News Hard Lesson One Player Won't Forget

When the Nats finished up last fall, Garrett Mock went home for his winter break to relax.
"Two weeks into it, and I'm twiddling my thumbs," he told me over the weekend.
So Mock became a coach. More specifically, a part-team fall-league baseball coach for a group of 14- to 16-year-old kids with the Columbia Angels, the prominent Houston area outfit that produced Mock, Josh Beckett and several other pros.
He made it to 20 games, during which his charges went 16-4, but he also established himself as an unorthodox skipper. "Definitely out of the box," as he put it.
For example, the whole giving out intricate signs thing? The kids were into it, and the more the better. Not for Mock.
"If we're gonna bunt, I'm gonna tell the kid, 'We're gonna bunt,' " Mock explained. "When I called pitches from the dugout, the catcher would look at me, I'd just say 'fastball.' . . . And I told kids, it doesn't matter if the guy knows you're throwing a fastball, it's a frickin' hard thing to do."
Mock also let his kids know they were there to win, that he wanted their results "to look like a stinkin' football score," but that they were expected to follow the rules of good sportsmanship. In one particular game, Mock's team went ahead by "two touchdowns and a field goal," as he put it, when one of his favorite players came to the plate and bunted for a hit. Not cool. Mock told the kid he would learn his lesson the hard way. I'll let him take over from here.
"So the next game started, and it was this Houston area all-star team. It was mostly juniors and seniors, kids that hadn't signed yet. So one of the guys that coached that team, I've known him for a long time, and I said, 'Hey, when this kid gets up to bat, I want y'all to put one right in his ribs, and I ain't kidding.' I was like, 'Just kind of give me one of these hand signs, let me know that this kid throws gas,' because I didn't want to bring him in when the kid throws 86 if you've got a kid that throws 91, you know?
"The first guy, he just threw cheese. The next kid throws harder than I do. He comes in, and I was like, 'Hey, grab a bat dude, you're gonna lead off this inning! Let's go, get on base!' " The kid went to the plate, saw the speed, and glanced nervously back at the dugout. Mock and the rest of his players were holding back laughter. The sitting duck backed away from the first pitch, and Mock told him to hold his ground.
"Next pitch, BOOM, right in his ribs," went the conclusion. "And I told him whenever you get hit make sure you look at the other coach of the team we just beat, I want you to go tip your hat to him, tell him you're sorry. So after the game I told his parents, I was like, 'Look, I don't want y'all to start suing me or doing whatever happens nowadays.' I was like, 'The kid needs to learn a lesson.' I said he's not gonna die today, he learned a lesson."
Which pretty much explains why I went into the non-lesson-learning professions. Great story, though