“You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
- Jim Bouton
Baseball players sacrifice a lot to become professional baseball players. They spend years honing their craft. They spend their summers playing minor league baseball in outdated stadiums, in rural towns, in front of sparse crowds, all while earning below minimum wage. The only thing that keeps them going is the light at the end of the tunnel, the hope that they will one day play in the “big leagues”.
Even once they get to the “big leagues”, players need to keep improving, keep hustling, keep succeeding, knowing that there are others waiting to take their job from them.
Those who view “getting there” as the ultimate goal, will quickly find themselves out of a job.
Everyone’s journey is different, but they all agree that things would be very different had a few “breaks” gone differently. Sometimes the breaks are outside of the player’s control, while other times it is due to the direct actions of the player himself.
Jim Bouton was a pitcher for the New York Yankees, Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros. In 1969, while he played with the Pilots and Astros, Bouton kept a diary. The diary would later be published into a book titled Ball Four.
I plan on discussing the book and its effects on Bouton in a later article, but there is one quote from his book that I would like to focus on:
“You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
This is not exclusive to baseball. People from all professions spend years, decades even, trying to grasp their job, only to discover that it is their job that has grasped them.
Go ahead, master your profession. But don’t let it define you and don’t let it consume you. And never EVER allow it to become a greater priority than your own family.
Yisroel Picker is a Social Worker who lives in Jerusalem. He has a private practice which specializes in working with people of all ages helping them understand their own thought processes, enabling them to improve their level of functioning, awareness, social skills and more. He also lectures on the topics of communication and child safety.
Follow Yisroel on LinkedIn here
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