My week without S is nearly over, and it can’t end fast enough. The boys are at ages where everything is difficult. If one of them is easy in an area, the other one is difficult in it. They perfectly complement each other to make things hard on me. Lil’ S2 is more difficult overall. He hasn't outgrown the random tantrum stage, and the smallest, weirdest things set him off. Appeals to reason or logic are futile. The other day, for example, he had a total meltdown because his ice cream wasn’t “in a stripe” in his bowl. Most kids are happy just to get ice cream no matter what the form. Eddie Murphy once joked a kid could drop an ice cream cone in dog shit and still eat it (“it’s just sprinkles”). But apparently not Lil’ S2. He’s the most fastidious kid I’ve even known. Everything has to do be just so or he gets really upset. He’s seems well-adjusted enough at school, but if we find out he’s on the spectrum or has OCD or something like that, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Lil’ S1 is different. The days of the random tantrums are pretty much gone (and he was never as bad as Lil’ S2 anyway), and you can reason with him and make deals with him, but he’s still trying, in that everything you tell him is in one ear and out the other. “Time to turn off the iPad.” He just sits there. “Don’t touch my glasses.” He puts his grubby fingers all over the lenses. “Put down my phone.” He puts in a bad password locks it. “Don’t tell your brother you got the last jelly bean.” He immediately gloats to his brother that he got the last jelly bean. That last one is part of a bigger problem: He constantly has to be holding one over on Lil’ S2. He makes everything they do a competition whose rules are always tilted in his favor (and that immediately change in the rare instances he loses). Of course, it gets under Lil’ S2’s skin, and then it’s a fight over a piece of dental of floss or something like that. They do have moments when they play nicely together, but those never last longer than 15 minutes, before it's tears and punches. Well, maybe this is my comeuppance for picking on my little brother when I was younger.
The other thing about Lil’ S2 that wears on me is that his sleep schedule is still erratic. Sometimes I have to wake him up so that we won't be late for school; other times, like today, he comes into my bed at 6:00 am and won't go back to sleep. The most annoying thing about this is that S’s mom is awake at that time and would love nothing more than to spend time with him, but he refuses to go. So irritating. He does say some pretty funny things, though. He's a stream of one-liners. This morning he said, “look at that, a fan-man,” and I looked up and the ceiling fan kinda looked like a face with two light bulbs as the eyes and blades as the hair, and then he said, “and look at his hair, it's all twirly.” It made me smile, but it wasn't worth my last hour of sleep.
In other kids’ news, Lil’ S1’s first day of baseball went pretty well. He seemed into it – much more so than soccer. I don’t know if it’s the sport or just that he’s older now. I intentionally planned it so that we arrived 15 minutes late, which I think helped. In general, I hate being late – it’s a bad habit and usually a very self-centered thing to do. But in this case, it seemed like the lesser of two evils, as I doubt Lil' S1 would’ve lasted until the finish had we come on time. He was starting to fade toward the end.
His coach is alright, in that he’s a dad who volunteered to do it, but he’s a bit too pedantic for my taste. Then again, almost everybody is too pedantic for my taste when it comes to youth sports, as I think kids shouldn’t really be taught anything at this age. I mean, they should learn the basics, the rules, how to play the game – stand here, run there, throw the ball to that kid. But trying to teach technique is a waste of time, in my opinion, and it might do more bad than good. I think it’s better for them to develop on their own and figure it out for themselves, especially in baseball, which is full of silly old wives’ tales, even today. Here are a few things you always here growing up playing baseball that are mostly BS.
Keep your eye on the ball
Hitters at high levels don’t hit by keeping their eye on the ball. It’s literally impossible for anything beyond slow-pitch softball. Your eyes can’t follow a ball moving throw air with any amount of speed. Hitters see the ball early and then use pattern-recognition to infer where it is going to be when they swing. If kids are missing the ball a lot when they swing, they don't need to keep their eye on it. They need more reps to build their pattern database and develop muscle memory.
Swing levelly
Playing T-ball as a youngster, my teammates and I always wanted to swing under the ball, in an upper-cut fashion, because we intuited that the ball would go further that way. But our coach (who also was my dad), always instructed us to swing levelly. He was following conventional wisdom of the day – the baseball world believed the best way to hit was to go for the line-drive, not the big fly-ball. But it turns out that’s wrong, and today we are seeing the “launch-angle revolution” in professional baseball. The best hitters try to hit the ball in the air because home runs are good, and fly-balls are better than ground-balls, and ground-balls happen frequently if you don't try to elevate the ball.
Use two hands when tagging a runner
Lil’ S1’s coach was teaching this, and I had to bite my tongue to avoid putting him on the spot. The idea is that when you tag a runner you should put the ball in your hand and then put your hand in the glove and then tag the runner with your glove. The rationale is if you tag the runner with the ball in just your hand or just your mitt, it could pop out. But this particularly silly, as unless the baserunner is body-slamming you (which is illegal), the ball almost never falls out of a one-handed tag. What’s more, it’s awkward to chase a baserunner holding the ball with two hands, and you can’t stretch as far. This is a case where teaching the kids the fundamentals is actually teaching them a less natural, less effective way to do things. It’s the same thing with catching a fly-ball two-handed, which is another one you hear all the time. There’s no reason to bring your throwing hand near your mitt unless you are going to have to make a quick throw.
