Size Doesn't Matter ... As Long As You're Fast

I am not your typical baseball player size. Nor am I your typical baseball player shape, actually. My natural build is perfect for soccer, which is actually what I was playing and excelling at until my brother decided that baseball was his sport of choice, and since I wanted to be just like my big brother, I dropped soccer and track in favor of baseball. My worst sport of the three, actually. Oh well. I digress. Doesn't really matter, since I'm stuck with it now.

I'm a 5'9", 170 pound white guy. Although that is what I'm listed at, it's not one of those comically inflated listings that you'll often find for undersized athletes. No, if you lined me up next to a tape measure, and put me on a scale, these are the numbers you would actually get.

This is pretty small for a college baseball player. I was almost the smallest player on my last team, and I expect to be the smallest on this team. This is not out of the ordinary for me, since I have almost always been the smallest player on my team (and occasionally in my league). I got a lot of snickers in Little League when I'd drag a bat my size to the plate to face an early-developed man-child who already had whiskers peppering his chin. The snickers stopped, though, when I hit .683 or whatever. Still, I've rarely been the best player on my team; all throughout club baseball in my teens, there were always other players who were the stars.

I'm very thankful for the fact that I've always had somebody better around me. You always see kids who peak in their early teens because they have a growth spurt and dominate for a year or two, and then they get complacent because they figure they will always dominate like that. It's the guys who are always working and always fighting that stay in it and never drop out. Always having great competition is why I'm still around in baseball now. Well, that and being fast.

I have ALWAYS been the fast kid. I was always the fastest on my team, and I was commonly the fastest in the league. I always had a lot of fun messing with people on the basepaths, because if other teams knew about me, I attracted great amounts of attention because they worried so much about me stealing bases. I LOVE scoring from first, which happens a lot, since I'm on first a lot (as opposed to second or third, since you'd actually have to hit with power to be in that situation). We were not very strong in track in high school, but I used to look at the meet times in the paper and find that I had run the 100m faster than our best sprinter...in the rain...in tennis shoes...without blocks. I am not otherwise supremely talented: I have poor eyesight, I have a weak upper body, I have decent bat control, I have a miserable throwing arm (part of that is surgically induced, but it wasn't great before I hurt it either), and I'm injury-prone. But hey...speed never slumps.

So I hope to continue to ride that wave onto this team. I don't expect to be the fastest anymore, since I expect there will be some excellent athletes on this team. I'm certainly not going to make it based on my hitting power, although hopefully my contact hitting will be passable. I really hope the coaches aren't looking when I throw. I can't let myself get derailed when I face one of the 6'5" pitchers, or take batting practice with a round of guys who all weigh 210 or more. As long as I can beat them all in the sprints and run down some ridiculously long fly balls, maybe I can sprint my way into a jersey.