Paula Desmarais

Hitting Advice

My father saw that my sister and I were having too much fun playing softball and he wanted in on it when I was eight. He promptly studied a few baseball books and signed up to be an assistant coach. He sort of did that anytime we found something fun. He’d start studying it and take over. As long as whatever we were into didn’t make him physically cold. He hated the two years we played hockey. Wanted zero part of it. He co-coached our softball team by the book. He’d hand out bubble gum before a game and tell us when we got up to bat to chew it hard like we meant business. Blow a bubble at the pitcher. It would intimidate her. That was our team’s “secret weapon.” He started to preach the tenets of softball to me in everyday life, well outside of softball practice and games. He’d tell me I should do something every day to improve my game, be it a game of catch, or pointing out that someone on the Red Sox did not get a hit because they took his eye off the ball. “Keep your eye on the ball and you’ll get a hit,” was his most common piece of advice. After a bad at-bat, he would tell me I took my eye off the ball.