As a baseball player, I watched hundreds of what I call mound moments—when a pitcher’s game and even career fate is at stake.
The manager comes striding out of the dugout and stands eyeball-to-eyeball with the pitcher, often who has been struggling in getting batters out, or perhaps it’s just a strategy visit. In either case, it is the manager affecting the pitcher's future.
Those adrenaline-pumping moments of suspenseful intervention mirror my life's work today with black boys who come up to bat in life with two strikes on them. One is being black and the other is being male.
You’ll hear me often say baseball imitates life and these face-on crystallizing moments I have with young men happen on baseball diamonds, classrooms, living rooms, and dangerous street corners. The only difference is we’re not talking balls and strikes anymore, we’re talking success and failure.
These moments begin with a premise that cultural biases and stereotyping shrink black boys’ margins for error. Born with those two strikes, black boys face enormous pressures living under a skin-colored perceived condition of guilt until proven innocent—a mode forcing them to survive from the outside in.
I use baseball actually and metaphorically to have mound moments with them and reveal these three steps necessary to beat the odds and make it to the big leagues in life and maybe even baseball:
Self Confidence
