"In spite of that, keep going anyway": How Baseball is like life

"The game begins in the spring, when everything is new again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains comes, it stops, and leaves you to face the fall alone."

That's from the beginning of Bart Giamatti's famous essay "The Green Fields of the Mind" Baseball fans, he writes, "count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops."

Baseball is such an odd game. Unlike, say, basketball, where teams seem to score almost every time they have the ball, baseball players see much less success. A .300 hitter is considered excellent -- yet that means he fails seven out of ten times.

The central focus of the game is the individual contest between pitcher and batter. And yet that context means nothing apart from the support of the rest of the team. A batter may defy the odds and reach base. Yet, that achievement means nothing if the batter behind him hits into a double play. Several times this season, one of the kids on our mites (ages 6 to 9 years) softball team has complained "It's not fair. Why do I have to go back to the dugout? He hit the ball to the fielder!"

Many people have said it: "Learning to deal with failure is one of the keys to succeeding in baseball." This is the time of year when that becomes most real. In most other sports, the last weeks are about playoffs, either getting set up for a good start, or making the final push to qualify. Not baseball. There are just four slots for the playoffs, and come September 1, there aren't many teams with a realistic shot at those four places.

Looking over the standings today, I found myself calculating what my team would have to do to avoid having the worst record in baseball. Not what they would have to do to win the playoffs -- or even just make the playoffs. Baseball has no Cinderella teams who start the playoffs in the eighth seed but overachieve to make it to the seventh game of the finals.

In that way, baseball is a lot like life. It's about doing your best day in and day out. Not because it's going to get you a shot at the championship. Not because it's going to get you a shot at glory. Just because it's the right thing to do. Just because there are people around you pulling for you, counting on you to lift them up.

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Galatians 6:9
And as for you, brothers, never tire of doing what is right. 2 Thessalonians 3:13
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Hebrews 12:1

Most of us don't rise from obscurity to become successful heads of corporations or wealthy movie stars or powerful civic leaders. In spite of that, we just keep going anyway. We do our best day by day, just because it's the right thing to do.