"It is one of the beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself." Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friday night I had the privledge of watching Xman play two games. In the second game, he moved from his position at first to the pitching mound.
We were down a good bit when he took the mound, and no matter how old he gets, I always hold my breath when he pitches.
This team we played were what I call a noisy dugout.
Anytime the pitcher pitched, they were making noise.
Xman had a full count on the batter and there they went hollering "Ball Four" over and over they yelled. You should picture it in a sing songy playground taunt sound.
I will confess to feeling a tad bit of "take that" when the last pitch was a strike.
I got to thinking at the end of this game, the team we played were very good. They had a pitcher who could throw, they came bats swiming, and they were good in the field. It was a competitive game.
But you see, they spent half the game trying to make us make mistakes. Trying to ruffle our pitchers into throwing balls.
It probably makes me old fashioned, or sports illiterate, but if you can't win a game based on your own skill alone, you don't win.
I don't care what the score board says at the end of the game.
If you have to rely on the other team making mistakes to win, is that really a true win? Did you win on your own merit? Or because you made so much noise our pitchers had trouble tuning you out?
Apparently this is a baseball thing because we've played multiple teams this year that rather than encouraging thier own batter to hit the ball, they yell at the pitcher to not pitch well.
We're a fairly young baseball program and we sometimes play teams that are playing at a higher level than we are. I love that our coach has encouraged our boys to take on this challenge. We become better by facing better competition.
We've learned that when we do our best, we can hang with teams that maybe we considered out of our league before.
I'm not sure what we teach kids when we say "encourage someone else to not do well so that you can do well."
I never want my kids to put someone else down just so they can win.
Mama Warriors, I think we have to teach our kids that we rise the best when we encourage others.
We have to rely on our own batting skills.
Better, let's encourage the pitcher to throw a good pitch so we can show off our bat skills.
Let's remember that we are all one team.
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