Everything I Learned About Teaching I Learned from Kansas City Royals Baseball (almost…)

We just finished our semester field experience a few weeks ago and I got to visit some classrooms - - one of the best parts of my job. Each semester I find the same (beautiful?) chaos: a kid who won't stop talking (distracting?), one who won't start (frustrating?), a kid with a rubber band (fun?), and a pre-service teacher standing in the middle of it all, holding it together with dry-erase markers and straight up willpower (Awesome!). Walk into Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City around this same time of year and you'll find something surprisingly similar.

I've been thinking about this for a bit. Partly because the Royals just unveiled their Forever Fountains City Connect uniforms — this fuchsia-to-blue gradient ball cap deserves a space on your mantle! And partly because I see so many things in baseball that remind me of teaching and teacher preparation.

Full disclosure: I don't live in Kansas City anymore. I'm an out-of-market fan, which means I pay for the MLB channel just to watch the ‘boys in blue’ from hundreds of miles away. My family has always rooted for the Cardinals - I’m the blue sheep of the family - but none of us root for those shady Cubs. MJ and I are making our annual pilgrimage to Kauffman Stadium in a few days and I cannot wait! There is something about being there in person — the fountains, the crowd, the crack of the bat — that the tv, regardless of how big, can not replicate. It's not unlike how you can read every methods textbook or phonics script ever written and still be genuinely unprepared for the moment you're standing in front of 22 kids who are all looking at you like you have the answers.

The Uniform Matters . . . But Not the Way You Think

The Forever Fountains design is intentional. They say the fuchsia gradient flows into blue to evoke the imagery of a Midwestern summer sunset and Kansas City's more than 200 fountains. Tucked inside the collar of every jersey are the words HEY HEY HEY HEY — a nod to the Beatles' famous 1964 "Kansas City" cover at Municipal Stadium, a song the team now plays after every home win.

Nobody in the bleachers sees what's inside the players’ collar. But it's there. It’s also under the bill of my new baseball cap.

One of the hardest things to teach pre-service teachers is the difference between performance and disposition. Students learn quickly how to look like a good teacher — they know to get down on kids' level, to use wait time, to smile. What's much harder to develop is the internal sense of what drives those behaviors when no one is watching, when the lesson is falling apart, when the kid is making it very difficult to be kind. The collar inscription nobody sees is actually the whole thing. It's the reason you do what you do when observation season is over.

Wear your uniform with pride. But understand that the hidden stitching is where your teaching identity - at least as it looks today - actually lives.

You're Playing a Long Season

Earlier this season, the commentators mentioned that the best hitters in the world fail seven out of ten times. A team can lose three in a row and still win the World Series. The season is 162 games long, which means a bad Tuesday in May is, statistically speaking, almost meaningless.

Teaching is a 180-day season with very little postseason rest, and beginning teachers in particular almost always evaluate themselves the wrong way. They are too hard on themselves after a hard lesson, or worse, they get a rush of confidence from one good day and assume they've figured it out. MJ and I have been there. Neither response reflects the actual data.

What experienced teachers develop — what I try to help my students begin developing — is the ability to see the bigger picture. The lesson that bombed on Wednesday is one data point. The week where nothing seemed to land holds important information. The student who seemed unreachable until March and then, suddenly, wasn't — that's the season revealing itself on its own schedule, not yours. Baseball teaches you to hold the long arc with some patience. So does teaching. I think the hardest part of both is resisting the urge to evaluate your whole year on any given inning.

Every Player Needs a Different Pitch

No pitcher throws the same sequence to every batter; they study tendencies now more than ever. They adjust mid-count, they throw a fastball to one hitter and a changeup to the next — not because the changeup is better, but because that batter, on that day, needs that pitch. The decision is always intentional.

Your classroom has 22 batters. Unfortunately, they don’t bat one at a time.

Differentiation gets taught in methods courses as a set of techniques — tiered assignments, flexible grouping, choice boards. Those techniques are real and worth knowing. But the more foundational skill, the one that actually makes differentiation work, is the ability to read a learner. To notice that one kid needs a clear, direct launch before they can do anything independent. That another kid needs time to sit with ambiguity or they'll produce something superficial. That a third needs you to stop explaining and just let them try. You can't script that responsiveness. You have to develop it through sustained, careful attention to actual children over time.

Know your hitters. And know that the knowledge changes with the day, the count, the game situation.

The Fountains Run Whether Anyone's Watching or Not

Kansas City's fountains — all 200 of them — don't run because there's a crowd. They run because that's what fountains do. The Forever Fountains uniform honors that: a city that commits to something beautiful and keeps it going, regardless of audience.

This is the dispositional challenge that I think is most underestimated in teacher preparation: consistency. Consistency of presence. The teacher who brings their full self on observation days and manages the class in survival mode the rest of the time is teaching kids something, but not what they intend. Kids always have a good read on adult authenticity. They know when you're performing and when you're there.

The teachers who change things are fountains. They don't hold their energy in reserve for when it will be evaluated. They show up because their students deserve the Fountain Spectacular every morning — not as performance, but as commitment.

Honor the Original Logo

The Forever Fountains uniform's "R" logo draws on the Royals' original 1969 logo. It's a new uniform that knows where it came from.

Every teacher has an origin story, and I don't mean the polished version they rehearse for job interviews. I mean the actual one — the teacher who changed something in them, the moment they realized they wanted to do that for someone else, the reason they walked into an education program instead of doing something easier. That origin is pedagogically significant. It's the source of what researchers call teacher self-efficacy — the belief that what you do in a classroom actually matters to actual children.

One of the things that concerns me is how quickly that original mark can get buried. New standards arrive. New initiatives layer on top of old ones. The pressure to perform on a particular metric crowds out the reason you came. The best version of your practice is always a blend of where you started and where you've grown. Don't let the new everything make you forget who you were when you first stood in front of a class and thought: I want to do this.

The Win Plays After the Last Out

After every Royals home victory at Kauffman Stadium, the same song plays. "Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey." Every time.

At the end of every school day, something a victory song plays in your classroom whether you notice it or not. It might be the crazy sounds of 22 kids gathering their backpacks. It might be when one kid lingers at the door for an extra few seconds. It might be the way your most reluctant reader carried their chapter book to the bus like it weighed nothing.

The victory song isn't always loud. Learning often isn't either. Part of developing as a teacher — part of what sustains people in this work over years and decades — is making sure you’re listening for the victory song.

A Final Thought

The Forever Fountains uniform blends past and present, honoring the Kansas City Royals’ roots while pointing toward the next generation of players and fans (and I’m talking to you, Bobby Witt, Jr. and Jac Caglianone). Teaching sort of works the same way. Every September you inherit children shaped by everything that came before you — every prior year, every teacher they've had, every hard thing and every joy. Your job is to honor that history, show up fully in the present, and point them toward a future you may not fully see. Yet.

It's a long season. The fountains run whether anyone's watching. The song plays after the last out.

Go teach something! Go Royals!