Monthly Archives: February 2026
What It Takes to Really Learn Something (or Unlearn Something)
When I was but a lad heading into high school, my heart’s greatest desire was to learn how to play the guitar. Partially because I loved music, but also because I thought doing so would help me meet girls.
(Don’t judge, Eddie van Halen started on guitar for the same reason, although he did a little better than me on learning it.)
Anyway, for my 14th birthday (just as the summer started) my parents bought me the cheapest piece of junk available that will still work, a $20 Decca guitar from Kmart. But I didn’t care – I had a guitar, along with a little songbook with songs like Born Free and Red River Valley that had the little finger placement charts above every chord.
I pretty much spent the entire summer locked in my room for 4-6 hours a day every day, playing the same old songs over and over until they began to sound like actual songs. In a month I felt comfortable enough to play that guitar in front of my parents and a couple of their friends.
Within a couple of months of starting I bought my first “real” guitar for $100 out of my 8th grade graduation money – a Suzuki 12 string that I still own to this day. It’s not very playable anymore but I still keep it around for sentimental reasons.
I tell you this story to point out a valuable lesson: if you really want to get good at something, you can’t just dabble at it or put in time against a clock. You have to work at it deliberately, with a goal and a sense of purpose.
In other words, you have to know your “why” or you’re just going to spin your wheels.
So if you’re a pitcher who is trying to increase her speed or learn a new pitch, you can’t just go through the motions doing what you always did. You can’t just set a timer and stop when the timer goes off.
You have to dig in there and keep working at it until you make the changes you need to make to reach your goal.
If you’re trying to convert from hello elbow to internal rotation, you can’t just throw pitches from full distance and hope it’s going to happen. You have to get in close, maybe slow yourself down for a bit, and work on things like upper arm compression and especially forearm pronation until you can do them without being aware of them.
It might take a few hours or it might take a month of focused, deliberate practice. But you have to be willing to do whatever it takes to get there.
The same goes for hitters. If you’re dropping your hands as you swing or using your arms instead of your body to initiate the swing you’re not going to change that overnight by wishing for it.
You have to get in there and work at it, and keep working at it until you can execute that part of hitting correctly. No excuses, no compromises; if you want to hit like a champion you have to work like a champion.
There will sometimes be barriers that seem insurmountable, and no doubt you’ll get frustrated. But there is some little thing holding you back and you attack it with ferocity, with a mindset you won’t let it defeat you, sooner or later you will get it and be able to move on to the next piece.
When I first learned how to play an “F” chord it was really difficult. It requires you to use your fingers in ways other chords don’t, especially when you’re a beginner.
But I needed to master that “F” chord cleanly so I could play certain songs, so as physically painful as it was (especially on that cheap little Decca guitar) I kept at it for hours on end until it was just another chord among many in the song.
The same will happen for you if you work at it. The thing you can’t do today will become easy and natural, and that will put you in a better position to achieve your larger goals.
Yes, it takes a lot to make a change, especially if it’s from something you’ve been doing for a long time. Old habits die hard as they say.
But if you approach it with passion and purpose you’ll get there – and you’ll be better-positioned for your next challenge. .
BONUS CHALLENGE: Yes, one of those young fellows up there in the top photo is me. See if you can guess which one and put your choice in the comments below. (HINT: It may not be the one you think.)
The Odds Are Stacked Against You in Fastpitch Hitting
A few days ago I was doing a hitting lesson with one of my students, a young lady named Avery. We got to talking about why the success rate for hitting in fastpitch softball is generally so low.
That’s when she said something profound that her mom Abbey had told her that I hadn’t really thought about in that way: Hitting is 9 on 1.
I think most of us tend to think about the battle between the pitcher and the hitter, i.e., how the pitcher is trying to get the hitter to miss the ball or at least mis-hit if she does make contact so doesn’t go too far. But while the hitter is up at the plate standing alone, the pitcher has one other person in front of her and seven others behind her to help her get the out on that weak hit.
That’s a pretty unfair advantage, don’t you think? Picture a basketball game, or a soccer match, or hockey game, or pretty much any sport where scoring means getting the object at the center of the game into the other team’s goal.
You don’t have to be Mr. Vegas to figure out who is going to win that contest, no matter how skilled the player on the one side is.
Yet when the scoring opportunity comes up for a player in fastpitch softball (or slow pitch, or modified pitch, or baseball, etc.) she’s facing a whole phalanx of opponents whose only goal is to prevent her from achieving her goal. Seems pretty unfair, doesn’t it?
And that’s why the stats of a game, even if kept honestly (versus the person who scores every contact as a hit or anything close as an error, depending on whether his/her team is at bat or in the field), don’t always tell the whole story.
For example, a hitter can slam a screaming line drive directly at the face of the opposing shortstop, who throws her glove up in instinct to protect herself. If said screaming line drive goes into the glove and the shortstop’s palmar grasp reflex (yes that’s a real thing) causes her hand to contract around the ball, the hitter is out.
Never mind that she smoked the pitch that the pitcher mistakenly threw over the heart of the plate. One of the seven fielders happened to be in the way of the ball as it was on its way to being a double and turned that great contact into a drop of a few percentage points in her batting average.
Or what about the well-hit ball to the outfield that goes to the person the other team is trying to hide? She puts her glove up over head to make sure the ball doesn’t hit her, and instead it nestles softly in the web like a bird landing in its nest.
The hitter did nothing wrong, and the fielder, quite frankly, didn’t do anything intentionally right, but the fielder gets high fives while the hitter gets nothing except another ding against her batting average. And those are just the extreme examples.
During the course of the game most times there are seven fielders behind the pitcher, plus the pitcher herself, whose job it is to make sure the hitter doesn’t reach base. And then you have the catcher whose job it is to clean up anything around the plate. That’s a pretty stacked deck.
The only way the hitter can be absolutely assured of not being out after contact is to drive the pitch over the fence. And while the number of hitters doing so has increased dramatically over the last several years, those are still a low percentage of all contacts made.
So the next time you’re wondering why failing 7 out of 10 times at the plate makes someone an all-star, remember that the odds are stacked against the hitter from the beginning. And beating 9 on 1 odds is a pretty good reason to celebrate no matter how it happens.
Life in the Fastpitch Lane 