Fundamentals first

For those 3 of you who have read some of my posts, baseball plays an archetypal role in my business, coaching, and teaching life. This post is just so inspired.

Fundamentals are important. In sports they teach your muscles the right way to do things. It teaches muscles to remember. We've all heard the 10,000 hours route to mastery (see Malcolm Gladwell's brilliant writing for that). He's right-on methinks, but too often the route to mastery or even base competence is skipped. 

I grew up playing Police Boys Club baseball in Washington DC. My coaches were cops, secret service agents and volunteer firemen. Suffice to say, I listened to them, trusted them and got better through them. On the baseball field, as a 9 year old, Manny Lopez, my beloved coach, handed me a wooden glove (a piece of plywood shaped like a flat baseball glove with some rudimentary straps on the backside to hold fast to my hand) and sent me out to shortstop. Essentially I had a cutting board with straps on my wrist. Manny proceeded to fire ground balls my way forcing me to use my top hand to commander the grounder. This taught me the right procedure-- stay down, charge the ball, use your top hand and come up in a throwing position. 

As a high school and college catcher, my coaches stood on the mound and fired balls in the dirt at me, forcing me to block them over and over and over again. Suffice to say, in the moment this was painful. But when I blocked pitch after pitch for my struggling pitchers and won games with my defense, I realized how that hard work paid could off.

Times have changed. My 11 year old son plays on a team with 3 uniforms tops (one for home, away and tournaments). He has a bat bag that barely fits in my car's trunk. His cleats looks like something from a bad 80s prom picture. I often mumble to my wife that his team is more interested in playing dress up than in playing baseball. Delusions of grandeur abound--parents thinking these kids are Mike Trout and yet a fly ball off the head seems more standard. For this baseball fundamentalist, fielding comes first. It's a simple game (to quote Bull Durham), "you throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball." Simple game, simple rules. We don't need Big Papi arm braces, Captain America batting gloves, $250 catcher's equipment, two different color belts! We need to throw, hit and catch. That's it. 

Sadly, another piece of this route to competence is practice, which is boring. Yes, but necessary. These good boys are about 100 hours into mastery, but dressed like 12,000. I used to support the jazz great Wynton Marsalis as his road manager. He taught me what hard work really was. He had a phrase he used to inspire and coach the up and coming musicians in his band. He'd tell them "you need to hit the woodshed before you get back on stage." This meant, you needed to get back to practicing because you didn't sound good up there tonight. Jazz, like baseball, is all about fundamentals. I was blessed to work with  Wynton and Ken Burns on the development of the PBS Jazz documentary. Ken Burns always felt that, fundamentally, there were three legs to the American Cultural story: The Civil War, Baseball and Jazz. 

Since my son's squad lost 18-0 last night, after committing 19 errors, I'm too damn frustrated right now to segue this eloquently into some business parable. You all are smart enough to do that. I will only say that, to me, most issues are a matter of refocusing on the fundamentals. Don't get distracted by the glittery gossamer of complexities. Learn to write well. Learn to use the right data to tell a story. Listen to others, not your inner (or outer) critics. Be fundamentally sound. The wins will come.