baseball and the life of being an expat

I was having a discussion the other day with a friend of mine and we came up with an interesting analogy about two topics that I never really thought would go together but we managed to come up with a pretty solid.

The baseball season in the US just started a few weeks ago and I'm realizing just how much I did miss watching the sport when I lived in Holland. Granted, I coached the softball team there for two years, but its just not the same. And now with MLB.com broadcasting the games via the internet, I get my chance to keep up with baseball - especially the hometown faves, the Cleveland Indians. What can I say, a glutton for punishment and enjoy the moments of promise (the late 90s) where the team shines. In any case, I appreciate the game and what it takes to play it.

As a spectator's sport, it isn't the most energetic or exciting to watch. The game is exceedingly slow with brief moments intense drama. But the game isn't about the brief moments when the ball is in play, its so much more than that. Baseball is mostly mental and knowing the strategy of how to really play the sport is akin to being a chess master. Its not just a game where a guy goes out there and hurls the ball at 80-95 mph and another guys hopes to hit that ball to a place where one of nine defenders isn't. Each pitch influences how the game transpires and how each pitch is played depends on how the next one will go. Appreciating the strategy and athleticism of baseball is what keeps me coming back (even though I'm a hockey fan through and through).

During the conversation I had with Ilse, we got to talking about baseball and eventually it turned into how it is somewhat reflected in life as an expatriate. Baseball is played in many different stadiums around the world and none of them are the same, each field has its own feel. People who play on that field grow accustomed to those conditions and have home-field advantage (not to mention fan support). Traveling to another stadium means you have to adjust to those conditions and play your best under conditions that may not suit you. Maybe left field has a giant wall to hit over or maybe the bullpen is in foul territory and fielding fly-balls is more difficult. Whatever it may be, you have to adjust or fail miserably.

And then the parallels to being an expat started to take shape. Living overseas is like being on the road for baseball. A new country requires you to adapt to the conditions and learn how to play your game "on the road" if you want to succeed with your goals, whatever they may be. Not only do you have to adapt to the new surroundings, you need to adapt to the game as it goes along. You may see the same pitch more than once but when the timing of that pitch can dramatically change how you react to it. There is a strategy to being successful in baseball just as there is a strategy to being successful as an expatriate.

I've noticed in life that we rarely make HUGE life-changing decisions, rather we make a series of small ones that influence how our present plays out. I'm a product of those small decisions that I've made and as it turns out, I've made some good, small decisions (or else I'd be somewhere else in my life at the moment). A small decision to go to a party when I was a sophomore in college has turned me into the teacher that I am today (believe it or not, yes). Baseball is similar in that the small decision of whether to throw a fastball for the first pitch of an at-bat can dramatically affect how the rest of the AB goes and the cascade effect of the rest of the game. A small decision to start off with a fastball that just misses on the inside corner may determine how the game turns out for you.

Now just as one pitch doesn't decide the outcome of a game, neither does one decision in your life. Winning a game in baseball may mean that you must make another choice to correct a decision that you don't like the outcome of, like walking a batter. So you work hard to concentrate into trying to make a better pitch so the current batter grounds into a double play. The same can be said of living overseas (or just living in general) - sometimes you need to need to really concentrate on making the next choice to improve your situation rather than ride a bad decision into oblivion. Little choices turn into what our lives will be remembered as...

So at the end of our chat, she said that I should write this down as a way to let others in on my new-found knowledge and insight (a topic that I'm sure has been written about infinitely before) and so I did. In doing so, I made the choice to ignore my homework and write a blog that only a few people read. But hey, its my choice and that's fine with me. I'll just need to make sure that my next pitch is a slider that nibbles the outside corner for the strike-out.