Baseball is the most difficult sport for any athlete to master. A player can do everything right while playing the game of baseball and still walk away a failure. A pitcher can throw the perfect pitch to the perfect location and give up a big home run. A hitter can make the perfect swing on a pitch and still strike out. Baseball is the one sport where even the best players fail 66% of the time and this statistic holds true from tee-ball all the way up to Major League Baseball level. So why let your child play a sport where they are going to fail more than they succeed? I offer this quote as a reason.
“Success is not built on success. It’s built on failure. It’s built on frustration. Sometimes it’s built on catastrophe.”
-Sumner Redstone
This quote illustrates why it is important to allow our children to play a sport where they will fail twice as much as they will succeed. Through the failures that the children endure on the baseball field, they will learn how to deal with the emotions that come with failure. Baseball teaches children many valuable lessons that they will carry off of the diamond and into life, but the ability to deal with failure may be one of the most valuable lessons that they learn. Children will learn teamwork, hard work and sportsmanship while playing baseball, but the lesson of failure on the baseball might be the lesson that helps the child become the most successful in life.
in his article “What Baseball Players Know About Life (Why 0-For-20 Isn’t a Bad Thing)” Logan Gelbrich discusses all the reasons that baseball prepares players for success in life through failure. He states, “As a hitter, to master the game of baseball means to have success just thirty percent of the time. Immediately, there is an unavoidable battle with success and failure built right into the foundation of the game. On top of that, baseball is an experiential sport. To master it is to be very specialized. Sure, athleticism helps, but even I will admit one need not be a great athlete to be a great baseball player. Running track or playing soccer, for example, means less for one’s ability to have success in baseball than nearly any sport. As they say about athletes trying to learn baseball, “You can’t steal first base.”
Children will learn on the baseball field how to deal with failure and how to handle the emotions that come from not being successful all of the time, so that they can grow from the experience. The experience will translate in to the child being able to accept failure in other areas of life without giving up or being scared of failure, because many people do not even try in life out of fear of failure. Baseball gives the children the ability to overcome the fear of failure and truly reach for their dreams in life.
“Failure teaches us more than success”
Steve Jobs
And that is why we allow our children to play a sport where they will fail more than they will ever succeed.
Kingsbridge Little League 