That Time When A Root Canal Taught Me About Life and Baseball

Throbbing tooth and heartache, I sat on the bench as my starting position was given away. It changed the way I valued baseball, and many years later, life. 

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Beneath the Surface is peeling back the layers of this onion we call sports.

I don’t think I’m alone in that my teenage years were the most vulnerable and impressionable of my life. I also don’t think I’m alone in that I didn’t realize it until many years later.

From the age of 4, I have played some form of baseball. There are pictures of me with an early 90s mullet from before I have clear memories, and I was holding a tee-ball bat. When things weren’t going great at home and my parents were doing things that parents maybe shouldn’t be doing, my safe haven was baseball.

The day I made the high school baseball team as an eighth-grader remains one of the happiest moments of my life. And the day I started my first varsity game at second base as a sophomore on a team with players infinitely more talented than I? That day was infectiously glorious. Yet it was short lived, at least that year.

I started at second base in a game on a beautiful Tuesday afternoon. My coach had a designated hitter for me, which was fine because we were facing a pitcher that had a fastball touching 90, but at second base—I was like a hoover vacuum cleaner sucking up everything that came my way.

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Basking in the moments after that game I thought I’d made it. I thought I had reserved a slot on that team for the rest of my high school career. Then the next week came and I had a root canal scheduled. Six days after my first start I was sidelined because I’d spent three hours in a dentist chair with a pointy scraper removing all life from my tooth.

“Coach, I won’t be at the game tomorrow night because I’m having a root canal in the morning.” I told my coach.

“Really? Well, you were supposed to start at second.” He looked at me through his dark sunglasses. “I guess I’ll have to put Seth out there.” I could tell he was disappointed and that made me feel good. It made me feel wanted. But that too, was short lived.

Arriving for the game that night I didn’t get into full uniform. I just put my jersey on and volunteered to work the scoreboard. As the team warmed up I scrutinized every move from my peer who had taken my spot. I watched as he made each throw to first base and I took note each time he pulled the first basemen even a fraction off the bag. Secretly hoping he’d have a terrible game so I could feel secure in my venture to maintain the starting spot the following week.

Unfortunately the game that night was against one of the weakest teams in the state. They barely had enough players to field a nine-man squad and only managed to get two hits throughout the entire game. The real tragedy was that my peer, Seth, had nothing short of ten ground balls hit to him including two balls he laid out for (and we’re talking full extension). He made each play look like he’d done it a hundred times before. Laying out with grace and snapping to his knees to make a crisp throw to first base. My stomach turned with each successful conversion of an out.

I didn’t start another game that year. I played a couple of innings here and there, but Seth had successfully earned his way into my position. Ten years later I realize he earned it, fair and square, and he was better than me. Though at the time, I would have never admitted it. I was bitter. I’d worked my ass off to earn that position and all because of a lousy root canal I’d lost it.

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Lessons learned in high school often get overlooked by lessons I learned in college, but there’s nothing more important than the lesson of humility.

The root canal taught me exactly that. As a man in the military, it’s easy to have an ego from time to time. It’s easy to feel like you’re entitled to a different set of rules because of the whole “going-off-to-war” thing, but the world doesn’t work like that. It didn’t work like that in high school. It didn’t work like that in college. And it damn sure doesn’t work like that now, as an adult with a wife and children.

Being a Good Man requires a lot of things, and those things are different for each person, but some things are universal. Humility is one of those things. It took a root canal and several years of percolating for me to realize how important humility is as a virtue. High school baseball taught me many important things.

The value of hard work.

The importance of discipline.

The meaning of teamwork.

All of which are very important, but the most valuable as a husband, as a parent, and as a man in today’s world, is humility. It was painful and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Photo: Flickr/Ian Ransley