes in.” 

Was Magic better in McKinney’s scheme than he would’ve been in Jerry Sloan’s with the Chicago Bulls? (The Bulls lost a famous coin flip for the rights to draft Magic Johnson in 1979.) Was Magic so great that he would’ve been great wher eever he played, or did the “Showtime!” game plan play to his strengths? If McKinney didn’t fall prey to the accident, and he coached a different team, with all of his facilities intact, would he have succeeded regardless? Or was the Magic/McKinney gameplan a marriage made in heaven? 

Would Joe Montana have succeeded regardless when and where he played? Was he so driven to be great that it would’ve happened no matter where he played, or did he fit the scheme the coaches implemented? We could ask this of any coach, scheme, and player marriage, but while most of the credit is given to the player, most sports nuts divide the credit more equally. How many sports nuts, the freaks of sports knowledge, know enough to know the name Jack McKinney. 

Prior to being hired by the Lakers, Jack McKinney was a basketball lifer who lived and breathed basketball. He was a college basketball assistant coach and a head coach, then he was an assistant coach for five years in the NBA. At the age of 44, he was hired to coach his first NBA team, the Los Angeles Lakers. It’s not an exaggeration to say his whole life had been leading up to that moment. How many hours, months, and years of his life did he sacrifice to one day see his dream to fruition? How many dark, quiet rooms did he sit in all alone, watching tape, learning the game, developing game plans, and correcting and perfecting it when others were out living a life? He sacrificed his life for basketball, and when all his work finally started to pay off, it was all taken away from him.

If Shakespeare were alive today, he would’ve devoured Jack McKinney’s narrative as a modern tragedy of epic proportions. He probably would’ve started his production with McKinney’s solo bike ride in which his gears locked up. Jack McKinney was thrown off the bike, and he landed in a manner that put him in a coma. The serious injuries he experienced would plague him for the rest of his life. It took him so long to recover that the Lakers named Paul Westhead coach, and then they named Pat Riley, the man credited with the Lakers fast break offense that we would eventually all call “Showtime!” This accident happened 14 games into Jack McKinney’s tenure as coach of the Lakers. He would never coach them again. 

Prior to the accident, Jack McKinney implemented his revolutionary fast break offense, and the Lakers used that game plan to win the ‘79-’80 NBA Championship, their first of that era. When McKinney’s successor Paul Westhead later tried to institute a different gameplan, it didn’t work for the talent on the court. Pat Riley took over, re-instituted McKinney’s gameplan, and the rest is history, Pat Riley’s history. The Jack McKinney story is interesting whether you are a Lakers fan or not, but it also interesting because prior to HBO’s retrospective broadcast Winning Time, based on Jeff Pearlman’s book, this sports aficionado had no idea how instrumental Jack McKinney was. The Jack McKinney story is interesting because it highlights the “forgotten man” in sports history.

“This is the guy who made my career possible,” McKinney said that Lakers’ coach Pat Riley always said when introducing McKinney, “This is the guy.”

The question author Jeff Pearlman put to Lakers’ point guard Norm Nixon decades later was, “Is Jack McKinney universally acknowledged as one of the greatest coaches in the history of the NBA?”

“I have no doubt that he would be [were it not for the accident],” Nixon said. “No doubt whatsoever.”

How many forgotten men and women, like McKinney, have changed the landscape in their world? How many little guys and girls helped the names in lights edit an otherwise flawed premise, or rescued an otherwise flawed scientific finding by disproving it so well that the genius had to go back to the drawing board to find a more perfect resolution? How many little-known advisors instructed world leaders to follow a different plan that resulted in a different outcome that defined history? We all know the names in lights, the names that sell newspapers and collect internet hits, but how many lesser-names who shunned the spotlight defined history as we know it. 

I don’t know these names, and either do you. I didn’t know the name Jack McKinney prior to this year, and unless you’re a die-hard Lakers fan, or you’ve watched the story of the Lakers in the 80’s Winning Time on HBO, you didn’t either. I heard some foggy details about a coach who started out with Magic, but I heard he died weeks into Magic’s rookie season. I didn’t know what role he played, if any, and I had no idea how instrumental he was. I just thought he was hired, and he died shortly into his tenure as coach. Jack McKinney didn’t die. He went onto coach a couple other teams, and he won coach of the year in ’80-’81 coaching for the Indiana Pacers, but after working so hard, as a coach in college and an assistant in college and the NBA, he never achieved the dream he could have with the talent Jerry West, Jerry Buss, and the rest of the Lakers’ brain trust amassed in ’79-’80, and the years that followed. McKinney is recognized by those in the know as one of the great basketball minds of his generation, but how many outside that very small world have even heard his name?     

“McKinney is not a bitter man,” Jeff Pearlman writes to close his intro on the now-deceased McKinney, “but he is human.” 

“Life isn’t always fair,” McKinney said. “I’m OK with how everything has turned out. I’m loved. But, well, it’s not always fair…”

“Jack McKinney is the man more responsible for the birth of the Showtime era of professional basketball,” Pearlman writes, “If only he could remember it.” 

If that doesn’t give you chills on how unfair life can be, then I don’t really know what I’m talking about. We talked about the scheme, player marriage earlier. Magic Johnson might not be “Magic!” today, were it not for Jack McKinney,  James Worthy might have been an all-star and nothing more, Jerry Buss might have been nothing more than an American businessman who tried and failed to resurrect the Lakers franchise, and Pat Riley might’ve ended up nothing more than a failed sports announcer. What if’s, and could’ve been, should’ve beens dot history, but the ’80’s Laker dynasty we know today, probably wouldn’t have happened were it not for one forgotten man in history, the late-great Jack McKinney.