Chapter 102: Batting Practice
It is Opening Week of baseball’s long season and little makes me quite so happy as the prospect of six months of a game most every day – and please, baseball gods, let it continue well into October for my Mets.
I love many things about baseball and high among them is the joy of procrastination that allows me not to think about writing, and with it the prospect of failure.
Writers have their rituals and sometimes they work. Baseball, meanwhile, is cluttered with ritual, and one in particular can be a gift for writers, whether or not they are fans: batting practice.
It is safe to say that batting practice has preceded every game that has ever been played. Players gather outside the “batting cage,” and wait their turn to take a dozen or so swings at oh-so-easy-to-hit pitches thrown by a coach adept at making sure they have something decent to hit.
To the uninitiated and uninterested, batting practice might appear illogical: if you play baseball today and tomorrow and the next day and the next do you really need the additional daily practice of a skill you already possess?
There is, of course, the argument about muscle memory – reminding yourself of what you must do physically to succeed at a skill regarded as arguably the most challenging in all of sports: hitting a round object thrown deceptively and at high velocity with a cylindrical bat.
Here the skeptics have a point. As a recent study suggests, muscle memory is long and enduring; even if you have not performed a particular task for a long time, the body is quick to recall just what to do. It’s the reason why people who have not exercised for months find themselves quickly back in shape.
But that accounts only for the physical, not the emotional. Baseball’s best hitters fail seventy percent of the time. The statistical likelihood of things going wrong, and the accompanying fear that the odds are against you, is why batting practice matters.
I put the question of batting practice’s essential role to Brett Boretti, the coach of Columbia’s baseball team. Boretti played in college and professionally before turning to coaching and is well familiar with batting practice as a participant and supervisor.
“As you get to the higher levels it is more ‘neck up’ than anything else,” he wrote, meaning that what goes in the mind of an elite player is vital for success, especially when fear of failure is such a relentless companion. “Playing without fear is something a player has to get to in order to reach their full potential. That’s when they have their most confidence and are not thinking about consequences but instead are just playing and reacting.”
Therein lies the paradox of batting practice: even as the mind can rapidly recall how to perform what’s expected physically, the memory of success is ephemeral. Which means a ballplayer needs the reminder of batting practice. Every. Single. Day.
Sound familiar?
Like Boretti’s players, my students have been writing for many years, and if his players' skills have grown considerably since Little League, so too have my students’ skills as writers improved dramatically since first grade. They know how to write, or rather their minds can quickly summon the requisite skills to assemble words, sentences and paragraphs.
It’s the forgetting where I, like Coach Boretti, feel compelled to intervene. I want my students to write with what he calls “fearlessness.” Truth be told, I too want to write without fear.
To do that I need my own version of batting practice. So do my students, and perhaps most writers.
Early on in my career I was given a job for which, I came to see, I was unprepared: a full-time feature writer. I no longer had to cover meetings, or breaking news. Instead, I could find and tell whatever stories I liked. It worked in the beginning; I filed often and established a routine. But then I decided to get ambitious and – God I wince at the memory – I decided to do a series on, wait for it, chiropractors (you in the corner, no laughing, I see you!) I started to report and report and report some more and when months passed and I had not produced a word my editor sat me down and said, in effect, I’ve given you all the running room in the world and it’s not working.
She took away my plum assignment and sent me to cover the courthouse. It felt like a demotion. It was a gift. Suddenly I was writing every day, and sometimes twice. I had trials to cover, and from the trials bigger stories emerged. I didn’t have much time to think. I only had time to file and get ready for whatever came the next day, when I would write again.
As much as I learned about the laws, the courts, and the criminal justice system, I learned a great deal as well about what was necessary if I was going to succeed as a writer: I needed to do it a lot.
Like all writers I needed to read and to push myself beyond what was comfortable and expedient. But what I had not appreciated was what felt so uninspiring but was just as essential: writing a lot of words and doing it all the time.
It did not matter if the writing was sterling; in fact, trying too hard to get things just right every time I sat down at the keyboard undermined the purpose. It did not matter if I wrote letters or memos or played with scenes or ideas that were for my eyes alone. I just needed to write.
I still do.
Batting practice does not matter, not like a game when the stakes are high, the pressure mounts, and the fear can overwhelm. Batting practice is a reminder of what a hitter can do.
Best if that reminder is not a distant memory because while the body remembers, the mind too quickly forgets.
Best if you’ve just done it, when it was just you and the ball. Or the page.