Every kid runs the same at-bat in the backyard.
World Series, game seven. Bottom of the ninth, two outs, your team down to its last swing. Everything on the line, and it is you at the plate. You get the pitch you were waiting for and you put it over the fence, and the whole thing lands exactly the way it does in your head, because in the backyard you are the one holding the bat and the script.
Some kids wanted to be a rock star, or the firefighter pulling somebody out of the smoke. Mine was the one from the backyard. I wanted the World Series, game seven, one swing to win it.
I never got the big leagues. That ship sailed a long time ago, and I made my peace with it. But a baseball nut still finds a way to keep playing, so I ended up in a Sunday Men's League, which is where grown men who cannot let the game go take it more seriously on weekends than they will admit. And one spring, in the championship game, I got about as close to that backyard at-bat as real life was ever going to hand me.
We were down four going into the bottom of the ninth. I was due up seventh. Do the math on that and you see the setup writing itself: if the inning stayed alive long enough to get back around to me, I would be standing in the exact moment I had rehearsed in my head since I was a kid. Tying run, winning run, the whole thing.
What nobody in that dugout knew was how badly I needed it.
Because a few weeks before this game, my wife and I got the news we had been waiting for. She was pregnant. So much joy, and also a reality check. The life we were living had us getting by and not much more. Not just the money. Physically and emotionally too. Another kid on the way could be the straw that broke the camel's back, and I knew it walking onto that field. I already knew a version of me was about to end. I just did not know what came after it yet.
I was living what looked like the dream from the outside. Working in baseball. At a leading training facility. I had even fielded a few calls from professional teams, which is the kind of sentence you are supposed to be proud of. And I was. But that industry runs on long hours and long days and a work ethic that eats everything else, all for very little money until the day you maybe make it big. I had the work ethic. Working harder was never my problem. Here is the thing about working harder when you have a family, though. It can put food on the table without ever putting you at the table, and it does not feed the people counting on you emotionally or physically. Eventually you have to be honest about which one they actually need.
So I had already made the call, quietly, before the first pitch. I was going to walk away from the dream job. Again. I had walked away from baseball once before because I did not think I would ever get a real shot at it, and here I was doing it a second time, this time by choice, with no idea what I was walking toward.
Which is the part I want to be straight about. I did not show up to that field because I had my life figured out. I showed up because that rec-league diamond was the one place that still made sense. Everywhere else I was doing math on things that would not add up. On the field I knew exactly what my job was. Stay back, stay on top, let it rip. Next pitch. The world shrinks down to sixty feet and six inches and a set of things you can actually control, and for a few hours the noise goes quiet. I did not need the field to save me. I needed it to be the one room where the lights still worked.
When the ninth started, I went and coached third base. Told myself it was to stay busy. Really it was that coaching is where I go when I do not want to sit still with my own head. But standing in that box, keeping the guys focused on the process instead of the scoreboard, one pitch at a time, I was not performing leadership. That is just the shape mine takes. Baseball is the environment where it fits best, the strategy and the stats and the brotherhood of a team pointed at one thing. Losing all of that was a real part of what scared me.
And the inning would not die.
A walk. A fielder's choice. Another walk, a hit by pitch, and suddenly the bases are loaded and the lineup is turning over and the thing I had run in my head a thousand times is genuinely about to happen. Our three-hole hitter laces one up the middle. A run scores. Then a sac fly brings in another. Two outs now, tying run on first, and me stepping into the box as the winning run.
The exact at-bat. The backyard script, in real life, with my life on fire in a way none of these guys could see. I put a foot in the box and tried to breathe.
Then the catcher called time, jogged out to the mound, and came back with the news.
They were going to walk me. Intentionally. Put the winning run on base rather than let me swing.
All that work, the whole inning clawing back, the one moment I had waited my entire life for, and I do not even get to take the bat off my shoulder. Cosmic. You know what, though. Next pitch.
The batter behind me grounded out. Game over. We lost.
I sat on the dugout floor and I cried. I do not remember how long. Long enough that everyone else was gone and I still could not make myself get up. This was not about a rec-league loss. It was that the one clean shot at the one moment I had wanted my whole life got dangled in front of me and then yanked away at the last possible second, and something in me just broke open. I did not want to leave. I did not want this to be it. Why was it put right there in front of me only to get stripped back out of my hands. Why is everything kicking me while I am already down. What did I do to deserve all of this. I had been busting my tail to provide for my family, inside a job and an industry I love, giving it everything I had, and it still was not enough. That was the one I could not shake, sitting there on the floor. Why is that so hard. Why does it have to be this hard.
One teammate was still around when I finally packed up my gear. We got to talking, and I told him a little of what was going on. What he said back was nothing fancy. You are a good dude, you are doing the right thing, hang in there and it will work out. That was the whole speech. But it was the first thing in a long while that let me trust my gut instead of second-guessing every move.
I drove home at peace, which surprised me. Somewhere on that drive the fear turned into a plan.
Here is the thing about how my head works. It never stops running scenarios, spinning up the next ten versions of a plan before I have finished the first. My wife said it best once, watching me do it. Isn't it exhausting, she asked, to always be planning, always strategizing, bouncing through every scenario before you have even picked one. She was not wrong. For a long time I chalked that up to ADHD being ADHD. It is partly that. But it is also the exact same wiring that makes me good at the strategic, see-the-whole-board part of leadership. The catch is that the brain that loves building the big vision is terrible at the boring middle, the task stacking, the grind that gets you from the idea to the finish. That is how projects die halfway. And whatever I did next, halfway was not going to cut it.
So I did what I do. I took a step back and I planned. Late nights, quietly, mapping the risk and the timeline and the actual route from where I was to where I wanted to be. I wanted the whole plan built before I brought anyone the crazy idea.
And there was one person I had to bring it to before anyone else. On the drive home I called my wife. Not to announce anything. To start the conversation, because a plan like this only works if we are both in it, and that was the whole point of what I was trying to change. We are a team. Whatever came next, we were deciding it together.
The idea was to go back and finish the degree. Not the one I had been chasing before. I switched from Kinesiology to Computer Science with a data analytics specialization, and I pointed it straight back at baseball, just from a different seat. Not the coach or the trainer on the field this time. The analyst in the background. More flexibility in where and when the work happens. More money, honestly, which matters when people are counting on you. And a skill set that works inside baseball and everywhere outside of it, so that even if the game and I ever parted ways as a job, the connection would never actually die. My connection to this game was not going to die. Ever.
What I was really chasing was not a diploma. It was the version of the leader I already was, fine-tuned. That part was already there, forged on a field. What I needed was the discipline to execute it and the credentials to be taken seriously in a room I had not been let into yet.
That was a year ago, a little more. I made the leap, and I am still mid-swing on it. The degree is in progress, the tools I write about on this site are getting built, and the through line from that dugout floor to all of it is not complicated.
The kid in the backyard and the guy sitting on that dugout floor and the person writing this are all running the same at-bat. Stay back, stay on top, let it rip. Control what you can control, keep your head in the process instead of the scoreboard, and when the moment gets pulled away from you anyway, and it will, you get up and you get ready for the next pitch.
I never got my World Series game seven. I got walked. But it turns out the swing was never really the point.