How baseball imitates life: Authors share tips for sports parents

When the ball goes up, time stops. As the dreaded popup rises in a youth baseball game, coaches on the bench and parents in the bleachers tense as the world turns into a slow-motion movie reel. Who’s gonna get it?

Even big leaguers sometimes hate popups. Just before Carl Yastrzemski hit the one that would end Boston’s American League East pursuit in a famous winner-take-all playoff game in 1978 , Graig Nettles, the Yankees’ third baseman, said to himself: “Don’t hit a popup to me. ” But Nettles, one of the best fielding third baseman of all time, camped under it and caught it.

Overcoming popups are essential to success in baseball and in reality away from the field. That’s the concept authors Ken Davidoff and Harley Rotbart have grasped in their new book, "101 Lessons from the Dugout: What Baseball and Softball Can Teach Us About the Game of Life. " I would argue most parents don’t often think about these lessons when we watch our kids play.

We want them to succeed from the earliest ages. “Considering the pyramid of ascension in baseball, kids are not gonna be playing major league ball, and many of the kids are not gonna be playing college ball,” says Rotbart, a pediatrician and parenting author who coached his two now-grown sons at baseball, tells USA TODAY Sports. “And if they do it, it will be club ball.