Lessons from Little League
Baseball as a teacher of resilience, patience, and the value of small wins
My son just wrapped up his spring Little League season. It was his first year at AA level, where the kids get their first at-bats with other kids pitching, and the full experience of scorekeeping, wins/losses, longer innings, and most of the rulebook.
I've coached his past seasons of tee-ball and A level, but coaching AA is different. It's the first level where the kids begin learning the actual rules of the game. We start keeping score, making outs, hitting real pitches; it's their first experience with ebb and flow of a baseball game. With the slowness, the stop-and-go, the tedium followed by excitement.
Coaching gave me a front-row seat to baseball's beautiful complexity and its value as a teaching tool for a wide variety of skills: from the athletic and physical to the mental and social. When you've grown up with the game, you lose perspective on how intricate it is. Its weird rules, timing, positioning, situation-dependent strategy; it all becomes second nature. But for the kids, everything is new. As a coach you see the complexity through beginner's eyes again.
Baseball's a challenge for kids this age, but one well worth the effort. Four separate elements are thrown at them at once, each an entire sport to itself: hitting, fielding, pitching, and baserunning. For coaches, the challenge is striking the right balance between easing them into certain skills and tossing them into the deep end to learn through raw trial and error on others. Like any tacit skill, the teacher can't explain in words exactly what to do, only model it. The player must go through the motions themselves, mimicking the patterns to hone in on what works for them. No words from coach can get that 7 year old shortstop to keep the grounder from going into the outfield. The kid only learns with repetition to get in front of it, knock it down, and refine their timing, position, and bravery to make the play.
In all its complexity we have a phenomenal tool for teaching a range of hard and soft skills.
There's the physical side: athletics, coordination, strength, agility.
But even more important are the soft skills, valuable both on and off the field: quick decision-making (building intuition, pattern recognition), friendship, teamwork, humility, respect, patience, and the long, frustrating (yet powerful) process of learning through trial and error.
One of the greatest joys of parenting is watching your kids pass through these little rites of passage. And a baseball diamond of first-graders working out the game for themselves is an incredible petri dish to observe their character formation and skill development as they confront its physical, mental, and emotional challenges.
Baseball is famously failure-heavy.
Even the best hitters in the game become an out ~2/3rds of the time. Comfort with constant strikeouts and weak ground balls is just part of playing. With youngsters this means waiting patiently for their turn up to bat, only to get fanned on 3 swings (while dad/coach gets to watch the tears). You feel for the kid watching them fail. But knowing the game means knowing where it's benefits lie. The slow struggle of baseball is one of its values.
Patience, a trust in trial and error (and adjustment), and a resiliency to not let the individual failures drag you down are required skills. Everyone notches a dozen failures per game. The sport isn't about perfecting performance; it's about gradual, play-by-play improvement one step at a time. Even over the course of a 3 month season, you can watch the kids' demeanors change as they get comfortable with the frequency of failure.
In his book on baseball, Men at Work, George Will wrote about the trial and lots-of-error of the game. I love this anecdote:
Warren Spahn was one of a group of former All-Stars who were in Washington to play in an old-timers’ game. Spahn said: “Mr. Speaker, baseball is a game of failure. Even the best batters fail about 65 percent of the time. The two Hall of Fame pitchers here today (Spahn, 363 wins, 245 losses; Bob Gibson, 251 wins, 174 losses) lost more games than a team plays in a full season. I just hope you fellows in Congress have more success than baseball players have.”
It's also useful that failure happens in both private and public.
Sometimes they swing and miss on the practice field or in the batting cage, in a private space for them to take bigger risks and try things. But in the game in front of their parents and peers, the successes and failures are on display. It's good life practice to get out there and try stuff in front of others. We're not always in the safety of home. Sometimes you've got to take a swing, chalk up strike three, and sit down.
Failure's not fun, but it's healthy for them to have this low-stakes environment to condition themselves to take risk and feel the sting of failure. It's only going to happen more and more often in life as they get older. Getting used to it is healthy.
A's and Cardinal's coach Tony La Russa was a big risk guy, as in comfortable taking it. Here's George Will again, in his chapter on the legendary manager:
La Russa believes in taking risks precisely because baseball, the game of failure, is all risks, the odds being what they are: against.
The stakes in Little League aren't exactly MLB-level, but I believe in the principle of using the sport as a platform for kids to learn about risk in a context with visible consequences.
