What Raising a Chess Prodigy Has Taught Me About Baseball

A Perspective on Developing a Potentially Elite Talent

We are thrust into parenthood sans the experiential knowledge required to perform one of the most important roles we’ll ever have in our lives. Faced with no choice other than to do our best, we learn on the fly, often sleep deprived in the early stages. We make mistakes, we learn, we adapt, but most of all, we revel in discovering who our children are, what makes them unique, and special to us.

For me, this meant being thrust into the unexpected role of custodian, guide and mentor to a precocious chess talent, a role I was wholly unprepared for, and still not sure I know how to do properly. When I’m not thinking about baseball, I think about whether I am doing a good job shepherding Brandon’s chess career, and honestly, I really don’t know. I’ve learned a whole lot, and I think a lot of that is relevant to baseball, which is the subject I mostly write about.

Before we dive in, let me indulge in some parental bragging. If you follow me on Twitter/X you’ve probably seen occasional (ok fine, too many) posts with me documenting/bragging about various milestones Brandon has reached at various points. I do this for a couple of reasons, first, I like to brag about him! I’m super proud. Second, I’m obviously very biased, but I tuly believe he has world-class, Magnus Carlsen-esque potential in chess, and I feel it’s important to document that journey, in the small chance that he does achieve a notable level of success.

My first tweet about him was just over 5 years ago when I first began to see the potential he had:

Apparently, ~8 months later, I wrote basically the same thing:

Ironically, despite Ben’s very kind comment, Brandon is somewhat of a chess snob, and considers me well beneath his talent level. Losing to me at this point, would be an embarassment. I’m very glad I documented those things, as I otherwise would have no real way of knowing when those milestones occured.

For context, I didn’t grow up as a chess kid, while I knew how to play, I hated the game, as I would inevitably blunder my queen, a problem I still run into today. I’ve learned a lot alongside Brandon, so my chess game has gotten a lot better, but I don’t think he gets his raw chess talent from me.

It’s often hard to wrap my head around just how good he is at speed chess. This is a snapshot as I sit down to write this:

That’s #2336 in the world in bullet chess. I don’t know precisely how many people are actively playing bullet chess on chess.com, but it’s in the millions. His ratings in slower time controls are not nearly as spectacular, and it remains an open question if he will ever excel at slower time controls, but his bullet chess rating is among the best in the world.

His rating may have changed since this published, but you can browse his stats here:

https://www.chess.com/stats/live/bullet/4kchess_tv_junior/0

What I’ve Learned

Let’s dive into the primary reason I’m writing this: sharing what I’ve learned, specifically what is relevant to the world of baseball, even more specifically, the art of developing elite level talents into professionals.

Development is A Step Function / There Are Plateaus

Take a glance at the chart above, which has a very large sample size. In the beginning, his rating climbed almost in a linear fashion, until as some point, he hit a plateau. His first plateau lasted almost 2 years, and perhaps he even regressed a little. Then he jumped up a tiny step, and got back to his former peak that he flashed in early 2021. At this point he’s pretty good, but not among the elite.

I’m not sure exactly when he took that next step, but up until September 2023 he was “stuck” in the 2100-2200 range, then all of a sudden, he takes a giant step, and now he’s holding 2500 consistently.

You never know when that next step is going to happen. It might never happen! In the baseball prospecting world, we tend to downgrade prospects a lot who merely tread water, who don’t develop in the linear way we intuitively expect them to. While sometimes that might indicate the player has stopped developing, it’s also possible they just haven’t taken that next step, and that next leap is just around the corner.

The Flash of Potential

Every once in a while Brandon has a great day and flashes to a new milestone. This is in many ways akin to pitcher reaching 100, or a batter cracking a 115 mph exit velo. Once the player knows they have it in them, it fuels them to make that peak their new normal, and push the boundaries of their potential just a little more. Every time he hit a new milestone, it was only a matter of time before he was able to hold that peak. Developing talents are often inconsistent, the talent they flash is often much more informative than the talent they show on daily basis.

Dealing With Failure

Losing sucks. In baseball and chess, you’re going to lose a lot, especially if you’re a batter. The hardest thing for me as a parent, was learning that I need to just let Brandon deal with failure on his own, in his own way, and just gently remind him that every time he’s been in a slump, he’s found a way to fight his way back to where he wants to be.

Right now I’m thinking about Jackson Holliday. He’s never in his life dealt with this level of failure, and it can shake you to your core. For Brandon, there have been slumps where he wanted to quit chess, and dealing with failure is a constant stuggle. Sometimes, it kills his joy, other times, it fuels him to try even harder and push through to erase the failure (in baseball parlance “pressing”).

Everyone will deal with failure differently, and I don’t have a specific takeway, except for the notion that how a player deals with it can potentially inform you about that player, but it also might mislead you, especially when they are very young.

Challenging a player, such as Sebastian Walcott, and letting them fail, struggle and potentially overcome might just be the forge that creates the sharpest steel, or it might crack.

