A Simple Game of Catch
And a memory of a lesson my father taught me
That’s my friend Steve on the right. We’re two 74-year-olds worn out after playing catch for about an hour. We solved the world’s problems, don’t you know?
But for me, baseball always reminds me of my father. And my first Little League home run — a low line drive over the left field snow fence at Duck Creek Park. I can still see my left leg stride forward and feel the bat make solid contact with the ball.
My first young adult taste of success.
And the lesson my father taught me about so much more than baseball.
A Big Bat and a Bag of Beans
In the summer of 1960, I was 11 and halfway through my third season of Little League. The Peter, Paul, and Mary song “Right Field” told my story: two weekly innings, the Little League minimum, one at-bat, usually a strikeout, and right field, where coaches always put their weakest players.
My father knew little about baseball except that I loved the game. Every summer afternoon, when he came home from his work as a chemical engineer, my friends and I would play Wiffle ball on a makeshift diamond in our backyard.
I was the oldest of three sons, so my Little League failure was new to him. I’m guessing he saw my sadness and lack of confidence with every strikeout. No father wants to see this in his son.
One day, he came home with an adult-size baseball bat and a bag of navy beans. After supper, he took me out to the backyard and said he wanted me to work on something every morning: holding the bat in his right hand, with his left hand, he took a bean, tossed it in the air, clasped the bat, strode his left leg forward, and hit the bean right at about the height of his belly-button.
“Repetition is important,” he said and added, “Your muscles will remember. Go through the bag, hit the beans toward the garage, and don’t clobber your mother when she’s hanging the clothes.”
That’s my father on the left, around this time. He was an engineer with Bendix Corporation in Davenport, Iowa, and worked on America’s space program. He knew how things worked, including sons.
For the rest of the summer, I covered the backyard with beans, never once hitting my mother with that colossal bat. I didn’t know it, but I was building wrist and arm muscles and honing a home run swing.
When the next summer came around, my coaches must have noticed something. They moved me from right field to third base for our first game. And in my first at-bat, bam!
More homers followed throughout my youth baseball career.
The Lesson
Sadly, I never played third base for the New York Yankees, which was my boyhood dream. Eventually, the curve ball would end my budding baseball career. Even my father had no answer for that.
He never said much about the navy bean experiment, and he never sat me down and told me that if I worked hard, I would become a better baseball player. Once he gave me a way forward, it was up to me.
Looking back, he taught me at a very early age what psychologist Carol Dweck calls the “growth mindset.” In my early Little League career, I saw my teammates hitting home runs and thought they were born hitters and I wasn’t. Dweck calls that the “fixed mindset.”
Whenever I encounter a limitation, I instinctively ask how I can improve. That’s the “growth mindset.”
Of course, it’s not instinct at all. It comes from countless bags of beans since that summer of 1960.
