Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hey parents and coaches, are your kids using the right glove? The most important skill for youth athletes to learn is how to play proper catch. The problem is most youth gloves are made with bad leather and are too big for small hands. They actually make it harder to play catch. That's why former Major League Baseball shortstop Kevin Smith created Cali Gloves. Cali Gloves are crafted from 100% Japanese kip leather and are the perfect size for kids.
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[00:01:13] Speaker B: Welcome to this week's edition of in the Clubhouse with EMD Baseball. I'm Andy Kirakidis, joined by my Wonderful co host Mr. Keith Glasser. How we doing?
[00:01:21] Speaker C: Great. How are you?
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Good.
Want to talk about persistence?
Try to do my best Jon Gruden impression there. Persistence.
It's not a good one. So but there was a play in the Eagles Cowboys game. It's going to kind of set the stage for for this this topic.
There's a young man by the name of Elijah Clark who's an undrafted free agent out of Syracuse and plays for the Cowboys. He's a special teams guys through and through. He's got 10 tackles on the air, all on special teams last night and this is floating around Twitter.
He made a super impactful play even though the Cowboys ended up not scoring, but a super impactful play nonetheless. There's about five minutes and 41 seconds left on the clock and the Cowboys are punting to the Eagles in a tie ball game after coming back from being down 21 to nothing. Sore spot for the Eagles and this kid, rookie, undrafted free agent finds a way to make the Cowboys roster.
Special teams dude, he just gets absolutely pummeled multiple times on this punt, gets dropped to the ground twice, gets tripped up a third time, stays headed forward, kind of meanders his way through traffic and comes up with just a massive hit that causes a fumble and gives the Cowboys a chance to take the lead. And it's I think there's a couple different layers to this because we've had some guys on recently.
Eric Kratz, former 10 year Big Leaguer whose story I think in some words can be defined by persistence.
Division 3 player, 8 years in the minor leagues leads to a 10 year big league career.
It doesn't happen if he doesn't just continue to move forward.
Right. We had a, our former coach who's now high up in the Royals organization talk about it. The guys careers end when they stop moving forward.
And you know, that highlight I think shows how important it is to just keep playing, keep grinding it out, like find a way to make an impact. And you know, for me there's, there's two different things about this. One, that kid's story, undrafted free agent, he's trying to make his way in special teams. That play that he made last night very well keeps him in the NFL for a couple years because somebody sees that play and goes, that's the type of dude that if he's going to be number 53 on our roster, we know we're getting everything we can out of that dude. Because guys who play that hard all the time, they matter.
So he marry Mel very well. May have extended his career off of one play. Right.
The other side of it is that kid's an undrafted free agent. He has to work for everything he's ever gotten. And I think this is some parallels to draw about what happens when you get to college and you know, a lot of freshmen, a lot of guys, they all want, they all want the spotlight, they all want to be the Friday guy, they all want to be the starting shortstop or whatever it is hitting the three hole.
But the reality is for most guys is that you need to figure out a way to make an impact. This goes across all college sports. You need to figure out what do you bring to the table that moves the needle for your team, right? For baseball, can you really play defense? Can you really run?
Do you throw a bunch of strikes?
You know, are you left handed guys really good against left handed hitters? You know, can you find a way to get into kind of that bullpen rotation, you know, like what can you do to help a team win?
And I think persistence is a big part of that. And guys who are willing to just do what they're asked to do and move forward and be successful, like the mentality it takes to do what that kid did on that play, I call him a kid, you know, he's a man, he's you know, 23 years old or whatever. But you know, for the purposes of the NFL, he's a kid.
You know, I think that drops into other parts of baseball too. Whether it's you Know, you have a really bad game, you're over three, and like, you step up and you get a chance to make, you know, put together a good at bat and a big spot late in the game. Like, guys who are persistent and just continue to do what is required of them, like, they tend to be really successful in baseball, you know, specifically what we talk about. But I think in general, like, guys who just continue to get up and move forward, that character trait of persistence, I think, oftentimes gets understated.
[00:06:11] Speaker C: Yeah, I think there's a lot of parallels, right. Like, it's that next pitch mentality if you're, you're, you're not flooding the zone. It's the next play mentality if you make an error picking up your teammates.
You know, there's.
I've said this a lot, and I think that it's, it holds true in this context of the conversation that baseball's a weird game from the standpoint of you never really know what is going to win or lose you the game in the moment, right? Like there's.
It could be, it could be an error in the third where you throw a ball away on a routine ground ball and that ends up leading to a run and you lose by one. Not to say that's the exact play, but you run it back and that play doesn't happen. Maybe we're tied.
