Every year in late February and March, major league baseball teams gather in Florida and Arizona for spring training. The games do not count. The stadiums are small. Veterans work on fundamentals they mastered years ago, and rookies get a chance to show what they can do. For six weeks, some of the best athletes in the world practice the basics in front of modest crowds, and no one thinks it is beneath them.
There is a lot in that for anyone preparing for a season of their own.
The preseason is not optional
Baseball could skip spring training. Players are professionals; they know how to hit and throw. Yet the sport has kept the ritual for well over a century, because a long season demands a deliberate ramp-up. Bodies need to be conditioned gradually. Teams need to learn how to work together. Timing, which fades over a winter, has to be rebuilt through repetition.
Many people treat their own comebacks the opposite way. They go from zero to full effort overnight, and they are surprised when they burn out or break down in the first few weeks. A ramp-up period is not laziness. It is how long seasons are survived.
Fundamentals before heroics
Spring training is famously unglamorous. Pitchers practice covering first base. Infielders take ground ball after ground ball. Hitters work on bunting. These are skills that rarely decide a game, yet they are rehearsed obsessively, because when a season turns on a single play, the fundamentals are what hold.
In a personal rebuild, the fundamentals are equally unexciting: sleep, routine, honest budgeting, keeping small commitments, showing up on time. They do not feel like the work that will change your life. They are the work that makes everything else possible.
The games do not count, and that is the point
Exhibition games exist so that mistakes can be made cheaply. A pitcher can try a new grip. A manager can test a lineup. Failure in March costs nothing but information. Smart players use that freedom aggressively, experimenting with things they would never risk in a real game.
Give yourself a preseason. Before a job search gets serious, practice interviews with a friend. Before a hard conversation, rehearse it out loud. Before committing to a new routine, run it for a week as a trial with no expectations. Low-stakes repetitions are where you find out what works, and they are cheap in a way that the real thing never is.
Veterans still show up
Perhaps the most instructive sight in spring training is a decorated veteran taking the same drills as a minor leaguer. Experience does not exempt anyone from preparation. If anything, the players who last longest are the ones who take the basics most seriously.
After a setback, it is tempting to feel that you should not need to start from fundamentals. You already know how to do this. But knowing is not the same as being ready, and the willingness to go back to basics without embarrassment is itself a mark of maturity.
Opening Day comes regardless
Spring training ends on a fixed date whether or not a team feels ready. That deadline gives the preparation its shape. Without an opening day, a preseason could stretch forever. Set your own: a date when the practice period ends and the real season begins. Prepare seriously until then. Then step onto the field and play, knowing that the work is done.
New messages, real moments from the road, and the All Is Well Project. Follow along and say hello.
The lessons behind everything Chris teaches. Start with three chapters, free.
Turn the lessons into your comeback.
Talk it through free with the Team Dorrity coach, or work with Chris one-on-one in The Better Than Back Experience.
