So baseball season is back and now in full effect.
This makes me happy. I’ll admit that I’ve become a bit of a baseball addict since moving to downtown San Diego. I live blocks away from Petco Park and dove in headfirst to being a Padres fan (even if we tend to be at the bottom of our division).
I’ve never watched this much regular baseball–especially so early in the season, so it’s been cool to see the players improve, struggle, grow, or fade over the course of the season.
During the Padres Opening Day (different from the Opening Night a few days prior for reasons we don’t quite understand), I looked up at the scoreboard when the newest Padres player, Seth Smith, stepped to the plate, and saw this statistic.
Go ahead and look at that again.
That’s a perfect batting average of 1.000 and a perfect slugging percentage of 4.000
The only way this is possible? Hit a home run every at bat.
And at that moment in time, Seth Smith had done exactly that. During the opening night game, he came in to pinch hit and knocked one over the fence to the crowd’s delight.
So these are the statistics displayed during his very next at bat. Perfect.
But now we’re a few more games into the season, and (at the time of writing), Seth Smith has been up to bat 36 times. His batting average is now .222 and his slugging percentage is .444. Yes, he hit another home run (in his third at bat of the season), but he’s now also struck out six times.
Yes, it’s true that the Padres aren’t the best team in baseball (at least right now), but even the best players in baseball fail A LOT.
The current batting leader has an average .500 meaning that half of the time, he isn’t getting a hit. The home run leader to date has only hit 6 home runs in 60 at bats while striking out 16 times.
Yes, failure is part of baseball. Joe DiMaggio’s 1941 fifty-six game hitting streak still stands, meaning that most players regularly have games where they don’t get a single hit.
And yet over those years we’ve talked about Williams, Mantle, Mays, Aaron, Jackson, Rose, Henderson, Piazza, Jones, Suzuki, Jeter, and Pujols. They all have amazing statistics–that also indicate many, many failures.
But they still stepped up to the plate. They still swung at pitches. They were even hit by pitches, but each and every at bat was another chance of possibility.
Of potential greatness.
Of the chance to become baseball legend.
So how are you approaching the “at bats” in your life?
Are you letting one “strike out” or “slump” somewhere in your season of life make you want to quit?
Or are you seeing a turning point?
When Seth Smith began the season, he hit two home runs in his first three at bats. We all can have moments of greatness.
But not if we let the fear of failure keep us strapped down to the bench.
