9 Things I Learned About Life At a Baseball Game

This is the second installment of a 9 part series of things I've learnedover the years about life whiling playing, coaching, watching or umpiring baseball. You can read the first one here.
Principle 2: Don't Worry About What Just Happened; Focus On What is About To Happen
No matter what has happened in a baseball game the most important thing is what is about to happen.  We all know people who live in the past. Baseball is a sport where you cannot afford to do that. If you do, you are in serious trouble.  How many times has a pitcher given up a home run immediately after not getting a strike that he thought he should have gotten? You’ve seen the batter who strikes out because he swung at a pitch he shouldn’t have because he was thinking about a called strike? The pitcher who falls apart after he should have been out of an inning but his teammates had an error.
The point is you need to play the game one pitch at a time. You can’t worry about the past. This is where baseball most closely mimics life. Too many people continue to make big mistakes because they made big mistakes in the past. People can get all focused on what happened last pitch that they forget to focus on the next pitch. What is the desired outcome for that pitch? What do you want to accomplish? If you’re putting your energy into the last pitch, you’re not putting all of your energy into the next pitch and on the baseball field and in life that can be devastating.
Life is too short to live in the past. Sooner or later we all face the 27th out of our life. We cannot waste time worrying about what happened in the first inning when we are in the 5th.
What happens when a team gives up a ten spot in the first? You don’t just stop playing the game? What happens when a guy is 0-3 and it’s his turn to bat in the bottom of the 9th in a tie ballgame? The successful batters go up and take their hacks. When your batting you can’t worry about what happened last time, you have to focus on what is about to happen.
That is how we need to approach life.