CHAPTER 1

Difficult Game ... Formidable System

Immortal New York Yankee outfielder Mickey Mantle and "Mr.October" Reggie Jackson summed up the sport of baseball whenthey analyzed their Hall of Fame careers.

"During my eighteen years I came to bat almost 10,000 times," saidMantle, who won seven World Series titles with the Yankees. "I struckout about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure aballplayer will average about 500 at bats a season. That means I playedseven years in the Major Leagues without even hitting the ball!"

Jackson, an outfielder and slugger who won three World Series ringswith the Oakland Athletics and two as a Yankee, had a slightly differentview of the same problem. "When you play the game for ten years, goto bat 7,000 times, and get 2,000 hits, you know what that means? Itmeans you've gone 0-for-5,000!"

That is the startling truth about a sport that can be a harrowingroller-coaster ride for even the most accomplished hitters. Batters oftengo through mind-numbing days or weeks without a hit. The successfulspell of 6-for-10 can just as quickly turn into a slump of 0-for-20,which will play mind games with the toughest competitors in thebusiness. Depending on which historical number cruncher you believe,the Major League Baseball record is 45 or 46 at bats without a hit byan outstanding catcher named Billy Bergen when he was playing forthe Brooklyn Superbas, the forerunner of the old Brooklyn Dodgers,in 1909. Craig Counsell, who won World Series rings with the FloridaMarlins and the Arizona Diamondbacks, went 0-for-45 in his finalseason with the Milwaukee Brewers in 2011 to either tie the record orfall one short. He did set a dubious record of sorts, going 0-for-July, arun of thirty-one fruitless at bats!

I watched my son Justin be tormented by the frustration offighting the ever-present slumps of the game through high school tothe pros, particularly an 0-for-37 run when he was struggling througha debilitating wrist injury in the Minor Leagues. I have watched prosbecome frustrated or shell-shocked after being swept with a "goldensombrero" (four strikeouts in a game, which is one more than a hattrick) at the plate or blasted by back-to-back home runs beyond thebleachers. I have seen Little League and independent select/travel teamyouth players reduced to tears when they swing and miss many timesin a game.

As the title of this chapter suggests, this is a very difficult gamewithin a formidable system. After years of watching moms and dads—especiallythose just starting out in Little League and select/travel ball—frettingover their sons' performances, I concluded that I needed topoint out in the beginning how physically hard baseball is, no matterhow far a kid is likely to travel in the sport. I have seen the parentalangst and the frustrations of youngsters who worry that they simply maynot have the goods or just need to develop physically. Maybe it is a littleof both, or as veterans of the baseball wars will attest, it might just bethe sport itself. Baseball does not suddenly become easy at any age. Thebaseball gods will smile on a select few and allow them to perform withdistinction over time, but they ensure that nobody ever truly masterstheir sport, not even Hall of Famers like Mantle and Jackson.

Hitting and pitching aside for the moment, it is my experiencethat it is just as daunting for a player and his family to negotiate the"system"—an assembly line from youth leagues through high schooland college to the two levels of the professional game, the Minor andMajor Leagues. For our family it was the great unknown, and with helpand trial and error, we managed to put the pieces together. Select/travelteams and showcases, college recruiting and the time lines, how playersare evaluated, and how pro clubs find draft picks are a mere startingpoint. There are so many things to know with so many nuances, and amisstep can be disastrous, even for a highly talented player. This bookis all about the system, and I begin with a chart on the assembly line inFigure 1, and a full rundown of its five levels in chapter 2.

The physical and mental demands of the sport are undeniable."Hitting a 90 mph fastball" often tops sports polls and questionnairesasking to name the toughest thing to do in sports. It is no picnic fora small boy trying to hit a 40 to 50 mph pitch from a machine or adad—or a 50 to 70 mph pitch from a youth player who looks like hecheated on his age. It is certainly no walk in the park when a 90 mphpitch thrown from 60 feet 6 inches has to be hit with a round stick 23/4 inches in diameter. And 90 mph fastballs are certainly not confinedto the pro game, because there are literally hundreds of high school andcollege players who reach that plateau. It has become even harder at alllevels in the amateur game because of the newly mandated metal bats,which are designed to play like solid wood and have lowered the boomon hitters from Little League to the college game.

Batters have an astonishing failure rate. The best players fail 70percent of the time, and there are plenty in the Major Leagues whohave a failure rate of at least 75 to 80 percent. A lifetime batting averageof .300—success at the rate of three hits out of every ten at bats—is astart to being voted into the Hall of Fame! What other sport deifies itsathletes with a 30 percent success rate?

