Teaching players how to handle failure?

Baseball is a game of failure. And, if we expect our players to handle adversity shouldn't we teach them how to handle failure? I believe unequivocally yes.

Here are some examples of teaching kids how to handle failure.

1) Teach players what you expect of them on pop ups and ground outs. I'm talking about the routine variety here. It's one thing to generally say you need to hustle everything out. But, it's another thing to explicitly state I expect you to get to 1B in .2 of your fastest time always. I expect you to get to 2B on all pop ups to the outfield in 9 seconds. I also expect you to give the new batter "five" before he gets in the batters box. This requires that the guy who popped up hustles all the way into the dugout.

2) When the umpire calls a close pitch a ball we want to tell the pitcher to demand the ball back from the catcher. We don't want the pitcher to have ambiguous ways in which to react. We want to tell the pitcher exactly how to react to this unhappy experience. Another good point is to teach all the assistant coaches how you want to react to these circumstances as well.

3) One of the hardest things to do is accept a strike 3 call from the umpire. You need to teach the player how you want him to react when an umpire "wrongs" the player. A good practice is to give the player an out that he can live with that doesn't show the umpire up. If he batter thinks that he was called out wrongly he should turn away from the batters box and remove his helmet a he walks back to the dugout. Simply drop both the bat and the helmet just inside the field of play. This "irreverence" can be cathartic and it avoids the conflagration that could ensue otherwise.

There are other ways that a coach can encourage a player to handle failure. These are examples of three.