You know, it's the taking the extra base on a, on a ball hit to the outfield that the outfielder, you know, bobbles and you don't stop running and you get the second base. Now you're in scoring position and you bleed a ball through and that, that scores a run and, you know, now you're up by one and you ultimately end up winning by a run. Not to say that that's, again, that's not the reason in the fifth inning, but you can go back to certain plays over the course of nine innings and look at it and be like, well, if that hadn't happened, you know, we might be in a different spot. And, you know, it holds true. Like you said, you could be, you know, 0 for 4 with four punches and come up in a spot in the eighth or ninth inning with runners on. And like those, those four previous at bats don't matter in that moment. What matters is what you can do to help the team and yourself ultimately in that moment to be able to get a win. And it might be laying down, maybe it's first and second with nobody out and you got a sack bunt to get them over and you lay down a great bunt and maybe you beat it out and it's base is loaded. Maybe they throw it away and you score a run and you reset with first and third, you know, whatever it might be. Maybe you bang a ball back through the middle and, you know, the winning run scores. You know, so it's. It's a weird game from that standpoint that, you know, you can't get caught so caught up in the moment that, you know, there's a guy I worked for who was on our podcast and, you know, did this for a very long time, and he'd always say, you know, you can't get too high or too low in this game. And I think it kind of speaks to the persistence you're taught. We're talking about where, you know, baseball is too long of a game to get Uber amped up, right? Like, you can't sustain that high level of energy over the course of nine innings. You also can't get too low because then it gets.
You can find yourself in that rut of being too low, and you can't pull yourself out of it. And it bleeds into other aspects of your game. It bleeds into the defense, it bleeds in at bat, to at bat, and. And what you're doing there, and your game starts to take steps back. You know, there. There has to be some. Some level of consistency and persistence in what you're doing over the course of nine innings that, you know, we're on to the next play, we're on to the next pitch, you know. You know, turn the page, as some people like to say in baseball. It doesn't necessarily refer to this instance, but it's a saying, you know, but, you know, eventually you have to kind of move on and able to be, you know, mentally, you know, in it enough to be able to kind of say, like, hey, I don't care what happened over my last three at bats, like, I'm going to get this guy here in my last, you know, there was a guy that, you know, I don't know if you played with him, but a guy that we played with at Marist, Brian McDonough, you know, like, his mindset was always like, pitcher didn't get me out, I got myself out. And that dude could hit, he could roll the pole, you know, and I think that, like, you know, a mentality like that is. Is kind of what we're talking about here. It's like, you know, I.
He truly and honestly believed that he. There was not a pitcher that got him out, it was himself who got himself out.
And, you know, being able to have that kind of persistent belief in what you can do and how you can affect a game and moving on from at bat to at bat, pitch to pitch, play to play, you know, can pay dividends in the long run for you in this game.
[00:10:17] Speaker B: 100%. Yeah, it's a tough game. It. It really is. Like, you know, when we've talked about it, but that mentality is just kind of moving forward. And we used to talk about it when I was at William and Marion and Coach Murphy, who I, I think, listens to this podcast somewhat frequently.
One of the things you use to stress with our guys is just. Just keep playing.
Or you play nine innings. Like, you come out in the first and you give up a couple runs. Like, just keep playing. You don't change how you play.
Continue to play.
And I think it was one of the things that he did extremely well as a coach was get the guys to understand that panic was your enemy, right? You give up a run or an inning goes bad or, you know, whatever it is, just keep playing.
And it doesn't matter if you're up 10 or you're down 10. Like, just keep playing. Like, how you show up consistently is really important in that play that, you know, that Elijah Clark made, Like, that's not by accident. I'm sure he does that every single time. It just happened that it showed up on Sunday Night Football and it was a big result. But I bet you if you went back through his tape, he fights his ass off every single play and was rewarded for it in that moment.
But, you know, the consistency of just how do you play, what is your mentality, the pitch to pitch, stuff. Like, it's such an important part of baseball, and it often separates guys who are successful over the long run versus guys who are successful in short windows, right? It's easy to play hard. It's easy to be focused when things are going well, right? And there's a term that people have probably heard, like front runners. Like, front runners, they talk smack and they're super energetic when things are going well. But as soon as you. As soon as they get down and they're, you know, kind of behind the eight ball a little bit, all of a sudden, it gets pretty easy to beat those guys because they don't really know how to compete. They don't really know how to fight back. They don't know really how to consistently show up with. With intent.
You don't ever want to be a front runner like, you want to be that consistent performer who is able to kind of separate the pitch to pitch portion of baseball and the play to play portion of other sports. And being able to wash it, it's such an important trait and it's something that, I mean, showed up in that clip. But I think it's really, really much. It's tied pretty closely into, into baseball.
Kind of when you zoom out a little bit and you start to look at what that consistent effort and consistent focus brings to the table and you know, we've watched it play out with players that the guys who have that type of mentality, they tend to do really well, or at least they tend to. They tend to perform at the level that they should perform at.
You know, maybe they're not a.350 hitter and that's fine, but if they're a.270 hitter, they're going to be a.270 hitter because that's what they do. They show up and they do what they're capable of doing continuously, game to game, pitch to pitch, ending to inning, all that kind of stuff. And uh, it's a super valuable trait and you know, just a little bit of a. A lesson learned. Something worth highlighting today.
[00:13:34] Speaker C: Yeah, love it.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Anything else you want to add?
[00:13:38] Speaker C: No, sir.
[00:13:39] Speaker B: All right, well, thank you for listening. Tune in next week. We will talk to you then. Thanks everybody.
Thank you for listening this week. If you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and hit that subscribe button and smash that like button for us. Check us out on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts as well as Spotify. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram MDBaseball. If you want to find out what me and Keith do to help families and players navigate the recruiting process, go ahead and check us out on emdbaseball.com take a few minutes to check out our new online academy. I promise you'll get some good information out of that. Thanks again for listening. Check in with you next week.
[00:14:27] Speaker C: Just watch.
