What MADE Stands For

Written in 2013, mid-career, and the closest thing I have to a founding document. Cleaned up but not redirected.

I love feeling the ball in my hand.

I love having enough hand control, after years of it, to move the ball around with my fingers and find a grip with my eyes closed — like the thing is an extension of my hand rather than an object I'm holding.

I love the days the ball comes out like a bullet. I love the days I could hit my spot blindfolded. Those are the days everything syncs and you feel like nobody can touch you.

And I love executing a plan from start to finish and making a hitter take a seat. Strikeout looking, fastball painted on the black, and he walks back to the dugout wondering what just happened while you've already got the ball back and you're waiting on the next one.

The part underneath it

But here's what I actually get out of this game, and it took me a while to be able to say it.

I get to check in, every day, with how lucky I am to walk onto a field with a healthy, able body.

I don't say that as a slogan. I had a total hip replacement at 19. There are people who will never get to play this game for reasons of resources, and there are people who won't get to play it because of the cards they were dealt physically. For a while I thought I was going to be one of them.

So standing on a line for the national anthem, or lying in scratchy grass in a random park going through my movement work with my music on — those are not small moments to me. That's the whole thing.

MADE

Somewhere in there I stopped thinking of baseball as a game and started thinking of it as a battlefield for four things:

Motivation. Appreciation. Dedication. EVEryday.

That's MADE. That's what the acronym has always meant, and everything I've built since — the coaching, the camps, the programs, the pitching academy — sits on top of those four words.

I capitalise EVEryday like that on purpose. It's been my signature since I was in my twenties and it's there to make you look twice at the word. Every. Day. Not most days, not when you feel like it, not when the season starts.

Why it works on kids

Baseball makes people stronger because it makes them connect to something.

I've watched parents drive absurd distances and give up every hour they had, just to be there while their kid chased something. There's a superhuman connectedness in this sport that I don't fully know how to explain.

Is it just a game? A field, some tightly wound balls, well-designed sticks, and some well-assembled leather?

Or is it a place a kid can practise being motivated, appreciative and dedicated, every day, until those become the things they are rather than the things they do?

Every decision we make daily aggregates into who we become. The stronger you connect, the more you appreciate. The more you appreciate the chance to get better, the faster you actually get better.

That's not a baseball idea. Baseball is just where I found it.

Get Better EVEryday.