Baseball, PhD.

Leslie Ann Ivory may be on to something. She wrote the book “Everything I know I learned from my cat.” The next book written should be “Everything I know I learned from baseball”. Ronald Reagan was called the Great Communicator. Baseball is the Great Educator.

During the U.S. Championship of the Little League World Series, the coach for Hawaii called time out during the fifth or sixth inning when his pitcher was getting hammered. Louisiana had taken a big lead and the Hawaii coach kept telling his pitcher “Keep your head up. C’mon, let’s go!” Sure enough in the bottom of the sixth, Hawaii puts on this big rally and comes back to win that game as well as the World Series against Mexico.

What do we take from that to apply in real life? Just as Jimmy V. told us “Don’t ever give up.” You never know what’s right around the corner. Always give your best effort.

There are other axioms to be used in life that we learn from baseball.

Take two and hit to right. See what’s out there and take what the competition gives you.

Hit ‘em where they ain’t. Don’t try to overthink everything. Sometimes the solution can be very simple.

You can’t steal first. You have to focus on the proper order, no matter what your specific talent is. Pay attention and apply yourself to all the details.

Don’t make the first or third out at thirdbase. Don’t be so aggressive that you limit yourself on cashing in big or continuing a great run – although I never understood why it was ok to make the second out at thirdbase.

You don’t have to be on the field to learn something. You can become a scholar by sitting in the stands.

I didn’t learn percentages from my 4th grade teacher. I learned them from Jack, Vince and Lou and the Tribune sports section. Whether it was winning percentage or batting average, at the drop of a hat I could tell you (probably before 4th grade) that 1 out of 9 is 11.1%. Sadly there were plenty of Cubs that went 1 for 9 and plenty of Cub teams that won one of their first nine for me to learn from.

I didn’t learn to make change sitting in my high school General Economics class, I learned it sitting at Wrigley, giving the hot dog guy two dollars for a $1.25 hot dog and getting back seventy-five cents.

So all you parents out there, save yourselves the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars on college. Send your children to Wrigley every day during the summer. It’s not an expense of season tickets, it’s an investment in their education.

CFCL Notes: My apologies for the delay in this week’s posting. The motherboard on my laptop gave way and I had to get a new computer which involved loading programs and transferring files and documents. It was appropriate that it was the motherboard that failed because when I realized that I would need to replace the computer and do all the file transfers, mother was part of the expression I uttered.

Non CFCL Notes: Even though last week I posted that the Cubs were basically a sure thing to make it to the World Series, the Cubs fan in me reared its ugly head this week. While the Cubs were in the throws of a four game losing streak at home, I thought “Here we go again.” Then I thought back to the ’69 Cubs. They had a pretty big lead and lost it. AND they had three future Hall of Famers (possibly four if Santo ever gets in). This year’s team doesn’t have four possible Hall of Famers. They probably don’t even have one. So unfortunately anything’s possible, even if ESPN’s website has the Cubs as a 99.4% chance of making the playoffs (probably the only time I’ll ever type – Thank god for the Wild Card).