Curveballs are bad for your arm
This one is for older kids. There’s long been this idea that curveballs wreck kids’ arms when they’re little. And that’s actually true... but only because pitching in general wrecks people’s arms at any age. Throwing curveballs doesn’t seem to be any worse than throwing fastballs, and it might actually be less stressful. Revving up and throwing as fast as you can 50 times in a row turns out to be not that great for you.
Hustle is good
We love hustlers in baseball especially, but in life in general. We love the idea of going all out, all the time, even for small things. But it's an unrealistic ideal. Hustle would be great if we had unlimited resources, but we don’t, and part of being a human is determining how best to utilize the resources we do have. Hustling is often inefficient. In baseball, for example, health is a valuable resource, and hustling is a great way to lose this resource for minimal gain. Sometimes it’s best to concede the battle to stay alive for the war. I think I’m especially attuned to this, because once I blew out my hamstring in a beer-league softball game trying get to second base on a play I was probably going to be out on anyway. We were losing by, like, 10 runs at the time too. One dumb play, and I was out the entire summer. Actually, I haven’t played softball since. It was a career-ending injury that probably would have been avoid if I didn't hustle.
Incidentally, there is a new book I want to read called Range by David Epstein about childhood development, especially in sports. I’ve heard him talk on like five podcasts, so I know a bit about the book already. The basic premise is that kids should do as many activities as possible when they are younger and not specialize in anything until they are in their late teens, at least. There are a few areas in which super young specialization is advantageous (like golf and chess), but for the most part kids with broad range often surpass hyper-specialized kids later in life. It’s somewhat counterintuitive, but it makes sense, in that having a broader skillset makes you more adaptable and more creative. It also, I’m sure, helps prevent burnout and resentment.
I’ve certainly never been good enough at a sport to have this apply, but there is something of a parallel in math. In junior high and high school, I was a good math student, but not a prodigy or anything like that. One of my shortcomings was that I didn’t carefully read the text and didn’t learn the techniques exactly. I would just get the gist and then come up with my own ways to solve the problems. I always figured this was going to come back to bite me in the end – eventually, I thought, I was going to have to learn to do things “the right way.” But then I got to college, where the instruction is better and not so by-the-book, and I learned that there is no “the right way.” In fact, I had inadvertently trained myself to think in a way that helped me become a very good math student.
Anyway, like I said, I want to read this book, but it will have to wait a while. I already downloaded a different book (The Queen by Josh Levin), and these days it takes me a while to get through an entire book. Maybe if I had more hustle, I would be faster.
Until next time…
Lil’ S1 is different. The days of the random tantrums are pretty much gone (and he was never as bad as Lil’ S2 anyway), and you can reason with him and make deals with him, but he’s still trying, in that everything you tell him is in one ear and out the other. “Time to turn off the iPad.” He just sits there. “Don’t touch my glasses.” He puts his grubby fingers all over the lenses. “Put down my phone.” He puts in a bad password locks it. “Don’t tell your brother you got the last jelly bean.” He immediately gloats to his brother that he got the last jelly bean. That last one is part of a bigger problem: He constantly has to be holding one over on Lil’ S2. He makes everything they do a competition whose rules are always tilted in his favor (and that immediately change in the rare instances he loses). Of course, it gets under Lil’ S2’s skin, and then it’s a fight over a piece of dental of floss or something like that. They do have moments when they play nicely together, but those never last longer than 15 minutes, before it's tears and punches. Well, maybe this is my comeuppance for picking on my little brother when I was younger.
The other thing about Lil’ S2 that wears on me is that his sleep schedule is still erratic. Sometimes I have to wake him up so that we won't be late for school; other times, like today, he comes into my bed at 6:00 am and won't go back to sleep. The most annoying thing about this is that S’s mom is awake at that time and would love nothing more than to spend time with him, but he refuses to go. So irritating. He does say some pretty funny things, though. He's a stream of one-liners. This morning he said, “look at that, a fan-man,” and I looked up and the ceiling fan kinda looked like a face with two light bulbs as the eyes and blades as the hair, and then he said, “and look at his hair, it's all twirly.” It made me smile, but it wasn't worth my last hour of sleep.
In other kids’ news, Lil’ S1’s first day of baseball went pretty well. He seemed into it – much more so than soccer. I don’t know if it’s the sport or just that he’s older now. I intentionally planned it so that we arrived 15 minutes late, which I think helped. In general, I hate being late – it’s a bad habit and usually a very self-centered thing to do. But in this case, it seemed like the lesser of two evils, as I doubt Lil' S1 would’ve lasted until the finish had we come on time. He was starting to fade toward the end.
