Double Trouble
When I meet those fathers.
You know, the fathers with first-born sons whose hands and noses look just like theirs.
The ones who think their kid is going to play center field for the Yankees so that he can vicariously live a dream and age in wealth at the same time.
I tell them to teach their kids how to hit doubles.
People look into baseball too much.
They go crazy over nuances and oddities.
Baseball has the simple Bull Durham basics:
throw the ball, catch the ball, hit the ball.
The game continues, like life, its an organism on grass.
Until someone hits the ball really, really hard.
Then, all bets are off.
The game is chaotic.
Fielders are running to posts trying to mend that break in the flow of the game.
That hard hit, the type of hit that causes every position on the field to move, must be an extra-base hit.
Home runs go over the fence.
Inside-the-park home runs are exceptions.
But home runs rarely cause all of the fielders to move.
Triples are rare.
Some people might tell you that fast guys turn doubles into triples.
So you'd figure that a guy with below-average power and above-average speed could turn his usual twenty-one doubles into fifteen triples and six doubles?
Fifteen triples leads the league sometimes.
The American League.
What happens most often though is that the hard hit is a double.
When players hit the ball their hardest, it's usually a double, and it usually goes to the wall.
All of the players move.
The fans in the stadium are either screaming or booing.
It's chaos until the umpire calls 'time.'
Then men who cause chaos?
They get paid.
So there you go dad...
Doubles.
Go and get tapes of Gary Sheffield and Edgar Martinez.
Sit your little boy down and tell him to study the patterns of their swings.
Why whenever they're really on a pitcher.
When they're out to show him that he's got nothing that day.
They hit a double.
Then, before he goes to bed read him doubles statistics:
Don Mattingly
1984...forty-four doubles
1985...forty-eight doubles
1986...fifty-three doubles
Teach him how to hit the ball as hard as he can.
The home runs will come.
The doubles, doubles are the worst kind of weapon.
