Baseball isn’t for quitters. The game has a way of weeding out the faint of heart.

This deep in the dog days of summer, when the heat surpasses oppressive and flirts with assaulting, most people are lounging in the pool or sipping a cool drink to outrun the thermometer. Not baseball players. Those maniacs are in the middle of their grind. You don’t know what heat is until you wear catcher’s gear in 100 degrees with no breeze.

It’s more brutal than you can imagine.

Baseball players find their own ways to adapt. Heat like this makes you soak your ball cap in hopes that it will mix with the sweat you’re already drenched in. Sun rays redden the neck and slowly steam the body underneath a layer of material. It’s enough to make you chug the nearest bottle of anything as soon as practice ends…or steal a sip of warm hose water just to slake the thirst. Anything to defeat the heat. Because if you let something like weather break you, the game of baseball will find a thousand more ways to chew you up and spit you back out to another sport.

Weather like this reminds me of my one and only season playing behind the plate. I loved the game too much to let it drive me away, but that one season taught me to appreciate one of the toughest positions in any sport.

Strapping on the catcher’s gear is a humbling job.

My town of Laurinburg, NC, wasn’t the same climate as the sauna of South Louisiana, but it was a different brand of awful: Dry heat so intense it felt like your skin was getting bit, with no breeze to be seen due to the surrounding sea of pines. I remember sitting in my catcher’s crouch, devoid of Knee Savers (nobody told me they existed), with sweat dripping from my facemask onto my chest guard and thinking, “Is this really what I signed up for? A whole season of THIS?”

I remember being amazed I could even sweat so much. How could one human being produce all this liquid without shriveling up like a raisin? Every time I had to take off the chest plate, helmet and shin guards they clung to my body with the suction only acquired from pure saturation. I was familiar with the usual discomforts of the baseball season, but this was some new hell I had never even imagined.

I stuck it out. I wanted to play baseball, and quitters held no place in the realm of winners.

One season of hell was all I needed though. From that point on, it was back into the field for me. I could cope with the direct sunlight and having to get in and out of “ready” fielding position from anywhere on the field…just not catcher. Never again.

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