I spent many winter off-seasons watching Major and Minor Leagueplayers preparing for spring training in the batting cage at our propertyin Richmond, Texas. Justin was the catcher, and I would stand rightbehind the netting and marvel at the ability of the pitchers to move theball through the air at incredible speeds. One day a baseball fanatic whohappened to be working at our property asked if he could face some ofthe pitching. The bat hardly moved before the ball thudded into Justin'sglove. The man was embarrassed and humbled, and I reminded himthat professional hitters not only have to make contact but hit the ballcleanly past strategically placed fielders! I contend that all baseball fansshould at least once in their lives stand behind a plate or a batting cageand watch the ball whistle and move violently through the air in aboutfour tenths of a second. Then the ignorant caterwauling at Major LeagueBaseball games would be reduced to a trickle!

Pitching is not only difficult but brutal on the arm. I grew upwith cricket, where a bowler performs only one type of action—fast ormedium-paced balls and spinners, which can be loosely interpreted ascurveballs and sliders—and he is moved in and out of the bowling lineupduring a game depending on when his type of bowling action is required.On the other hand, a baseball pitcher has no respite and is required tomaster many types of pitches and throw accurately over a seventeen-inch-wide plate with cunning changes of pace and spin maybe a hundred ormore times a game. Some days it works, and other days it doesn't. If apitcher gets shelled because his pitches were a couple of inches high or afew inches over the middle of the plate, the fans bemoan his failure.

And on defense, you had better not miss anything. What othersport signals a player's error and then highlights it on the scoreboardand in the official box score for the world to read in the newspaperor on the Internet? Offensive linemen in the NFL who miss a blockdon't get errors posted on the scoreboard. What other sport designatesa scorekeeper in the stand and gives him the ultimate power to decideif a player made an error in the first place? Who says it wasn't a pebblethat caused the ball to deviate? A player who is out of position or tooslow to react and doesn't lay a glove on the ball he probably should haveplayed is normally not given an error. Figure that one! Scorekeepers arethe front line in recording the games for official records, and if theydecide it is an error and not an official hit, it has historical significancein a game that thrives on history.

Professional athletes in all sports make it look easier than it trulyis. In this age of nightly television sports show highlights, the constantimages of towering home runs, dramatic strikeouts, and spectacularcatches give a skewed perception of baseball in the minds of many fans,especially the new or casual fan. For some, it is only when blooper reelsare played on the scoreboards for light entertainment between inningsat Major League games, or on television, that there is a reminder this isindeed a very tough game to master.

I have always categorized sports as being "natural" or "manufactured."The ancient Greeks began the Olympics in 776 BC with mostly naturalsports—everyday human athletic skills including running, jumping, andthrowing. But over the centuries, man introduced balls and implementswith which to hit them, and superior eye-to-hand coordination becamea primary human element in the newly manufactured sports of baseball,golf, tennis, hockey and cricket. Professionals in all sports have the giftof extraordinary athletic ability, but not all of them have, at the coreof their sport, the task of using a round stick to hit a small ball thrownat enormous speed from a very short distance. Manufactured sportsrequire extremely long periods of time to learn the techniques to masterthe implements.

Baseball players, therefore, take countless years of honing skills toreach the top. In the NFL, the college game is the minor leagues, thefarm system so to speak. In baseball, high school and college are theminor leagues before the Minor Leagues. The sport is so difficult that inthe majority of cases, it takes years of sharpening skills in at least someof the seven levels of the Minor Leagues before a player is even close tothe Major Leagues. Bryce Harper at nineteen and Mike Trout at twentyboth broke into the Major Leagues in 2012 after two years in the MinorLeagues and shook up the baseball world by becoming All-Stars andRookies of the Year. They were highly talented high school players whohad accelerated careers. They were very rare exceptions.

It is this lengthy and tricky climb that makes it so important forfamilies to fully understand the system so that they can draw up agame plan. One cannot simply have a dream and not know the path toachieve it, no matter how good the player may be. While parents playa pivotal role with money and planning, it is important that teenagers,especially those eyeing the prize of a college scholarship or a professionalcontract, also have a working knowledge of the structure because, afterall, it is their future.

