‘I think falling short in the World Series will stay with me until I die.’ – Aaron Judge
Those were some of the New York Yankees captain’s parting words to the media before he stepped into the dead of night late last October. Judge spoke of the ‘battle scars’ he’ll carry after one of the most excruciating losses any team, at any level, could imagine.
Three errors, a dropped fly ball, a major league pitcher failing to cover first base on a seemingly routine play. It was going to be a long, dark winter, right?
Judge’s spring debut Saturday was his first official moment on the field since he and his teammates unraveled before America in World Series Game 5 and were eliminated by the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Watching them, going about the familiar rhythms and rituals of spring training, we realize it wasn’t all that bad.
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Late baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti once wrote in an essay about the national pastime: ‘It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.’
It’s also structured, like all sports if we play them for the right reasons, to keep us wanting to come back.
Have you ever thought deeper about why we play, or why we throw ourselves into our kids’ games, beyond the aesthetics of trying to win?
Maybe it’s for those first signs of the next season, or even just the next game, that offer us another opportunity to do a little better. Judge felt the pull of them early in the offseason.
‘You flip it pretty quick,’ he said at the outset of spring training. ‘Even during the regular season, bad games, bad moments, you’ve got to move on and go to the next one. So just like anything, you lose out on a World Series, you gotta learn from it, learn what you can and move on to the next thing.’
How we process losses, the ones that seem like they can’t get any worse, can define our sports experience. Whether we are a young athlete, a sports parent or Aaron Judge, we can always overcome them. Here are four perspectives that can help us do it:
Whether you win or lose, sports are about your relationships
When Judge was 2, his parents brought him to his brother’s Little League opening day in their hometown of Linden, California. In a split second, it seemed, he spotted some friends and disappeared into the crowd.
‘If it wasn’t for Little League parents like you, I would not have found Aaron,’ his mother, Patty Judge recalled last summer, via MLB.com.
We quickly realize when we first register them that we do it not to kick-start a major league career, but for the relationships we build. We spend quality time together, with kids but also with other parents who become some of our best friends. When we start to keep score, what is our first impulses after a loss?
We have a team meal – a family meal, really. A loss becomes an opportunity, not to realize what we all may have done wrong, but to celebrate what is right.
The Yankees, of course, lost Juan Soto to free agency. There is turnover everywhere in sports, even at the youth level, where everyone seems to be looking for the next best opportunity.
But do we undervalue the familiarity – and the healing power – of our teammates? Sometimes after a tough loss, all it takes is a call or text from one to get you out of your funk.
‘We were checking in all offseason on certain guys,’ Judge said. ‘ ‘How you doing? What’s going on?’ They were ready to go a couple weeks after the season was over with. They’re like, ‘Hey, I can’t wait to get back down there and get this thing rolling.’ ‘
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Learn from Bill Buckner: Like mistakes, losses last only as long we allow them to linger
During the top of the fifth inning of World Series Game 5, the Dodgers’ Tommy Edman hit a soft line drive to Judge in center field with nobody out and a runner on first. Perhaps taking his eyes away from it momentarily, he tried a one-handed catch. The ball hit off this glove and dropped to the outfield grass, opening the door for the Dodgers to score five runs in the inning.
When it was time to talk about missing the ball after the game, he pursed his lips, gave the slightest of smiles, and said: ‘Just didn’t make the play.’ That was it.
We made such a big deal about it because he is a major leaguer. But what would we have done if he was a kid?
When players make errors, especially ones that lead to losses, the late Bill Buckner once said, we tend to dwell on the ‘ugly part of sports.’ (As we know from youth sports, sometimes our age doesn’t seem to matter.)
Playing first base for Boston, Buckner missed a ground ball that gave the New York Mets a walk-off win in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. His Boston Red Sox went on to lose Game 7 two days later.
Buckner took responsibility and tried to move on from the incident. But constant reminders from fans and the media burned him for years before died in 2019. It got so bad, he moved his family from Boston to Idaho after he retired in 1990.
‘I don’t think that in society in general that’s the way we should operate,’ he said when he returned in 2008, and a two-minute standing ovation from fans at Fenway Park allowed him to finally extinguish the play. ‘What are you teaching kids? Not to try because if you don’t succeed then you’re going to buried, so don’t try?’
