The Cost of No Bad Hops?

I love baseball. I mean, I really love baseball. It’s been a part of my life from my earliest childhood memories. I love the competition, the strategy, the fundamentals. I’m great with a 2-1 pitchers’ duel. Ballpark food tastes better, just because it’s at the ballpark.

Right now in our town, we’re in the middle of the construction of a new ballpark for our high school team and no one’s more excited than me. Among the features is that it is an all-turf field. Please understand this, I’m a baseball purist and I prefer the real grass and dirt of a baseball field to the artificial. But I’m also a pragmatist and the truth is that the window of high school baseball includes a winter offseason and a spring season, both with the frequency of bad weather. In that equation, what artificial turf allows is practice time and games to be played when they would otherwise be canceled.

In coaching travel ball for my son’s team when he was younger, our practice field was an open space at a local church camp. It was mostly flat, except for the large hump between the pitcher’s mound and shortstop, the low spots around third base and home plate and the rolling hills in the outfield. And by the third season of practicing out there, most of the rocks had been thrown off the field. As the boys got older and stronger, we learned we had to position a coach near the creek in right field or the woods in left to try to keep baseballs out of them. And I’m really not exaggerating. Don’t get me wrong, we were thankful for the space and we love the memories we made out there.

As you might expect, as we would practice, we had more than our share of bad hops - grounders that a player would be in perfect position to field, only to have the ball shoot off course at the last second, getting past our player or sometimes catching them in the shin, chest or even head. We affectionately called these “camp hops”. Our guys would be frustrated that they missed a ball, but shouting “camp hop” just reminded them it wasn’t their fault, they’d done their job and that sometimes the ball bounces the wrong way. We’d also remind them that when we played for real in tournaments, there’d be no camp hops on those fields and that we’d be better prepared because of our practice conditions.

Last week, I drove past one of the baseball complexes we often played tournaments and noticed that they had turfed several of the fields. One of them was even a t-ball field. Remembering specific rainouts at that complex, my first reaction was the pragmatist - thinking that the current wave of kids would get more practice time and suffer fewer rainouts. I thought of our current project for our high school field and how much our guys were going to appreciate the new facility given their camp practice field and routine tournament rainout experiences.

Then, I had a bit of a sinking feeling….

“This next wave of kids isn’t going to know what bad hops are about - or the appreciation of a new facility when you’ve had to endure conditions that were far less than ideal.” And that kind of made me sad for them.

This is not really that different than anything else that’s changing for our younger generations. We don’t teach cursive in elementary school anymore. We allow ChatGPT to write content for us. The slide rule my dad used is a museum piece. Phones aren’t mounted to walls and connected by a cord.

The risk is for us old-timers to lament all of the things that generations that have followed us have never experienced - and the lessons that we learned from them that they’ll miss. And I know that progress is a good thing and that by eliminating old problems, it frees our capacity to work on and solve bigger, more complex problems. Still, I wonder about a world where there are no bad hops and what that might cost us. I see two things…

Years ago, the Center for Creative Leadership released a study that identified five primary ways people develop. One of those was “Response to Adversity”. Adversity (read-in “bad hops”) creates great teaching moments in real time with real consequences that theory or case study cannot. Adversity creates both cognitive and emotional tracks that we must navigate and that produce in us new muscle that we can exercise when the next bad hop happens.

In his book, A New Kind of Diversity, Tim Elmore quotes a higher-ed leader, that fears that we’ve “prepared the path for the child, instead of the child for the path.” Turfing the fields in a proverbial sense is a parallel idea.

I think this presents a potential dilemma for us as leaders: When do we allow adversity so that our people can experience it and capture that growth that comes - and when do we “turf the field” so that our people can get past the unnecessary distractions and we can get on with next level work?

I don’t have a great answer. In the end, it’s probably a judgment call in what we try to get ahead of - and how we lean into the uneven fields and camp hops they produce. What I am convinced of is that it’s our responsibility as leaders to remain sensitive to both and be intentional about our choices in the development of the people entrusted to us.

And yeah, maybe there’s room for us to work in stories of what it was like when we played back in the day - camp hops, phones with cords, and all.