Strikeout King

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When Reggie Jackson retired from baseball in 1987, only five people had ever hit more home runs than he had.

“Mr. October” won five World Series championships and once hit three home runs in one World Series game alone. This was made even more remarkable since it came on three straight pitches from three different pitchers.

In 1993, he received more than 93% of the votes to gain admittance into the Baseball Hall of Fame. 

But what many people forget is that as legendary of a player as he was, Reggie Jackson is also baseball’s all-time strikeout king.

Nobody in the history of baseball has “failed” more often than Reggie Jackson. He struck out nearly 2,600 times in his career.

If you strung all those pitches together, that’d be five years. So essentially you could say that one of the greatest hitters of all time went five years without touching the ball.

Great players “fail”. Great people “fail”.

It’s not whether we get knocked down, but whether we get back up again.

It’s not that we “fail” but that we fail forward, learn from the past, and become better.

 

Jamy Bechler is the author of five books including The Captain and The Bus Trip, host of the Success is a Choice Podcast, professional speaker, and trains organizations on creating championship cultures. He previously spent 20 years as a college basketball coach and administrator.  The Leadership Playbook is Bechler’s online program that helps athletes become better teammates and more positive leaders while strengthening a team’s culture. As a certified John Maxwell leadership coach, Bechler has worked with businesses and teams, including the NBA. Follow him on Twitter at @CoachBechler. To connect with him via email or find out about his services, please contact speaking@CoachBechler.com. You can also subscribe to his insights on success and leadership by clicking here.