Few players have accomplished as much as Andrew McCutchen has as a Major Leaguer: a five-time All-Star, the 2013 NL MVP and the 2015 Roberto Clemente Award winner to name just a few of his highlights in a 17-year career.
But a moment from his Little League days taught McCutchen a valuable lesson about overcoming failure and setbacks.
McCutchen, 38, is the featured guest on the latest episode of No Easy Outs, a new series on MLB YouTube that details how some of the game’s biggest stars have overcome challenges on their way to Major League success. The conversations are designed to relate to younger audiences (ages 8-14), informing them about the power of resilience and demonstrating how even the best players in the game experienced difficulties that they’ve had to overcome.
During his long career, McCutchen has learned over and over the importance of maintaining confidence during the long grind of a baseball season. The seeds of that lesson were planted in a Little League loss that still eats at McCutchen decades later.
Andrew was a developing five-tool superstar when, as a 12-year-old, he was trying to pitch the Fort Meade, Fla., All-Stars to a championship.
“My stuff was pretty unhittable,” said McCutchen, a future Gold Glove Award-winning outfielder.
But a sudden bout of wildness put him in a bases-loaded situation with two outs in the last inning, his team clinging to a one-run lead. Unable to throw a strike, coaches implored McCutchen to “just lob it in.”
McCutchen says he can still hear the sound of the ball as it buzzed by his head and into the outfield for a game-winning hit.
As the best player on his team, losing the game in that moment brought a wave of emotions that McCutchen didn’t know how to handle.
“That was probably the lowest moment for me as a 12-year-old kid. Feeling like you lost the game ... didn’t know if I should cry or could cry.”
Losing that game in that fashion was a humbling moment that stuck with McCutchen. Still, he was brimming with confidence as a high school senior when he hit .709, was named Florida’s Gatorade Player of the Year and chosen 11th overall by the Pittsburgh Pirates in the 2005 MLB Draft.
He literally laughed at the scout who told him that a .300 batting average was going to be considered a success from that point on. Until he hit .297 at his first Minor League stop.
“There was a big learning curve for me to understand that this game is a lot harder than I think. It may not just be a numbers thing. It might just be the fact that you’re far away from home ... that’s a struggle in itself, having to learn how to cope with that on top of a game that is very demanding.”
McCutchen eventually learned to adopt a day-to-day approach that helped him stay even keel after both good games and bad. He even found a catchy way to remember how to take the positives from any situation.
“The way to deal with failure is to address it, not shy away from it ... but always backing it up with a “but” or a rebuttal. I always call it a re-BUT-tal.
“I didn’t have such a good game today ... but I’ll learn from that and I’ll pick it up tomorrow and be ready to go.”
No Easy Outs is a series that utilizes a mix of animation, sit-down interviews, archival footage and dynamic graphics to tell unique stories of each player. Steven Kwan stared in the pilot episode that's streaming now on YouTube. Subscribe to MLB’s YouTube page to make sure you don’t miss an episode.