Proving People Wrong

Clearly I have baseball on my mind with the season quickly approaching. It feels weird being a freshman on the baseball team again. Going from a senior and being a captain of your team to joining a team as one of the new guys is a huge transition. The main thing on my mind right now is that I have to prove myself to people. I’m here to prove to people that I’m here to play baseball for a reason and I’m here to show everyone how much baseball means to me.

When I was younger, in little league, I can remember always being the best kid on my team. I remember some people looking up to me and I remember always being the go to guy to win the game. As I got older, not only did the competition level become much greater but the competition level within the team became greater as well. I got to junior high and I experienced competing with other players for playing time. This is one of the things that still drives me today; the idea that playing time is earned and not simply given to me is fresh in my mind.

Then high school came and after freshman year I had proved that I was good enough to play varsity. My goal had always been to play varsity as a sophomore and when I accomplished that it just drove me more. Although I had already earned my spot on varsity, the following year I didn’t slack on my training and was more than ready by the time tryouts came around. I was the kid that would start counting down the day’s right after fall baseball ended. Being a captain my senior year was a great honor and I was absolutely crushed when we didn’t make the playoffs. The good thing is that now I get to move on from that and work towards winning a championship here at Gordon College. I think that I as a freshman owe it to the older guys, especially the seniors, to work hard and win games. This is the senior’s last chance for a championship in a program that is so much further along than it has been in the past.

With that being said I want to shift back to the fact that I’m here to prove people wrong. When I started to not be able to see the catcher’s signs and realized that I had to wear glasses to play baseball I wasn’t happy at all. I went to try to get contacts and the eye doctor literally told me that my eyes were too small to put them in and he couldn’t even do it. That crushed me, and I figured that playing baseball with glasses was going to be really hard, but that didn’t stop me. I kept working hard and kept growing as a player despite having a sort of setback. Eventually I got used to wearing them during baseball and now I’m completely fine with it.

Sometimes I even look at it as an advantage for me. I feel like the hitters look at me and think that there’s no way that this nerdy looking kid can pitch, but soon enough they find out. For those people that do make that assumption, I’m here to prove you wrong. During my first year on varsity I remember my coach saying something at a practice that I will never forget. The whole team was around him and he was talking to us before we ran at the beginning of practice and he said to us, “None of you will play baseball in college.” I remember all of us looking around with confused faces and talking about what he had said throughout the whole run. From that day on I made it one of my goals to prove him wrong. I wasn’t the first player on that team to play college baseball and I’m glad that 3 of us made it to the next level. That’s why I’m here; I’m here to prove him wrong.

As a program here at Gordon College I think that we have people to prove wrong as well. We need to prove the other teams that look at us as an easy win wrong. We need to prove those coaches that passed us up or didn’t recruit us as heavily what they’re missing out on. We need to prove every other person on this campus that thinks that our baseball program is a joke wrong.

If anyone doubts me or us right now, go ahead. Come the end of the season we’ll see what you think. Take my word for it; we will succeed as a team this year. The most important word in that last sentence is team, remember that. If you’re reading this and thinking that I’m cocky you’re wrong; there’s a difference between cockiness and confidence.

-Eric Proulx