Learning Through Repetition – Religion & Liberty Online

One constant in American life is a debate about schooling. Educators and psychologists repeatedly erase blackboard plans and chalk up new ones. Screens in the 2010s are saviors, and in the 2020s devils. AI mixes fact and hallucination but doesn’t help us think.

The other constant through all the years, according to the famous Field of Dreams speech by James Earl Jones, “has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”

What is the sound of two constants, education and baseball, clapping like blackboard erasers? In 1973, Dan Shaughnessy and I were both part-time Boston Globe reporters. I left. He stayed and became a baseball writer who offered this complaint following last month’s Hall of Fame game in Cooperstown, N.Y.: “Baseball is largely unrecognizable to old-time greats.”

Shaughnessy reported that “analytics and new methods of teaching have removed the endearing layer of tutelage that’s always connected the sport.” He wrote that such Hall of Famers as Jim Kaat, Barry Larkin, and Cal Ripken Jr. muttered about lack of fundamentals like “moving the runner over, or learning to pitch as opposed to throwing 100 miles per hour.”

Shaughnessy quoted Kaat: “We’re all Mr. Irrelevant now.” Some say the same about human teachers in schools. The lead of a July 27 New York Times article crowed, “In Austin, Texas, where the titans of technology have moved their companies and built mansions, some of their children are also subjects of a new innovation: schooling through artificial intelligence.”

It so happened that during the 1990s and early 2000s, I visited 25 spring training camps and interviewed players, including Barry Larkin once and Cal Ripken Jr. twice. I sat next to Ripken during a rain delay and heard him rip into Bill Clinton’s lack of character during the Monica Lewinsky affair. I also enjoyed his view of baseball tutelage: “No matter what situation arises, if you’ve done your work, it’s something you’ve done and thought about many times before.” Larkin, less vocal, said how he had learned: “People. Teachers.”

Ripken spoke about the importance of repetition: “To have a successful at-bat, you have to do certain things the same way whether nothing is on the line or everything’s on the line. That’s not to say you don’t feel the pressure at times, but you have to put the specialness out of your mind and try to make every at-bat the same, whether it’s the World Series or an intersquad game. [You] keep telling yourself, ‘I‘ve done this thousands of times before. I’ve done my work.’”

Barry Larkin showed in the batting cage how a human teacher was important. Larkin’s tiny adjustments under the eye of Reds manager Tony Perez—a slugger from 1965 through 1986 who would also make the Hall of Fame—impressed me. Sometimes Larkin moved his hands half an inch higher or lower on the bat. Sometimes he held the bat slightly more erect. Perez was complimentary.

Teachers are especially important with students who aren’t brilliant, as Perez showed in his interactions with Jamie Quirk, a marginal utility player. Perez was insistent: “Keep your body behind the ball. Use that bleeping weight you’ve got on you…. Stay behind it, get your hands in front, save your hands for the last moment. … Keep your body back, keep the ball in front of you. Hit the bleeper on top.”

Quirk did hit the next few pitches sharply, with Perez giving instant reinforcement: “See what you did. See where you hit that bleeping ball. See it. Got to keep the ball in front of you.” Perez also expressed interest in character, which he defined as taking a high inside pitch without flinching. When outfielder Roberto Kelly did not panic at a close pitch, Perez said to all, “That’s the way to take a pitch.”

Perez was not pleased with Willie Greene, however, a 21-year-old infielder. Perez muttered, “Every time he gets a pitch inside he goes …”—and Perez demonstrated a flinch. To Greene, Perez simply said, “You’ve got too much movement in your body.” When Larkin had his second batting session, Perez told Greene to watch closely as the great hitter stayed calm as a pitch passed inches from his face. Perez again said, “That’s the way to take a pitch.”

