When the ball goes up, time stops.
As the dreaded popup rises in a youth baseball game, coaches on the bench and parents in the bleachers tense as the world turns into a slow-motion movie reel.
Who’s gonna get it?
Even big leaguers sometimes hate popups. Just before Carl Yastrzemski hit the one that would end Boston’s American League East pursuit in a famous winner-take-all playoff game in 1978, Graig Nettles, the Yankees’ third baseman, said to himself: “Don’t hit a popup to me.”
But Nettles, one of the best fielding third baseman of all time, camped under it and caught it. Overcoming popups are essential to success in baseball and in reality away from the field.
That’s the concept authors Ken Davidoff and Harley Rotbart have grasped in their new book, “101 Lessons from the Dugout: What Baseball and Softball Can Teach Us About the Game of Life.”
I would argue most parents don’t often think about these lessons when we watch our kids play. We want them to succeed from the earliest ages.
“Considering the pyramid of ascension in baseball, kids are not gonna be playing major league ball, and many of the kids are not gonna be playing college ball,” says Rotbart, a pediatrician and parenting author who coached his two now-grown sons at baseball, tells USA TODAY Sports. “And if they do it, it will be club ball. So I think that parents have fantasies about their child, if he doesn’t make that catch, if he doesn’t get the hit with the bases loaded, nobody is gonna sign him.
“He’s not going to be drafted anyway.”
While chasing the long odds, have you ever thought about how baseball and softball imitate finding success in life? Rotbart and Davidoff, a veteran sportswriter, have teamed to explore that question.
We spoke with them and picked out 10 tips for parents about how they can apply lessons from baseball for sports and life success.
1. Step into the box: Being comfortable and confident is being successful
The book is about 15 years in the making, after Rotbart coached his two sons (now 34 and 38) through high school, taking meticulous notes that became a manuscript. He connected with Davidoff, who covered Major League Baseball for 30 years for a few New York City-area papers to bring it more legitimacy, to connect it more to the big leagues.
Rotbart was exercising the lesson in Chapter 9 (“The Batter’s Box”) and finding his comfort zone. In this instance, Davidoff tied the familiar moment to Hall of Famer Derek Jeter, who liked to chat with fans in the on-deck circle, which made him feel at home as he calmly walked to the plate.
When he stepped into the box, it was his time to be confident in his preparation, focus in and take charge.
“You are the right person, at the right time,” the authors write in the book. “Believe you can face any challenge, any time, and want to face that challenge. You are in the in the batter’s box, right where you belong.
When you step into the box and aren’t successful, though, a matter of inches – up or back, inside or out – can help you get on track.
“You can change your faith oftentimes without making dramatic changes in your life, but even making incremental changes,” Rotbart says.
2. Remember to tag up: Pause and control your anger
Now you’ve made it to one of the bases. If the batter hits a fly ball that is caught, you can’t advance to another without “tagging up.” When the ball leaves the bat, though, your impulse is to run.
But that little pause – that tag up – prevents us from harm and embarrassment. Outside the field, it’s a form of anger management.
How many times have you received an email or text from someone that enrages you? If you respond right away, your reply might be nasty. But if you pause and take a break, your action is more measured and thoughtful.
“There’s so much impulsivity in young athletes,” Rotbart says. “They see it in role models. They watch it on TV, the impulsive reaction to umpires, to coaches, to fans. And we have to teach kids to tag up.”
3. Life is a fielder’s choice: Decide what is most important
We are told as baseball players to think about what we’re going to do with the ball if it’s hit to us in the field. If runners are on base, we must make a choice.
If our team has a big lead in the game, we get the easiest force play. But if it’s a close game, we might throw across the diamond to third base to get the lead runner.
“It’s urgent for you to protect that slim lead and then you translate that over to school,” Davidoff says. “Let’s say you’re acing chemistry, you’re up four runs in chemistry. So, OK, you have homework in five subjects tonight, don’t worry about (chemistry) too much. But now you’ve got a “C” in chemistry, you’re only up one run. You need to get that lead runner. You need to turn the double play. You need to really step on the gas with your chemistry and make sure you nail it.”
4. Include everyone: Pinch-hitters and pinch-runners are crucial to the team
We can learn to throw ourselves into whatever role we are given.
“There are players who are not starters, and there are players who may not even be position players by their talent level,” Rotbart says. “But they have other skills that they can bring. They may be a fast runner. They may be able to hit, but not be able to field. And pinch-hitters and pinch-runners teach kids that we should be inclusive and not clickish, that we should want everyone on a team, everyone in our friendship circle, everyone in our class, to be included in activities, because everyone has something different to contribute.”
Even if you’re assigned a less prominent or less prestigious assignment on the team, or on the student council, or at the school newspaper, or in a Woody Allen movie with one line, make the best of it:
Go out there and make the catch that nobody expects you to make.
“When the expectations are low, that’s when you have the best opportunity to shine,” Rotbart says.