The play-by-play nature of the game makes it good for teaching situational risk/reward patterns. Each play configuration, whether you're on defense or offense, changes the risk calculus of various decisions. If you've got 1 out and bases loaded, do you try the throw to the catcher for the out at home to prevent the run? Or throw to first and give up a run in exchange for the easy 2nd out? It depends! If you're ahead by 5 runs and it's late in the game, sure. If it's early and you're down a run, take the risk.
Watching our boys learn to make these decisions mid-play is both gratifying and frustrating. But for them, they're put in a position to make risk computations quickly. And they learn from the consequences, good or bad.
Baseball is great classroom for teaching the value of incremental success, of compounding progress. It's not a game of heroic feats (though sometimes your kid clears the bases with a hit over the infield), but rather the cumulation of individual good plays. You can't get 3 outs with one catch and throw. You can't score 10 runs with a swing. You have to claw your way forward with one small success at a time. There's no lottery. Will says:
Baseball is still what it always has been and always will be, basically a 90-feet-at-a-time game.
I'm a believer in institutions as shapers of character.
"Institution" in this context doesn't necessarily mean a specific organization — though Little League Baseball is itself an institution. I'm referring to its other definition: a law, practice, or custom, like the institution of marriage or rule of law or private property.
Over time institutions build up muscle for how to shape human characteristics and behaviors in specific ways; the older they are (lindy!), the more power they have to bring people together for a shared cause.
The game of baseball is itself an institution, with its own customs, norms, and culture. Its norms function as guardrails and guideposts to help its players model behaviors and emphasize certain values, like patience and perseverance. There are as many unwritten rules as those in the rulebook: Tuck your shirt in. Always beat out the ground ball (even if you're an easy out). No taunting opposing hitters from the infield. Celebrate successes, but maintain your humility.
wrote a whole book about this idea: on institutions as vehicles to mold and shape character toward specific ends, not merely to serve as platforms to be selfishly abused for personal gain. Institutions exist to change us as much as we use or influence them.Baseball doesn't just teach how to hit a ball with a stick. It teaches how to wait your turn, to sacrifice for the team (sometimes literally, as in the sac bunt). It forces you to get used to standing around while still paying attention, sometimes for innings at a time. It models how to incrementally clock small victories.
The game of baseball aligns with Levin's description of the formative function of institutions:
While institutions come in a wide range of shapes and sizes, they share two distinct elements that, broadly speaking, may be said to unite them. That they are durable is essential. An institution keeps its shape over time, and so shapes the realm of life in which it operates. When it changes, it generally does so by incremental evolution of its shape and structure, not by sharp and disjunctive transformation, so that its form over time exhibits a certain continuity that is fundamental to what it is able to accomplish in the world.
Most important, each institution is a form of association. What’s distinct about an institution is that it is a form in the deepest sense: a structure, a shape, a contour... The institution organizes its people into a particular form moved by a purpose, characterized by a structure, defined by an ideal, and capable of certain functions.
(Yuval Levin, A Time to Build. 2020.)
I see the game of baseball like this — a traditional communal activity, refined over decades, with a collection of rules and norms meant to shape character.
When George Will reflects on why he decided to write a whole book about baseball as a political commentator, he saw the connection between the game of baseball and its utility for character formation:
(The book) had become an illustration of two of my most deeply held convictions: Character is destiny. And people of good character demonstrate in their daily lives the fact that, by being attentive to the small details of their vocations, big problems can be largely banished.
Attending to and shepherding the small details is an important, valuable skill for life in general. Baseball teaches us to value the iterative gains: that we don't need big, sweeping change or successes to be satisfied. The big problems we encounter in life can be overcome if we pay it forward little by little, day by day.
These lessons aren’t exclusive to baseball, of course. Soccer, football, dance — they all teach things like structure, commitment, and teamwork.
But baseball has a unique cocktail of virtues. The slow pace instills patience. Part of the game is waiting for the play to start, waiting for the ball that never comes to you, sitting in the dugout. Its difficulty breeds resilience. Its structure rewards attentiveness to small moments. It teaches kids to wait their turn, to play for the team, to pay attention even when they’re not in the spotlight. To get comfortable with silence and stillness — even boredom.
It’s a game that demands kids try, again and again. To swing and miss. To run and get thrown out. To stand in the box after a strikeout and take another cut. And that’s what makes it such a good teacher.
In an increasingly impatient society filled with distractions constantly eroding kids' attention spans, there’s something grounding about old traditions that still work, ones that force stillness and attention and its other virtues.