Northwest Missouri State Bearcats Baseball Report: Success in Baseball = How you deal with adversity

Photo courtesy of Northwestbearcats.com

The Northwest Missouri State Bearcats baseball team has had a tough start to the 2013 season. Following the mid-week sweep by the Missouri Western Griffons, the Bearcats are 6-16 overall, 4-13 MIAA. Due to snow, the Bearcats have played all but 4 games on the road. The team is frustrated. The Bearcats have struggled in all phases - pitching, offense, and defense.

Being successful in baseball means dealing with adversity. How you deal with adversity is directly related to how successful you will be in baseball - and life. Here is fact: every person that has played the game of baseball has been a consistent failure. The greatest offensive star in baseball, Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox, finished the 1941 season with a .406 batting average, which meant he failed nearly 60% of the time. Nearly seven decades later, no other major league baseball player has failed at or less, since. Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs...and struck out 1,330 times. Cy Young, of which all baseball pitchers covet to aspire to, lost 316 games as a major leaguer.

The reality in baseball, and life, is that success in both are directly related to how you manage failure and adversity. Baseball is the fabric of our Country's heritage because at its roots is the fundamental fact that a collective team effort requires individual responsibility, and personal sacrifice, for the greater good. In many ways baseball is American heritage because America's heritage is agriculture, America's family farms. Draw parallels with Paul Harvey's poem "So God made a farmer":

"It had to be somebody who’d plow deep and straight and not cut corners; somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed, and rake and disk and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk and replenish the self-feeder and a hard week’s work with a five-mile drive to church."

"Somebody who would bale a family together with the soft, strong bonds of sharing; who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply with smiling eyes when his son says he want to spend his life doing what dad does – So God made a Farmer"

Personal sacrifice for the greater good. For family. Once the batting order is set, your turn at the plate will come. Baseball doesn't permit a game to be dominated by star players whose teammates are simply along for the ride. It takes time and patience to understand baseball. Becoming proficient at its skills are hard to do. Dare I say, very hard. A round ball, a round bat, both moving too fast to think.

But baseball is great because natural physical gifting and athleticism are no predictors of baseball success. Look at the major league baseball hall of fame - players do not possess amazing size, strength, speed. Hall of Famers are short, skinny, fat, slow, fast, muscular, flabby, intelligent, or ignorant.

Learning to succeed in baseball is learning to persevere in the face of constant adversity. Constant pressure.

If the Bearcats are going to shift the direction of this season they will need the kind of moral courage that keeps persisting in the face of inevitable and constant adversity. You see, the key to the Bearcats' success, baseball's fundamental bedrock, is the Cats need to have confidence. If they don't get two hits in today's game, they'll get them in the next game. Every outside-strike called by a umpire gets the Cats closer to a home run. Persistent daily commitment to succeed in the face of constant adversity, driven by confidence, must prevail.

The Bearcats cannot win every game from here to the end of the season. No batter will bat 1.000. No pitcher will go without a loss. But really, is a bad break, a bad call, a bad bounce, a bad game, or a benching, really adversity? Is it really "failure" when its a part of the game? We know adversity will happen in every play of every baseball game. That's what makes the game compelling. What makes life worth living. One day the pressure, adversity or failure in baseball will turn to adversity in life. A disputed strike zone will turn into a mortgage payment. Playing time will turn into a marriage with your sweetheart. A bang-bang play will turn into an infant and the sudden realization someone's life is your ultimate responsibility. And when it comes to life, there cannot be failure. So really, where is the real pressure? Where is the real adversity? In baseball, today's error turns into tomorrow's game saving double-play. Today's strike-out will turn into tomorrow's game-winning RBI. Until the Bearcats can embrace the adversity in baseball, the failure in baseball, and have the hope and confidence to concentrate in the present moment, then the team's performance will remain at its present level.