You Have to Be Willing to Get Hit by the Ball

You have to be willing to get hit by the ball.

I'm not sure why this side story showed up this morning, but it did — and it still feels true. Growing up, I didn't play many sports. The one I played a ton of was baseball: something like twelve seasons over eleven years, though I took my junior year off for reasons that made sense at the time and don't matter now. I was a really good hitter. I could never throw. Second base, pretty average with the glove. Functional.

The wild thing on the mound

My childhood best friend was probably a top-three pitcher in our area. Also a little Wild Thing about it. Maybe ten percent of the time he threw the ball, he had absolutely no idea where it was going. Which meant he hit me more often than almost anyone else.

I realized — partly to help my dad, who was the coach — that you can't be afraid of getting hit by pitches. You have to stand in there. You can duck out at the last second if you know it's going to take your head off. But you need to stay long enough to see whether it's actually going to be in the strike zone. Otherwise you're flinching at everything, and the strikeouts pile up without a swing.

I was a better hitter in part because of that friend. Iron sharpens iron, I suppose. The pitcher who might bury one in your ribs forces a choice: bail early, or stay and see.

A little pain, not catastrophe

There's a lesson in there somewhere. Be willing to take a little pain. Lean into the hard thing. Take some risk, knowing it's unlikely to be catastrophic — and that the real cost is usually the flinch, not the bruise.

All sporting analogies aside, here's the truth: everything carries risk. Writing this post carries risk. Shipping the weird idea, making the call you might regret, standing in on a pitch that might be inside. If you don't frequently take risks — hopefully calculated risks, the reversible kind, the two-way doors — you're not going to really do anything. Or do anything very well.

The catastrophic pitch is rare. The habit of ducking early is common. And once that habit sets in, you stop seeing the zone at all.

Stand in long enough to know

The rule I kept from those years is simple enough to fit on a sticky note: stand in long enough to know.

Not forever. Not with your eyes closed. Not through every one-way door with permanent downside. But long enough to tell the difference between a ball and a strike — between discomfort and actual danger. Most of the time, what looks like it's coming for your ribs is going to miss, or glance off, or leave a bruise you'll forget by Thursday.

The people I respect who keep compounding aren't reckless. They're just less impressed by the flinch. They've been hit enough times to know the difference, and they stay in the box until the difference is clear.

You have to be willing to get hit by the ball. Not because pain is the point — because ducking is how you strike out looking.