Baseball is one of the great love son my life. The funny thing is, it kind of disappeared at least in an active sense from my life for a while. Between the years that I personally stopped playing and a few years ago when my kids started playing, I really just experienced baseball passively, by watching it. And I know that for many people, watching baseball can seem boring. But I'm here to tell you why it's not and why I love it.
How I watch baseball these days
There are really two main ways that I watch baseball currently. And they exist at two very different levels.
- I will watch my favorite team, the New York Yankees, play on TV 3-4 times a week, and
- I coach (and inherently watch) my sons play baseball anywhere from 3-6 times over a summer week
Despite these levels of play existing on totally different planes of existence, there actually is a lot of overlap is how watching these forms of baseball bring me joy.
Why I love watching baseball
Here are my top 3 reasons:
1. Failure is more common than success
This is such an important life lesson that is built right into baseball. We see these athletes as almost superhuman. Whereas we view ourselves as very human. Similarly, we think it is possible in life not to fail. But here's the secret: it isn't.
In fact, like in life, in baseball the only way to ensure success is to get up there and fail. The best hitters fail 70% of the time when they walk up to the plate. But to achieve the success needed for their team, they have to get in the arena every time, knowing they are more likely to fail than succeed.
I harp on my sons that we learn more from our failures than successes. Baseball brings that lesson to life.
2. The balance of the team and the individual
Baseball is kind of funny as far as team sports go.
The grand majority of every play (every pitch, every swing, every ground ball and pop fly) takes place between two individuals (the pitcher and the hitter, the hitter and the fielder). And yet, it takes a team to win. You could never play baseball alone and succeed.
Combine this with the built in propensity towards failure in the sport and it is a very unique environment. I love watching how players pick each other up (along with picking themselves up). I also love watching players coach their teammates and work together even when their situation is largely individual.
3. The silent movements
Even on the seemingly most boring plays, I love watching baseball. And many times I'm not even watching where the ball is hit per se.
Every play in baseball presents an infinite amount of potential plays. It's why, even after being played for 100s of years, you still see things in baseball that have never been seen before each year.
As a result, on every play, each player on the field has to prepare themselves for any possible event. This means that, on every play – even the most boring, each player is moving into position to prepare for the expected and unexpected.
The preparation and forethought to me is really fun to see. Plus it serves as a good analogy to life again, where most of our moves are unseen and maybe even necessary. However, that preparation every day leads us to the ultimate success that we experience. To the untrained eye it looks like it just happened naturally. But we know what we have done behind the scenes to make it happen for us.
The last reason why I love watching baseball
There's time to think.
And that's not really true about most sports. But baseball again is unique in that each play may happen in milliseconds. But in between that is time. Time to strategize, plan, and think.
And maybe that is the toughest part. It's easy to let our instincts take over. It's hard to envision what we have to do and then actually do it immediately after…time and time again.
Almost as hard as hitting a small round ball with a round bat.
And to finish off, here are some other posts discussing the overlap among sports, life, and finance:
- Comparing the Financial Lives of Doctors & Professional Athletes
- Sorta Random Sunday: The Most Financially Literate Athlete?
- Sorta Random Sunday: The Amazing Story of Junior Bridgeman
- Sorta Random Sunday: FIRE and the NFL
Watch my Masterclass Webinar on The 12 Steps to Financial Freedom for Physicians here!
What do you think? Do you like watching any sports in particular? Why or why not? What can we learn from them? Let me know in the comments below!