Not knowing the system can lead to mistakes that might jeopardizethe journey. When our family was starting out, the first seeds for thisproject were planted at a tournament for eighteen- and nineteen-year-oldsin Houston. We were watching a strongly built young man—touching 92 mph on my radar gun—overpowering all hitters, and Iturned to the longtime tournament organizer and showcase presenterand asked him about the pitcher's background. "He was just selected bythe Chicago Cubs in a late round in the draft ... but he cannot decidewhether to accept the draft pick or play in junior college because beinga late-round choice, he is worried that he might be cut at the club'straining camp," he said.

We were naïve at the start of the Humphries' baseball journey, butnot that naïve. I told the organizer that it wasn't the National FootballLeague, and I understood that players picked in the Major LeagueBaseball draft did not attend any training camp and went straight toassignments in the Minor Leagues. No draft pick, I said, appeared to becut before he played at least one short season, and my statements werelater confirmed by friends in professional baseball.

The real question in my mind was: How could it be that the playerand his parents did not know the system after years in the game? Andif the long-established organizer of showcase tournaments did not knowhow it all worked, then how many parents and ballplayers would also beuninformed? How much damage could be done to a baseball prospectif he and those around him were ignorant of the system and had notactical plan? The player in question went back to school, and missedthe professional opportunity. I do not think he was ever drafted again.That scenario happens all the time.

A short time later, the seeds began to sprout when the father of ayoung pitcher who was being recruited by a number of major collegesasked me if I knew how the NCAA Division I colleges dispersed the 11.7scholarships they handed out each year. The question greatly surprisedme because a family that close to having their son sign a Letter of Intentto play for a college should have known that the NCAA allocates a setnumber of 11.7 scholarships for Division I baseball and that is the sumtotal. There is no annual accumulation. College coaches, distressed byhaving such a paltry number of scholarships, have to be master jugglersin trying to accommodate all the players they need for their rosters.After the young man and his family had spent years in the system, itwas incomprehensible to me that they did not know the NCAA ruleson scholarships, which could have backfired on them in a process wherethousands of players are competing to make college teams. I also sawa friend blow the chance of his son signing with a college because thefamily did not fully understand the early signing period in collegerecruiting.

This book will not teach how to hit a baseball. It will focus on thesystem and how it works, and how to negotiate, and hopefully master,the levels from youth leagues to the Major Leagues.

* * *

Justin:

I did not realize until now that my 0-for-37 was only 9 away from the worstslump in Major League Baseball history! I was battling a very tough wristinjury in High A ball in Salem, Virginia, which had been reinjured aftersurgery; I couldn't hit to right field, and I was pulling everything to try toget hits. We were on a long road trip, locked in hotel rooms and buses, whichmade it even harder to find mental diversions. In retrospect, I should haveasked for a day off, but I was the only first baseman available at that timeand it is also a no-no in the Minor Leagues to ask for days off because youget labeled and it can really damage your career. The club knew I was hurt,but nothing was done about it at the time. A few weeks after the slump, mywrist was placed in a cast, and I was on the disabled list for nine weeks.

The mental side of the sport is the toughest adjustment a young playerhas to make as he moves through the levels. In high school I never hit below.400, and I had never really dealt with failure like this. If I went 0-for-3 ina game, I knew I would get a hit or two the next game. It was just how it wasand there was no sweat. But when I got to the professional game, the pressureto perform was infinitely higher, and there were so many reminders every dayas to how you were doing. At every at bat, your average is on the electronicscoreboard—and family and friends always check online to see how you aredoing. So when your batting average goes from .315 to .114 in a 0-for-37slump in eleven games, you are reminded of it every day. It consumes you.And to be honest, a big string like that stays with you forever.

I went 0-for-4 on the first day, and then when I came to the platethe next day and got out in the first at bat, I said to myself, "Okay, that's0-for-5." And then it was 0-for-6 and 0-for-7, and it just continued tosnowball. I knew I was a much better hitter than the slump was suggesting,but I was hurt and it was eroding my confidence a little more every day.I worked overtime with the hitting coach, former Major Leaguer ChuckyCarr, but nothing was happening at the plate. Even the solid hits were goingstraight to fielders. Eventually my teammates tried to relieve the pressure withlighthearted banter, but no matter how funny they were, the pressure did notgo away. It was easy for them to be funny; it wasn't happening to them! I triedeverything I could think of it to get out of it, to get my mind off of it, but itwas everywhere. Finally, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, playing againstthe Atlanta Braves affiliate, I smacked a ball between third and short for asingle. Hallelujah! No matter how good the player, every hitter is vulnerableto this in a game that can play tricks with the mind. You just never see itcoming, and once the downward spiral starts, it is hard to pull out.