Marco Luciano Shows Off Glove ... AND Bat!

SF Giants Minor Lines, July 21-23, 2023

Photo: Willie Mays Award for World Series MVP (2019)

It was great getting to see the big club this weekend and recalibrate the eyes, as the saying goes (a little less great seeing the actual scores of the games). Among many enduring memories (including one of the two or three longest home runs I’ve ever witnessed at Nats Stadium), I won’t soon forget the sight of Casey Schmitt slamming his bat on home plate in overwrought frustration after striking out in a crucial situation on Friday night.

Right about this time last year, I was talking with Schmitt about his difficult first professional season in San Jose. At the time, he looked back on that season as a valuable experience in learning how to deal with failure:

“Just learn to enjoy it a lot more. Because it can be taken away in a pitch, just like that. So it was a tough year, but it was definitely a year that needed to happen to me. It was a big thing for me to get through.”

Casey Schmitt is Enjoying Whatever Comes His Way

It struck me that I feel like I’m constantly talking with minor leaguers about this specific topic — how to deal with failure, how to learn from it intellectually without being devastated by it emotionally — only to see them go on to bigger struggles in the major league and read very similar pieces by the beat writers up there. It’s not a lesson that can just be learned once and that’s behind you. It has to be dealt with over and over, as the quality of competition gets tougher and tougher and the stakes higher and higher. It helps that these players go through struggles at the lower levels. It helps them learn to problem solve and helps them learn to process things in productive ways. But it never stops being hard to succeed and it never stops being painful to fail.

It’s just a really tough task these kids have taken on. A task where the most likely outcome is always going to be failure. And all we can really do is appreciate the awesome (literally!) ambition of the goal they have set themselves to and the passion and effort they devote to it.

Re-calibrated. Let’s move on and see what the weekend brought us, non-major league division. Some incredible plays, for one thing….

and that wasn’t the only great one! We have Marco Luciano glove highlights herein as well!

HITTER of the WEEKEND: Jimmy Glowenke (Rich), 5 for 11, HR (7), 2 2b (16), 4 RBI
PITCHER of the WEEKEND: Carson Whisenhunt (Rich), 4.0 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 5 K