Surf When You Can by Brett Crozier

Author:Brett Crozier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2023-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Play Small Ball

As a kid growing up in California, baseball was a big deal. We listened to it, we watched it, we talked about it, and we played it. A lot. I settled in at third base, a position that suited my size, speed, and reasonable hand-eye coordination. And while I never got good enough to play for my beloved San Francisco Giants, I did play in the Rincon Valley Little League Majors, which was the next-best thing for a young kid at the time. The best team I ever played on as a kid was the Dragons, led by our larger-than-life Coach Ray, who proved to be a memorable figure in my life, even though I was just a boy of twelve when I met him.

A huge man who also happened to be a California Highway Patrol officer, Coach Ray was a stickler for the fundamentals. Under his guidance, I and all the other kids on the team mastered the foundational elements of the game, which we carried with us throughout our little league “careers.” I remember him hitting grounder after grounder after grounder to me at third base, a seemingly endless barrage of balls hit in my general direction, all with a singular collective purpose: to reinforce the importance of learning how to do the little things right. I didn’t know it at the time, but Coach Ray was teaching me the value of what baseball aficionados call small ball.

In small ball, a team relies on the fundamentals to win games. On the offensive side, singles and walks are as valuable as extrabase hits, and advancing runners through steals, bunts, hit-and-runs, and sacrifices is every bit as important as waiting for the long ball to clear the bases. In the field, teams that play small ball are defensive masters, and rarely give their opponents the gift of free runs.

Although small ball was once the dominant style of play across the major leagues, its popularity has waned dramatically in recent decades with the advent of smaller ballparks and the ever-increasing lust for home runs by both teams and their fans. Nevertheless, there are occasional examples of clubs employing the small-ball strategy to beat the odds and humble their opponents. In the 1950s, the Chicago White Sox had very few power hitters, so manager Paul Richards decided to manufacture runs through a combined emphasis on speed and defense, and a rigorous adherence to the basics. The so-called Go-Go Sox were born and went on to win the American League championship in 1959. The Los Angeles Dodgers won two World Series titles in the 1960s the same way.

More recently, the Kansas City Royals—a team regarded by most pundits as a playoff long shot—out-bunted, out-stole, and out-fundamentaled their opponents all the way to a World Series appearance in 2014, where they ultimately lost to my Giants, four games to three. The loss did little to dampen the spirits of the resolute Royals. Under manager Ned Yost, the team entered the 2015

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