Catcher, the loneliest position in baseball. On a sunny afternoon Brendan Lacey sits alone behind home base staring intensely at the field. He can see the situations coming in his head. Runner on second the pitch bounces on him he clutches the ball and then its automatic like a machine. Arm back look throw to third, got em. A wild pitch, one of the toughest plays for a pitcher to handle in the game look routine for Lacey. He’s dealt with wilder predicaments in his life.
At four Lacey was diagnosed with autism, a social disorder that can make it hard for people to communicate. “It was a little scary because I’m just this little kid and suddenly I have this big road block in front of my life and I have to deal with it. At four that’s a lot” Lacey doesn’t sugar coat anything, “I had some hard times, growing up it was harder to make friends with the other kids.” Lacey remembers he used to have a hard time getting along with kids until he found the break through, Baseball.
Lacey started playing ball young. A form of stress relief putting bat to ball put Lacey in a zone where he could control an uncontrollable life at a young age. Hours of batting cages, dinging pitches into the mesh were all the therapy Lacey needed. “I love the ability of the game to exploit failure.” The game showed lacey that everyone had struggles and there were ways to beat them. “The game is designed to make you fail, to make you want to give up, that’s how the good players are weeded out from the bad.” Lacey says some players hate those failures but it’s what makes the game great to him.
Lacey has seen his share of failure on the field though. “My freshman year my hitting was just bad, it ended up just taking me out of the moment all together.” Lacey saw the low numbers as a message though. “Nothing, nothing in this game is handed to you, you have to work for it you have to have incredible drive. I just decided that what I wanted was a better batting average and I went after it.” Anyone anywhere close to Lacey will tell you this is more than true. He spends the most time in the weight room, the most time on the field and in the batting cages. This is a kid who watches sports science videos for fun, shares them with his pitchers and develops the pitching strategy for The Skyline Eagles Baseball team.
Failures come in life to though says Lacey. “I was devastated when I found out I had autism I was not a happy kid at times, like why did this happen to me? But I accepted it and I said to myself you can do this how can I make this a strength?” He found a way, laser focus, “when I step on the field everything else disappears it suddenly all becomes baseball everything else in secondary.” It gives Lacey an edge that most other athletes don’t have. That’s fine by him hell just keep picking them off at third.
