In high school, I was the captain of our baseball team. It’s a role that prepared me for my future job as a coach, as well as my future teaching job. The main thing I learned is what works with one person and one situation will not necessarily work with another person and situation. Be stern with one person and it will light a fire under them to improve; be stern with another and they’ll cry like a chef dicing onions the size of Rosie O’Donnell’s mouth.

Whenever our head coach needed to talk to our pitcher, he would signal to me, the 1st baseman, to go talk to him (in baseball, coaches are limited in the number of times they can visit the pitcher, so our coach relied on me if he had already used up his visits). Sometimes, I would call timeout and talk strategy with the pitcher. Sometimes, I would give him a verbal kick in the rear if I thought he wasn’t concentrating. However, other times, I would bring levity to the situation and talk nonsense.

Me: “What did you think of the restaurant we went to last night?”
Pitcher: “It was okay.”
Me: “What did you eat?”
Pitcher: “Chicken fingers.”
Me: “Was it good?”
Pitcher: “It was okay.”
Me: “I had fried shrimp…I think some of it’s still stuck in my teeth.”

About this time, the pitcher looked at me like I was crazy. “Well, we better get back to the game,” I said. “There’s two outs and a runner on third. Just get the hitter to hit it to me and we’ll be fine.”

Our coach, of course, didn’t have a clue this was the kind of stuff I would talk about to the pitcher. But my goal was to take the pitcher’s mind off of the situation. If the pitcher was a fragile sort and I could tell he was stressed, I took his mind off the game – even it was for only 30 seconds.

And yes, the above conversation really did happen.