Sometimes, it’s a tougher play than we think. The ball is spinning away from your first baseman and you hear the steps of the fastest player on the field churning toward first base. You freeze.
It happened to Yankees pitcher Gerrit Cole and first baseman Anthony Rizzo on Mookie Betts’ two-out ground ball them that prolonged the Yankees’ World Series nightmare fifth inning. Rizzo fielded it to his right behind first, started to move toward the bag and Cole wasn’t there. Betts beat both of them there.
‘It wasn’t for a lack of effort, I just misplayed the ball,’ Cole told NJ.com this spring. ‘I didn’t get off in a position to get over to first base. It was just a mistake.’
He got buried, too.
‘Kids who pitch one inning a week, bro, know how to get over (to first),’ Dodgers reliever Joe Kelly said on a Feb. 20 podcast, referring to his son’s travel team. ‘They’re nine. And not one of them forgets to get over.’
Focus on what we ‘do,’ not on what we ‘don’t’
When we win, we have a tendency to celebrate the result more than focus on how we got to it.
When we lose, we attach reasons that churn through our minds. Major leaguers know instantly what they did, and how they can reset.
Despite what Kelly says, kids don’t always know what to do, and we don’t always properly allow them to correct themselves.
‘I think there’s a lot of advice that’s given by coaches, well-intentioned coaches, and there’s no real instruction there. They’re just kind of narrating what’s going on,’ says RobertAnthony Cruz (aka Coach RAC), a Savannah Bananas player who connects with tens of thousands of younger players through instructional social media posts. ‘ ‘Hey, you just swung at that curveball in the dirt, that can’t happen.’ ‘
‘A lot of the content that I make is like, ‘OK, let’s talk about some of those changes you actually can make because every failure in the book in baseball, I’ve done it, and I have little ways that I’ve found that can correct these little things.’
Go to a youth baseball complex, and you’re likely get a constant echo of don’ts from parents and coaches: Don’t pull your head when you swing … don’t swing at balls in the dirt … don’t throw the ball to the cutoff man when there’s a runner on second base trying to score.
‘What I needed to hear when I was a kid was, ‘When I was your age (and) I was chasing everything in the dirt, I would set my eyes up and I’d search for something up in the zone, and I lot of times that would help me avoid swinging at that ball in the dirt,’ ‘ Cruz says.
We can also encourage them when they try to do it and they fail, especially in the heat of a championship game with their friends and families watching.
‘They thought I was a success before I even showed up,’ Cruz says of his own parents, Ron and Cynthia Cruz. ‘So there was no pressure on me to perform and earn anything. I didn’t have to earn anything. I wanted to win because I wanted to win.’
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We can always look forward to another season
In January, Judge, 32, and his wife, Samantha, welcomed a daughter, Nora.
‘It’s more motivation,’ he says. ‘I don’t want her to think her dad’s … I’m getting older, I don’t want to be the old man here in a couple years. So I gotta stay on top of my game. So she’s definitely gonna to motivate me, definitely keep me on my toes.’
He has kept tabs on the Yankees’ active offseason after moving on from Soto and on what Kelly and his teammates said.
‘They won,’ he says, widening his mouth into a smile. ‘They can say whatever they want. If you don’t like it, you got to play better.
‘Guys are ready to get back to work, get us back in that spot and rewrite the script.’
It’s one none of us completely controls when we play sports. Greg Olsen, a former Pro Bowl tight end who hosts parenting podcasts on Youth Inc., tells his kids the work they put into sports doesn’t guarantee a great tournament, a spot on the team or a winning season.
‘When you focus on the outcomes of it,’ he says, ‘now you’re only stuck with the result. The result went your way, awesome; the result was not your way, it was a failure.
‘It’s only a failure if you didn’t do everything in your power along the way to have success.’
What we can count on when we’re young, and when we’re Aaron Judge, is that familiar pull we get at the beginning of each season.
‘You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive,’ Giamatti, the late commissioner, continued in his essay about baseball, ‘and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.’
But no matter what happens at the end of the year, as much as it crushes you, the cycle always starts up again.
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.