The Other Day #7 - A Different Perspective

The other day I was out walking the dog in a park near our home. It’s a public park that consists of several baseball fields, a soccer field, four tennis courts and a children’s playground. It’s also a popular place for dog walking. It’s actually become a bit of an informal dog park, where a half dozen or so of us early-morning dog-walkers regularly greet each other, exchanging pleasantries but not names, and feel comfortable taking our dogs off leash to do what dogs do best.

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Not really in the mood for small talk, I wandered off to inspect the condition of one of the baseball fields that had recently been hit hard by a couple of heavy rainstorms. The last time I was there I’d seen a team from the DPW working hard to replace all the infield dirt that had been washed away and I was interested to see their handiwork. As I walked the bases I imagined the thousands of ground balls fielded here over the years by Little Leaguers and it brought back memories of my own childhood, much of it spent on a field just like this one.

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As I completed my trip around the infield, I stopped to stand at the plate and imagine what it would feel like to face a pitcher once again. It’s been nearly 40 years since I participated in any kind of organized baseball and probably ten since I was in a recreational softball game, so the feeling was both familiar and reminiscent of something long since lost. For a reason I can’t explain, I decided to stand in the left-handed batter’s box. I’m right-handed. Never even considered switch-hitting, so not clear why I did this, but the effect was unexpected. As I stood and surveyed the field, imagining where the infielders might be stationed, and then visualized the ball coming in at me, everything felt entirely different than I remembered.

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When I played baseball as a kid, first in Little League, then Pony League and, then, finally, as a senior in high school, I was always a dead pull hitter. Maybe it was being a Red Sox fan and having the image of the Green Monster, that massive thirty-seven-foot wall, looming in left field in Fenway. Maybe it was because it just felt natural and comfortable. Whatever the reason, I know it brought my batting average down and that if I’d learned to “go the other way” I would have been a more versatile, and better, hitter. But comfort can be a trap. It can lure you in and convince you that if something comes easy it must be the best path. Avoiding discomfort seems obvious. It’s an evolutionary trait developed to avoid injury and preserve energy. Why would anyone intentionally choose to do something that made them feel uncomfortable?

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As I stood on that child’s field, recalling the feelings of playing baseball as a boy, I was thinking about how it would feel for the bat to make contact with the ball, releasing the top hand first while following through with the other hand, pivoting my body to turn and run towards first, thinking about whether I could try to stretch a single into a double, trying to determine if the ball might make it into the gap because the outfielders were shaded towards the foul lines, should I sprint down the baseline or make a wide turn, did the fielder have a good arm... all the decisions that I should have considered before that now have to be made in milli-seconds.

But something about looking out at the field, and those imaginary defenders, from the other side of the plate, literally a 180-degree shift in perspective, changed everything. I didn’t want to open my hips, get under the ball, swing as hard as I could and pull the ball down the right field line. No, it felt more natural to keep my stance closed, meet the ball out in front, drive it up the middle or even poke it into the hole between third and short. For a moment, I think I actually experienced what it must feel like for most lefties to hit.

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Empathy is a wonderful thing. The ability to understand and share the feelings of others is useful in many situations. In advertising, there are all kinds of models and frameworks and techniques to help strategists and writers and designers better empathize with the customer. Over the past couple of decades, an entire business discipline, Customer Experience, has been built around the concept of empathy. Understanding how your customer sees the world, and your product or service’s place in it, provides clues about why customers buy from you. It allows you to feel what they feel. It allows companies to create products that better meet their needs. Sometimes it can even identify needs your customers are unaware of.

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If only I’d taken a couple of practice swings from the left-handed batter’s box 40 years ago...

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