His coach is alright, in that he’s a dad who volunteered to do it, but he’s a bit too pedantic for my taste. Then again, almost everybody is too pedantic for my taste when it comes to youth sports, as I think kids shouldn’t really be taught anything at this age. I mean, they should learn the basics, the rules, how to play the game – stand here, run there, throw the ball to that kid. But trying to teach technique is a waste of time, in my opinion, and it might do more bad than good. I think it’s better for them to develop on their own and figure it out for themselves, especially in baseball, which is full of silly old wives’ tales, even today. Here are a few things you always here growing up playing baseball that are mostly BS.
Keep your eye on the ball
Hitters at high levels don’t hit by keeping their eye on the ball. It’s literally impossible for anything beyond slow-pitch softball. Your eyes can’t follow a ball moving throw air with any amount of speed. Hitters see the ball early and then use pattern-recognition to infer where it is going to be when they swing. If kids are missing the ball a lot when they swing, they don't need to keep their eye on it. They need more reps to build their pattern database and develop muscle memory.
Swing levelly
Playing T-ball as a youngster, my teammates and I always wanted to swing under the ball, in an upper-cut fashion, because we intuited that the ball would go further that way. But our coach (who also was my dad), always instructed us to swing levelly. He was following conventional wisdom of the day – the baseball world believed the best way to hit was to go for the line-drive, not the big fly-ball. But it turns out that’s wrong, and today we are seeing the “launch-angle revolution” in professional baseball. The best hitters try to hit the ball in the air because home runs are good, and fly-balls are better than ground-balls, and ground-balls happen frequently if you don't try to elevate the ball.
Use two hands when tagging a runner
Lil’ S1’s coach was teaching this, and I had to bite my tongue to avoid putting him on the spot. The idea is that when you tag a runner you should put the ball in your hand and then put your hand in the glove and then tag the runner with your glove. The rationale is if you tag the runner with the ball in just your hand or just your mitt, it could pop out. But this particularly silly, as unless the baserunner is body-slamming you (which is illegal), the ball almost never falls out of a one-handed tag. What’s more, it’s awkward to chase a baserunner holding the ball with two hands, and you can’t stretch as far. This is a case where teaching the kids the fundamentals is actually teaching them a less natural, less effective way to do things. It’s the same thing with catching a fly-ball two-handed, which is another one you hear all the time. There’s no reason to bring your throwing hand near your mitt unless you are going to have to make a quick throw.
Curveballs are bad for your arm
This one is for older kids. There’s long been this idea that curveballs wreck kids’ arms when they’re little. And that’s actually true... but only because pitching in general wrecks people’s arms at any age. Throwing curveballs doesn’t seem to be any worse than throwing fastballs, and it might actually be less stressful. Revving up and throwing as fast as you can 50 times in a row turns out to be not that great for you.
Hustle is good
We love hustlers in baseball especially, but in life in general. We love the idea of going all out, all the time, even for small things. But it's an unrealistic ideal. Hustle would be great if we had unlimited resources, but we don’t, and part of being a human is determining how best to utilize the resources we do have. Hustling is often inefficient. In baseball, for example, health is a valuable resource, and hustling is a great way to lose this resource for minimal gain. Sometimes it’s best to concede the battle to stay alive for the war. I think I’m especially attuned to this, because once I blew out my hamstring in a beer-league softball game trying get to second base on a play I was probably going to be out on anyway. We were losing by, like, 10 runs at the time too. One dumb play, and I was out the entire summer. Actually, I haven’t played softball since. It was a career-ending injury that probably would have been avoid if I didn't hustle.
[Pete Rose aka "Charlie Hustle" during his short stint with the Montreal Expos. What a haircut!]
Incidentally, there is a new book I want to read called Range by David Epstein about childhood development, especially in sports. I’ve heard him talk on like five podcasts, so I know a bit about the book already. The basic premise is that kids should do as many activities as possible when they are younger and not specialize in anything until they are in their late teens, at least. There are a few areas in which super young specialization is advantageous (like golf and chess), but for the most part kids with broad range often surpass hyper-specialized kids later in life. It’s somewhat counterintuitive, but it makes sense, in that having a broader skillset makes you more adaptable and more creative. It also, I’m sure, helps prevent burnout and resentment.
I’ve certainly never been good enough at a sport to have this apply, but there is something of a parallel in math. In junior high and high school, I was a good math student, but not a prodigy or anything like that. One of my shortcomings was that I didn’t carefully read the text and didn’t learn the techniques exactly. I would just get the gist and then come up with my own ways to solve the problems. I always figured this was going to come back to bite me in the end – eventually, I thought, I was going to have to learn to do things “the right way.” But then I got to college, where the instruction is better and not so by-the-book, and I learned that there is no “the right way.” In fact, I had inadvertently trained myself to think in a way that helped me become a very good math student.
Anyway, like I said, I want to read this book, but it will have to wait a while. I already downloaded a different book (The Queen by Josh Levin), and these days it takes me a while to get through an entire book. Maybe if I had more hustle, I would be faster.
Until next time…
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