Two Games, One Summer

The Sacramento Sentinels infielder keeps two bags packed at all times. One holds his baseball gear, cleats and batting gloves and the well-oiled mitt he has used since high school. The other holds a different set of equipment entirely, because on the weekends, when the Sentinels are not playing, he drives several hours to compete in a second sport that most people assumed he would have abandoned by now.

He will not name the sport on the record, worried it sounds like a distraction, which is precisely the accusation he has spent his athletic life fending off. Coaches in both disciplines have urged him for years to choose. Specialize, they say. You cannot serve two masters. You will be good at both and great at neither. He has heard the speech so many times he can recite it, and he has ignored it so many times that the ignoring has become a kind of identity.

The Case Against Choosing

The conventional wisdom is not wrong, exactly. The two-sport path is harder. He trains more, rests less, and divides an attention that his single-sport peers get to concentrate entirely. His baseball coaches worry about the wear on his body. His other coaches worry he shows up to their competitions tired from a week of games. Both worries are legitimate.

But he has an argument, and it is more thoughtful than mere stubbornness. Each sport, he insists, makes him better at the other. The footwork from the second sport sharpens his range at second base. The hand-eye demands of baseball steady him in the other arena. More than that, he says, the variety keeps him sane. Athletes who specialize too young burn out, lose their love for the thing, start to feel like employees of their own bodies. He has never once felt that way, and he credits the division for it.

A Summer of Logistics

The Golden State Collegiate Baseball League season is, for him, an exercise in logistics bordering on the absurd. Weekday games with the Sentinels. Weekend competitions elsewhere. Long drives in the dark, meals eaten in the car, recovery squeezed into the margins. He has a spreadsheet. He has a very patient girlfriend. He has, above all, an energy that his teammates find both inspiring and exhausting to be around.

The Sentinels coaching staff could have forbidden it. Many summer programs do, insisting on full commitment. They chose instead to accommodate him, partly because he is a genuinely useful player and partly because they recognized that the thing driving him toward the second sport was the same thing that made him good at the first. You do not fix what is not broken, and his joy, clearly, was not broken.

There is a cost, and he does not pretend otherwise. He will probably never be the best in the region at either sport, and he knows that a fully committed version of himself might have been. He has made his peace with the trade. He would rather be very good at two things he loves than great at one thing he has come to resent.

Someday the logistics will become impossible. The sports will diverge, or his body will insist on a choice, or life will narrow the way it narrows for everyone. He knows this. For now, though, he keeps two bags packed, drives through the dark on weekends, and refuses the speech he has heard a hundred times. There will be plenty of time to specialize, he figures, once the summers run out. Until then he intends to play everything, as long as the playing stays fun, which so far it stubbornly has.