Lessons from the Little League

by Charles L. "Fanner" McClenahan

This spring has been a difficult one for me. For the first time in years I am not involved in coaching baseball. Our son is in high school and, if truth be known, has advanced well beyond my ability to teach him anything about baseball. Our daughter is not a ball player. Instead she has chosen figure skating as her area of athletic endeavor-a sport requiring a level of grace and artistry well beyond that possessed by her father-and I am therefore limited to a more naive and awestruck type of support consisting mostly of a series of "wows."

It occurred to me as I was watching the grass turn green and my Neat’s-foot-oiled glove turn brittle from disuse that there are some lessons that good coaches will try to impart to young baseball players and that, if remembered, will serve those players later on in the business world. Some of these lessons may be learned in other sports as well, but only baseball combines the elements of individual performance on offense with teamwork on defense to the same extent that they come into play in the modern corporate environment.

So for those of you who never played youth baseball I offer the following:

Practice makes perfect-The team that has spent time preparing for various situations and on which each member knows his or her responsibility will generally outperform the team that relies on instinct alone.

Players will rise to reasonable expectations-If the coach expects each member of the team to try his or her best, the players will do it. If the coach expects players to treat each other with respect and to provide support to their teammates, the players will do it. If the coach treats the team as baseball players and not as kids, the members will think of themselves as baseball players and will act like baseball players. The key is the reasonableness of the expectations. If the coach expects to win every game, the team’s inevitable failure to rise to that unreasonable expectation will spill over to reasonable expectations as well.

Don’t look for a walk-I have observed many coaches of younger players coaching that "a walk is as good as a hit." This may be an effective strategy for winning against pitchers who have not developed good control, but in the long run it loses. Players coached to look for a walk when they are seven or eight often fail to develop the batting skills they need when they are twelve or thirteen. Coaching to win at the expense of development of basic skills is always a mistake.

Don’t take a called third strike-I have never criticized one of my players for a swinging stikeout. When a batter has two strikes it is "crunch time" and any pitch that is close needs to be attacked aggressively. There is probably nothing more difficult in all of sports as hitting a baseball, and there should be no negatives associated with swinging and missing. But for a player to take a close pitch for strike three with the bat resting meekly on his or her shoulder substitutes bad defense for good offense.

Don’t argue with the umpire-Umpires (like CEOs, Popes, and Supreme Court Justices) make mistakes, but that is a necessary part of the game. Arguing with an umpire’s judgment call is "bush" and has never been allowed on any team I have coached. Most kids play baseball for only a few years, but they can have class for their whole lives.

Play hard, play fair and have fun-Every season I made the same opening speech to my team, in which I told the players that I expected only these three things of my team. If you don’t want to play hard there is always someone else, possibly with less physical talent, who would love to take your place. If you don’t want to play fair then your priorities are not consistent with those of the team. If you don’t have fun then what are you doing here?

Now I’m sure there are some readers who dispute the applicability of some or all of these lessons to business life. There may even be some who question their applicability to youth baseball. But any reader who bases such concerns upon the assumption that the modern corporate environment is far more complex than baseball is obviously unfamiliar with the balk rule.