🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Boston🎶
Bike Safety🚲
Lineup Builder⚾
THE DAILY UPDATE
Three Things I’m Grateful For Today:
- That time toward the end of the day where all work is done, all responsibilities are done, and I can just breathe.
- The Tony Kornheiser Show.
- Processing through journaling. If I didn’t write out my feelings and thoughts, I think it’s quite possible I would explode.
Pursuit of Wordle Godhood: Today’s result: Four. I’ll take it.
Wordle 1,040 4/6
⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜
⬜🟨🟩⬜🟩
⬜⬜🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Pursuit of Connections Godhood: Today’s result: FAIL. Well that was embarrassing.
Connections
Puzzle #318
🟦🟩🟩🟩
🟪🟨🟩🟨
🟦🟦🟩🟦
🟦🟦🟦🟩
The song in my head when I woke up: “Peace of Mind,” by Boston, which is perhaps the most out-of-left-field morning-brain song I’ve ever had. I have no clue the last time I even listened to this song, and I had to look up “Boston songs” to find the name.
Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: I understand about indecision/But I don’t care if I get behind/People livin’ in competition/All I want is to have my peace of mind
Commute Tunes: No commute today. This might just be a full WFH week. We shall see.
Something I’m looking forward to today: A big interview that hopefully leads to something great.
Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: Our weekend baseball tournament.
Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: Wifey Poo having the young man with autism whom she works with over for dinner last night.
What I’m writing: Yesterday’s Two Crappy Pages involved a ton of writing for a Johnny Boy Marketing client. Four stories, each roughly 550 to 650 words. The one that felt the best was about two master’s students working on their capstone project, which is a new way to teach typing skills to children without increasing screen time.
What I’ve written: Leader of the Bike Lane Uprising: Christina Whitehouse leaned on her MDP2 education to create the app that allows cyclists to report bike-lane hazards and has prompted city action to promote a safer environment for bikers.
Today’s Stoic Though of the Day: “You have been formed of three parts – body, breath, and mind. Of these, the first two are yours insofar as they are only in your care. The third alone is truly yours.” — Marcus Aurelius
John’s translation of Today’s STD: “Your body can break. It can be imprisoned. Tortured. Violated. Your breath will one day cease. Exertion makes it labored. But your mind? That’s your shit, yo. So use it for something. Challenge it. Develop it. Make it better. Today.”
Running a youth baseball team is a bit like walking a tightrope. I won’t be too overly dramatic and add “… without a safety net,” because failing in this role isn’t going to change the world. But that doesn’t mean it’s without its trials and tribulations.
I am blessed with three very good assistant coaches. In general, we are in agreement on just about everything, and we have made everyone on our team a better ballplayer in some way.
Last night, we spent a good hour texting back and forth about lineup construction. Who should bat where? Who should play where?
The great thing about our team is that there are no liabilities. There’s no “automatic out” or kid who, when the ball is hit in his direction, you say, “Oh dear God no.” That said, our outfield situation isn’t what I want it to be. I’d be happy to have three guys who can make the routine plays on the regular, and though all our outfields are capable of that, there have been some really ugly oopsies that come down more to confidence than skill. Remember, we’re talking about 14-year-old boys here, and for all their dugout swagger and bluster, all are fragile to some degree. I remember what being 14 was like, and I understand the false bravado.
My mission as a coach is to put kids in situations in which they are likely to succeed. Yes, baseball is a game of failure, but I don’t want to place a young teen in a position in which they don’t have the confidence they are going to be able to do the job. This isn’t so much about winning as it is about personal development. I want these kids to have experiences that build them up, not tear them down.
The challenge is that I don’t have a 26-person-deep Major League Baseball roster and a farm system of up-and-coming young prospects. I have a very limited number of pieces to move around the field, and I’m running into situations where I am having to piece together an outfield and just pray it works.
I’m also a dad. Boy The Younger is having a horrible season at the plate. So when I’m building a lineup, it’s very challenging to not put my own son at the very bottom. It’s tough to tell your son that and say, “But I’m wearing my coach cap now, so you have to be OK with this,” or some other stupid remark. He has the talent. He just has been very hesitant to pull the trigger and is looking at far too many good pitches he should be swinging at. None of the coaches has found a good way to fix this, and none of us can swing the damn bat for him.
All of these words? They merely are to say that being a youth baseball coach at this level isn’t easy. I want my kids to look back on this time like I look back on my time as a youth baseball player. Those times made me who I am today in many ways, and I look back on them fondly. I had a lot of success until I hurt my arm. I also had a lot of failure. It happens in baseball. It happens in life.
So today my mission is to, by midnight, have the lineup and the positions set for this weekend. Then, we’ll see how it goes.
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