Perez also saw what I did not initially grasp. Hal Morris, the Reds’ first baseman bouncing back after a season of injury, put on an impressive display of power during his first batting practice session. Ball after ball went over the fence, to the delight of a teenager on the other side who had brought his glove and positioned himself well. Perez, though, suggested that Morris was swinging for the fences too much.

Perez kept telling Morris: “If the ball is low, don’t try to lift it. Stay on top and see what you can do. Nice and easy. You want slow feet, quick hands. Stay in front, don’t drop your bleeping head. You tend to drop your shoulder. Keep your head up. When the ball is down you’re still trying to lift it. Stay on top.”

Stay on top. That’s the opposite of what computer-hugging, analytics-trained coaches teach today. They preach about “lift angle” and the purported need to “elevate the ball.” Three decades ago, though, Morris listened carefully, adjusted, and got it. Perez was pleased: “Yes, that’s a bleeping line drive. You don’t have to hit bleeping flies to drive in runs. Just make contact. Keep the ball in front of you, you want to see it when you hit it. Keep that bleeper in front of you, see it when you hit it, stay low.”

Morris confessed that he had been blind but now he saw: “I wasn’t seeing that low ball before, now I can.” Perez replied, “Happened to me, happens to you, happens to everybody. But you were doing it at the end. I bet you saw where you hit that last line drive. When you stay back, bleep, it feels different, doesn’t it?”

Perez demanded that each player learn the fundamentals of his position: an hour of ball-blocking for catchers, bunt-defending for infielders, hitting the cutoff man for outfielders. Constant teaching. Constant mentoring. Concentration. Repetition. For an hour, Cincinnati pitching coach Don Gullett demonstrated exactly how to turn on a pickoff to second base. Each pitcher tried it, over and over again, lifting the leg just so.

Theoretically, a large language model (LLM) with a swinging arm and a lifting leg could do what Gullett did, but the computer would not have had a 3.11 ERA from 1970 to 1978 and twice as many wins as losses. When Gullett spoke, rookies listened.

Pittsburgh Pirates pitching coach Ray Miller understood the importance of personal tutelage. Miller explained: “I’m dealing with 22-year-old guys here who could become millionaires real quick. They have an attention span of about ten minutes, and they naturally tend to overthrow on the mound and overdo it off the field, so it’s a race against time in trying to teach them. My job is to put old heads on young bodies.”

Miller said self-esteem among young pitchers should arise from knowledge, not from easy compliments: “When you’re young, even if everyone says you’re great, there’s fear in your mind—am I really a big leaguer?—and consequently you overthrow. … I tell them about the hitter’s depth perception and their ability to change speeds so he never really has a good swing at it. I stress instant feedback and a lot of information flow to the pitcher.”

Miller spent a lot of time after workouts in one-on-ones. “You have to read a guy. Certain guys you have to put your arm around them. Other guys you gotta boot their rear ends. So I never instruct a pitcher when another guy’s standing there. Here in spring training when I get a guy I like, I take him aside, just sit down and talk with him about the weather, anything, just to get a read on him.”

After talking with Ripken in the Baltimore Orioles camp, I asked coach Elrod Hendricks about education. He said, “Spring training is no different than a teacher teaching students. … You teach through repetition. Maybe the 1001st time it will get through to them. … People will look at some good players and say, ‘They’re so natural,’ but there’s no such thing—they all have to work hard at the craft. The only way you become natural is through hard work and execution.”

Hard work and execution. American education used to emphasize hard work on the grammar of words and numbers, “the three Rs.” A human being said, “Repeat after me.” That for many children was more effective than a computer will ever be. Teachers and coaches both learn, regarding some of their pupils, “You have to put your arm around them.”

Education is hard. Learning grammar requires repetition. Education is also personal. Myler Lentz discovered that students were cheating in his ethics class by turning in AI-reliant papers, so he substituted one-on-one oral exams and found that those same students learned more about virtue—and practicing it.

At spring training, I witnessed players learning through repetition and personal tutoring. Educational life would do well to imitate baseball.