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Nobody knows...
May. 12th, 2011 08:35 pmI was a baseball fan when I was a kid. It was easy. We lived in New York, which was home to the Yankees, and the Yankees were quite a team in those days. Even though I haven't followed the game since about 10th grade, just a few moments ago, I tried to remember the 1964 starting lineup and managed to come up with everyone except Clete Boyer (3B), Tom Tresh (LF), and Elston Howard (C).
The one thing that kept me from complete ostracism when it came to choosing up sides for any kind of ball game in my youth was the fact that I could hit and I could run. My fielding skill, or lack of it, pretty much guaranteed a stint either in right field or behind the plate, as catcher.
I made my bones, so to speak, at the catcher position one summer day between eighth and ninth grades when, during a softball game, someone with even less fielding skill than I had was chosen as our team's ninth player. They got right field, I was handed the catcher's mask.
Somewhere in the heat of battle, a runner on the opposing team came around third, headed for home, just as our shortstop cut off a throw from deep in the outfield. Hoping against all hope that, by some miracle, I might catch the ball, the shortstop fired the ball to me as I stood at home plate.
I caught the ball.
The runner, who was taller than I was and heavier, decided to run right over me and try to swat the ball out of my glove.
Bad idea.
There was a loud "thunk," and when the dust had settled, I was left standing, the ball still in my glove, and the runner was on the baseline, a few feet short of home plate and sitting on his butt.
I played a lot of ball during the rest of the summer and the following year, and spent almost no time in right field.
Some many years later, after college and my stint working in Russia, word went around at our Manhattan publishing house that the company would sponsor a team in the Publisher's League, which played in Central Park on a regular basis. I signed up and penciled my name in for either the shortstop position or third base, which were about as far, philosophically, from right field as one can get.
You see, between junior high school and that point in my life, I had gotten used to doing new, seemingly "impossible" things and in fact, I had signed up for the softball team as a test of newly formed hypothesis: that just as my "inability" to run three miles in the Marines had been all in my head, so was my "inability" to be an infielder (or anything else, for that matter). Back in junior high, everybody "knew" I was a lousy fielder—including me—and so I dutifully fulfilled everyone's expectations.
Have you ever been in a situation where you notice how some one particular outcome in the near future would be less-than-optimum (such as putting a soft-drink cup filled with soda down on the floor next to your chair and realizing just how easily you might accidentally kick it over), and then kicking it over as you turn to pick up the cup?
Have you ever been in a situation where you've heard someone say, "Now watch me..." followed by some less-than-optimum result (for example, a golfer who is about to hit a ball, who says "Now watch me hit this ball into the water"), which then happens, almost as if by magic?
I think it's the same principle at work.
My advantage with my publishing co-workers was that none of them knew I was supposed to suck as a fielder.
And I actually did a pretty good job at third base, that year.
Confidence of any kind—good or bad—feeds upon itself. You may not always succeed with a positive attitude, but you'll almost always fail with a negative one.
Cheers...
The one thing that kept me from complete ostracism when it came to choosing up sides for any kind of ball game in my youth was the fact that I could hit and I could run. My fielding skill, or lack of it, pretty much guaranteed a stint either in right field or behind the plate, as catcher.
I made my bones, so to speak, at the catcher position one summer day between eighth and ninth grades when, during a softball game, someone with even less fielding skill than I had was chosen as our team's ninth player. They got right field, I was handed the catcher's mask.
Somewhere in the heat of battle, a runner on the opposing team came around third, headed for home, just as our shortstop cut off a throw from deep in the outfield. Hoping against all hope that, by some miracle, I might catch the ball, the shortstop fired the ball to me as I stood at home plate.
I caught the ball.
The runner, who was taller than I was and heavier, decided to run right over me and try to swat the ball out of my glove.
Bad idea.
There was a loud "thunk," and when the dust had settled, I was left standing, the ball still in my glove, and the runner was on the baseline, a few feet short of home plate and sitting on his butt.
I played a lot of ball during the rest of the summer and the following year, and spent almost no time in right field.
Some many years later, after college and my stint working in Russia, word went around at our Manhattan publishing house that the company would sponsor a team in the Publisher's League, which played in Central Park on a regular basis. I signed up and penciled my name in for either the shortstop position or third base, which were about as far, philosophically, from right field as one can get.
You see, between junior high school and that point in my life, I had gotten used to doing new, seemingly "impossible" things and in fact, I had signed up for the softball team as a test of newly formed hypothesis: that just as my "inability" to run three miles in the Marines had been all in my head, so was my "inability" to be an infielder (or anything else, for that matter). Back in junior high, everybody "knew" I was a lousy fielder—including me—and so I dutifully fulfilled everyone's expectations.
Have you ever been in a situation where you notice how some one particular outcome in the near future would be less-than-optimum (such as putting a soft-drink cup filled with soda down on the floor next to your chair and realizing just how easily you might accidentally kick it over), and then kicking it over as you turn to pick up the cup?
Have you ever been in a situation where you've heard someone say, "Now watch me..." followed by some less-than-optimum result (for example, a golfer who is about to hit a ball, who says "Now watch me hit this ball into the water"), which then happens, almost as if by magic?
I think it's the same principle at work.
My advantage with my publishing co-workers was that none of them knew I was supposed to suck as a fielder.
And I actually did a pretty good job at third base, that year.
Confidence of any kind—good or bad—feeds upon itself. You may not always succeed with a positive attitude, but you'll almost always fail with a negative one.
Cheers...
