A Cold Day in Mid-Autumn

I believe that if you’re not going to do something to the fullest extent that you can, then it’s not even worth trying to do. This idea is applicable to many things such as sports, for example. I try to live this belief everyday in my life, but especially on the baseball diamond.

On a cold day in mid-autumn, my team was scheduled to play the best team in fourteen and under baseball league. I can remember the day vividly, mostly because of the fact that my fingers were freezing as soon as I exited the car. I walked down to the field, only to find out that our team only had 8 of the 9 players that are needed to field a valid team. This meant that we would have to “borrow” a right fielder from the other team while we were in the field. When the game was about to start, the umpire turned to our coach and told him that since our team did not have enough players, we would have to take an automatic loss. Instead of just giving up and telling the umpire that we would go home and drink some hot chocolate, our coach decided to still play the game, even though it was freezing. Our team decided that just since we had to forfeit didn’t mean that we didn’t have to play as hard as we could. The score was 0-0 up until the fourth inning when the other team scored 3 runs. We ended up losing 3-0 that day, against the first place team in our division. We could’ve just given up, and went home, but instead we decided to play. Not only did we play, we played well and with all of our heart.

What makes this game so important to me is that our team could’ve just given up at the moment we noticed we would have to forfeit, but we didn’t. We still played the game, and played to the best of our ability. Therefore, I believe that if you are not going to do something to the fullest extent, then you shouldn’t even try.