My oldest son is playing tee ball this year. A friend asked me the other day how his last game went. My response: “You’ve been to a kids tee ball game before, right?”
I love when kids are into playing baseball. I love cheering for my son when he steps up to bat, and the excitement and joy that he gets from putting on his uniform and trotting onto the field with his friends. But a children’s tee ball game is not high quality entertainment. Most of the kids spend ten minutes hacking at the tee before actually making contact with the ball. The outfielders spend more time rolling in the grass and picking dandelions than paying attention to what happens at the plate. When the kids are hitting, you have the batter, the kid on deck, and then seven or eight teammates outside the dugout playing in the dirt.
But if there’s one thing I can appreciate about tee ball, it’s the emphasis on fundamentals. My son’s coach, whose own family has a long history in the southern Illinois region of playing high school and collegiate baseball, does a pretty great job of stressing the importance of learning the small things. In a recent post on the team message board, he made the comment, “It’s important to learn the basics at a young age and not get wrapped up in how your child compares to others at young ages. Kids progress/develop at different ages. Learning quality fundamentals pays off over time. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” It’s a message I wholeheartedly support. Tee ball isn’t really about entertainment for the masses. It’s about kids having fun and learning how to play the game the right way.
And the coach is right. In time, learning those fundamentals pays off. Not learning them will cause issues down the road. For example, look at another team I watch, one that IS supposed to be entertaining, the St. Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals are currently 4th in their division, 4 games below .500, and over their last 20 games are 5-15. There are a lot of reasons for this, but a primary one is that they play sloppy, reckless baseball that ignores basic fundamental tenets of the game. For years, the “Cardinal Way” as personified by legendary coach George Kissell was supposed to be about sharp, crisp, fundamentally sound baseball. This year’s version apparently didn’t get the memo. They run into outs on the base paths. They bobble easy ground balls. They miss the cutoff man. Some nights I wish the manager, Mike Matheny, would morph into Jimmy Dugan, Tom Hanks foul mouthed manager from the 1992 film A League of Their Own. Dugan, whose line “There’s no crying in baseball” was inspired by one of his outfielders repeatedly missing the cutoff man, would no doubt have a mental breakdown if he saw this team playing. The Cardinals have not learned the essential nature of good fundamental baseball, and consequently, they give away games they should be winning.
In life, I know we often like to use the cliched phrase “Don’t sweat the small stuff” and sometimes take that to mean little details don’t matter. But this is a misappropriation of the phrase, which is really about not letting minor problems turn into big ones. The way to do this is often to pay attention to the fundamental details. It’s in those little, mundane details that we often find the difference between achieving success and experiencing defeat.
Andy Andrews, author of the book The Little Things: Why You Really Should Sweat the Small Stuff, made this observation about Olympic Gold Medalists:
“…the difference really is in little things, because the actual gap between first and second place is most often ridiculously small. In fact, there are multiple Olympic sports in which the difference between first place and tenth place is less than a second.”
It’s in the day to day fundamental details of training that athletes acquire the skill to be 
successful. Most non-Cardinal fans (and even some Cardinals fans) don’t know about George Kissell. He never made it to the Major Leagues as a player, and he spent most of his life managing or instructing in the Cardinals minor league system. But when he died, New York Yankees Hall of Fame manager Joe Torre said “I learned more baseball from George Kissell than from anyone else in my life.” Another Hall of Fame manager, Sparky Anderson, who also learned from Kissell, said he was “the greatest baseball fundamentalist I have ever known.”
George Kissell made a career out of eating, breathing and sleeping baseball fundamentals. He understood success is in the small details that are overlooked by people who too often get overly focused on a larger picture and miss what separates the good from the great. It’s something I’m trying to remember myself, that big picture plans are great, but achievement is found in what I do in the every day. So examine your own circumstances. What are the “fundamentals” in your life, or in your career? Watch those who are achieving goals you want to achieve. What are they doing on a daily basis, what is the “small stuff” that is separating them from everyone else? Learn that, and you can start incorporating those details into your own path to success.
As Lao Tzu said; “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
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