Don’t Mess With the Swing

This is probably my most relevant message to anyone reading this. DON’T MESS WITH WHAT MAKES THE ATHLETE GREAT. I made this mistake, big time, and it almost killed Brandon’s chess career. It’s a mistake I think about a lot, and one I’m very grateful he was able to overcome. Early on, we paired him with a couple of coaches, both International Masters, very close to Grand Master level. Elite chess players, and fantastic coaches, just not for Brandon.

Between the 3 of us, we tried to morph him from a tactical, calculation machine who played on intuition, into a boring, positional classical chess player, which was not what he was at all. It sucked the joy out of the game, and he spent most of his time fighting his coaches, trying to articulate to his coaches that they should work with his style, rather than try to change him. I should have listened to him! I thought I knew better, a mistake we often make as parents. Sometimes we do know better, but also, a lot of the time, we really have no clue.

I can’t stress this enough. If a player has had success doing things a certain way, DON’T MESS WITH WHAT MAKES THE ATHLETE GREAT. You might think you know better, you might think they can’t succeed in their own way, but do not try to rebuild them into the type of player you think they need to be to succeed. Tweaks are fine, but overhauls can break the player.

The Importance of Joy / They’re Babies!!!

A side-effect of the mismatch in coaching, was that it sapped a lot of (all?) the joy he had playing chess. It became a job of sorts, something he understandably had no interest in. I remember vividly when he broke down and told me he was worried I didn’t love him because he wasn’t succeeding (by his standards), or on pace to be Magnus Carlsen just yet. I feel a lot of guilt about this; of course my love wasn’t contingent on his chess career, but it clearly was what he was experiencing, and it instantly changed my perspective, and apporach. I stopped talking to him about what I thought he needed to do to reach his potential, and just let him breathe, and play for fun.

He took a year off of chess, pretty much, and from my perspective, I felt like I had stolen his potential from him. At some point, he logged back into his account and started playing again, off and on, and eventually, without me breathing down his neck, he rediscovered his joy, and catapulted himself into the upper echelons of the sport.

I think this is very relevant to how the baseball industry deals with precocious Latin American child athletes. While these kids are somewhat older than Brandon is right now, these kids (babies!!!) are thrust into being professionals as early as 13 (earlier?), with grown men evaluating everything they do, on and off the field. How are you supposed to have fun and joy, playing a game, when you’re under such an intense microscope, at such a young age? We see the kids that succeeded, like Julio Rodriguez and Elly De La Cruz, who cearly have lots of joy playing baseball, but how many were crushed by the process?

For kids growing up in Canada or the United States, there’s a lot less pressure. Not great when you’re 15/16? You got time, senior year of high school is the most important year. Not good enough to be drafted straight out of high school? There’s probably a college program you can find. Can’t make the Bigs out of college? There’s probably a job somewhere in baseball for you. Can’t find a job in baseball? You’re living in one of the richest countries in the world. Charlie Condon is a prime example of this. If he were a kid in Venezuela, he never would have had the time to develop into one of the of the best hitters in the world. In fact, he probably would have stopped playing baseball entirely at 15, as he wouldn’t have been on anyone’s list.

For the Latin American kids, it’s a whole different ballgame, pun intended. Succeeding can often be the difference between poverty and saving your family from poverty. If you aren’t hitting certain performance benchmarks at a certain age, you’re not going to make it. There’s no realistic way to remove that burden from the minds of the children playing the game, especially the ones striving to be the one in a million that makes the major leagues, but we can definitely be mindful of it, and endeavour to reduce it. I think an International Draft would be a step in that direction. But that’s a longer discussion, and a topic I don’t feel remotely qualified to write about.

Never Satisfied / Never Good Enough

I think this part is extremely important, and highly relevant to the baseball world. What makes Brandon great, is the fact that he’s never happy to be stuck at whatever level he’s at, no matter how spectacular it is. The thrill of reaching a new milestone is fleeting, and lasts for a day or two at most, and rapidly turns into “I’ve been stuck at 2500 for a whole week” mentality. Once he gets to a level, and holds it, he’s now looking at the next level that he’s eyeing. He won’t be happy until he gets there, then he’ll be happy for a day or so, and then it’s on to the next goal.

I don’t know exactly how you would measure that in a baseball athlete, but I imagine players like Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer are very much wired this way. No matter how good they are, they’re going to want to be better. deGrom was the best pitcher in baseball, by a wide margin, but that wasn’t enough. He’ll push himself to be the best possible version of himself, beause no matter how good he is right now, he can be just that little bit better.

If you can find the athlete/prospect that has this mentality, I would bet on that profile. I don’t know much about Travis Bazzana, but what I’ve read about him sounds a lot like this mentality. You don’t have to be wired this way to succeed (early career Anthony Rendon, probably), but being wired this way will drive you to be the best possible version of yourself.

Final Thoughts

This is probably the most personal article I’ve ever written, but I felt it was important to share what I’ve learned over the past 5+ years trying to help my son reach his potential, and how those lessons might relate to developing and evaluating baseball players.

We used to stream chess, and I’ve promised Brandon we will do that again soon. If we do resume streaming, you can find us on Twitch; give us a follow, and come join us when we do:

https://www.twitch.tv/4kchess_tv