The pain of taking too long to learn

A fellow told me the story of how he never learned to bat until the last game he ever played. (He went into the Army after that!) I couldn't help but relate it to trapshooting because I just get that way sometimes. He was 17 then and playing his last summer of organized baseball that had started when he was nine I think he said. He was an outstanding center fielder with a remarkable arm but his batting really suffered once he had to face fast pitchers. The coach was always trying to get him to use a different bat, one 2 inches shorter and noticeably lighter than the one he insisted on using. But the coach didn't force him to, so he didn't, until the last game he ever played when he later figured the coach was the one who hid all the other bats when it was his turn to go up there, so he did this time, rather than make some kind of fuss about it when he was expected at the plate. He clobbered the first pitch a country mile high and so deep into left field it would have been over some major league fences, but they played without fences and so the left fielder had a lot of time to run back and get under it and sloppily even caught it, which didn't seem to matter at that point in the story as far as I could tell. Anyway he got to bat one more time with that bat and did the same darn thing again, a mile high and deep into left. And then he went into the Army. That sure made it seem like a story that was really going to go somewhere only to go all the way to hell anyway in the very end..