So, this ‘Ashton Larson baseball’ thing, right? Been hearing whispers about it here and there. Folks talking it up like it’s some kind of new secret sauce for hitting or pitching, or who knows what. You know how it is, someone throws a name out there, and suddenly everyone’s an expert or trying to decode it.
Naturally, I got a bit curious. Thought I’d spend a bit of my weekend trying to figure out what the fuss was all about. My ‘practice’, if you want to call it that, started with the usual trawl through the internet. Found a few forum discussions, a couple of really blurry video clips – you know the type, where you’re mostly looking at pixels. Nothing concrete, really. Just a lot of speculation. So, I figured, heck, maybe it’s about a particular stance, or a specific drill. I went out to the local park, the one with the slightly lopsided backstop, and just tried to imagine what it could be. Swung the bat a few times, trying to feel if there was some revolutionary new way to connect with the ball that I’d missed all these years.
I even tried asking old Joe, who’s been coaching Little League since the dawn of time, if he’d heard of ‘Ashton Larson baseball’. He just squinted at me over his glasses and said, “Son, in my day, we just called it ‘hitting the darn ball’.” Can’t argue with that logic, can you?
After a few days of this, poking around, trying a few things out based on vague descriptions, I came to a pretty simple conclusion. Maybe there’s something to it for some specific high-level players, or maybe it’s just a new label for old ideas repackaged. Honestly, it felt a lot like chasing smoke. You spend all this time trying to grasp it, and there’s not much there, or at least not what you expected.
It kind of reminds me of when I decided I was going to become a master gardener a few years back. I bought all the books, the fancy tools, the special organic fertilizers. I read about companion planting, moon cycles, you name it. My ‘practice’ involved meticulously planning my vegetable beds, starting seeds indoors under grow lights, the whole nine yards. I was convinced I was going to have this amazing, bountiful harvest, just like in the magazines. And what did I get? Three lopsided tomatoes and a zucchini that looked suspiciously like a boomerang. The rabbits got most of the lettuce.
My neighbor, old Mrs. Henderson, she just chucks some seeds in the ground, waters them when she remembers, and her garden looks like something out of a fairy tale. She told me once, “Dear, you just gotta let things grow. Don’t fuss so much.”
And I think that’s sort of where I landed with this whole ‘Ashton Larson baseball’ exploration. Maybe the real ‘practice’ isn’t about finding some obscure new technique. Maybe it’s just about showing up, doing the work, and not overthinking it too much. Sometimes the secret is that there isn’t one. Just good old fashioned effort and letting things develop naturally, whether it’s baseball swings or zucchinis.