5. If you get yourself into a pickle, you can give yourself up for the greater good
I had a player on one of my Little League teams who was fast and could keep himself caught in a “pickle” between first and second bases long enough for a runner from third base to break for home and score.
The longer a pickle in baseball lasts, the more humorous it gets, and we wonder if the runner who made the “mistake” will still reach a base safely.
“Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t work out, but the analogy in the book is that when you are untruthful, when you say things that are not true, you get yourself in a pickle, and that’s when you’re lying, and you lose trust,” Rotbart says. “Sometimes you get away with it. Sometimes you advance to the next base. But oftentimes, you get thrown out, and being untruthful, lying is the most common cause for (a) real-life pickle.”
The lesson I like about the pickle is sacrificing yourself. As we know, even with two outs, that run from third base counts if it scores before the player is tagged out.
6. Mound meetings work: Take time to accept advice, or to just catch your breath
Davidoff remembers covering the Yankees’ first interleague visit to play the Colorado Rockies in 2002, and Roger Clemens was having a rough first inning.
He watched third baseman Robin Ventura walk over and chat with Clemens for a few seconds. Davidoff asked Ventura the next day what he had said to the starting pitcher.
“Nothing,” the third baseman told him, “just an excuse to let him exhale and take a deep breath.”
We all need it. Clemens got out of the first inning allowing only one run.
The same concept can apply when you call a timeout as a youth coach or gather your young player on the mound. They often respond by playing better. Sometimes, it’s as simple as you telling them, “I believe in you.”
7. Clean up your messes, and take pride in your spaces
Yoshinobu Yamamoto came to the Los Angeles Dodgers for $325 million in 2023. We know he helped lead Los Angeles to the World Series the last two seasons.
But did you know last October, after he pitched a complete game to even the World Series 1-1 in Toronto, he remained in the dugout and cleaned up trash teammates had left behind?
“Do not leave today’s mess for tomorrow,” Rotbart said. “You clean up the dugout, you sweep the field, just like Yoshi Yamamoto did. That’s protecting your tomorrow by taking care of your mess today.”
Someone may be playing on the field after you, or an opponent may have hosted you at their home park. You are showing them respect – win or lose – but also showing everyone a piece of who you are.
“Your personal spaces are part of you, signs on the outside of who you are on the inside, like the clothes you wear and how you brush your hair,” the authors write.
8. Stretch for the ball, but know when to pull off the base
Sometimes we want to make a spectacular play by diving for a ball in the outfield, or stretching far in front of us to catch a ball if we’re playing first base.
But what happens if we can’t get to the ball? We miss it, and it rolls to the outfield wall, allowing three runners to score. We don’t reach it and it skips past us at first base and the baserunner to get to second base in a tie game.
Sometimes, we need to slow up and let the ball drop to prevent further damage, or take our foot off the bag to stop the ball from going to the fence. Rotbart has used such analogies when speaking to patients as a pediatrician.
“A clinical example that I have (is) where a parent and an adolescent came into the clinic, and the mom was complaining that her son was doing too much of what his friends, what his cohort was asking him to do,” he says, “and that he would do anything to maintain friendship but he was going too far, doing things he shouldn’t be doing.”
9. Believe in yourself, and don’t listen to the chatter
I hear it every time my sons play a high school game. Teams are yelling at each other from the dugout, or fans are yelling from the stands, to try and throw players off their games.
It’s not easy to block out the noise.
“There will always be those who feel better when they’re embarrassing others,” Davidoff and Rotbart write. “In baseball, the best teams and the best players don’t taunt.”
The authors analogize chatter in the book to be like gossip: Saying things that are potentially hurtful, disruptive and distracting or even dangerous (in the case of fly balls).
Chatter might seem helpful in the moment but if a potential coach sees you doing it – in person or on social media – he or she might stop recruiting you.
10. Learn to catch the popup: Take charge and follow through
When the ball is up in the air, we’re waiting for someone on the field to take charge. Maybe it’s the kid who’s under it, but often it’s the one who’s most confident in catching it. Go ahead, call for it.
“Someone has to take responsibility,” Rotbart says. “Someone has to be accountable, and suddenly, the pop fly became a lesson in taking responsibility, following through.”
He thought about it, after watching some of the 700 to 800 kids who came through his baseball program crash into each other on the pitcher’s mound going after a popup. Rotbart reached for his notebook, and the seed of a book was born.
“Double-check everything you do with others to make sure you know who is doing what,” he and Davidoff would craft into lesson No. 48. “If you’re the one ‘calling’ for the ball, make sure others hear you; if someone else is calling for it, make sure you hear them. Messages you send can get lost and so can messages people send to you.
“When it’s important your message – or assignment or project – gets where it’s going and gets seen or heard, follow through and make sure it got there. Otherwise, you’ve dropped the ball.”
Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His Coach Steve column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.
Got a question for Coach Steve you want answered in a column? Email him at sborelli@usatoday.com
