Ethyn Street, a junior pitcher/second baseman with Our Lady of Mount Carmel School in Essex, has learned plenty about the cruel side of his favorite game. Of all the many sports he has tried, baseball has rewarded Street – and tortured him – the most.
Not even an extremely trying sophomore year, when he led his team as a pitcher with its lowest earned run average yet struggled mightily with an extended hitting slump that left him with a .111 batting average, could make Street consider quitting the sport.
“I was down in my own head too much with the worst slump I have ever been through. Everybody deals with failure in this game,” Street said. “I think baseball is the most challenging game there is, and the most fun. It never fails to amaze me and it never fails to let me down.”
High school players and coaches competing in the talent-rich Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association, a prominent athletic league of private boys’ schools that includes numerous Catholic institutions in greater Baltimore, can feel Street’s pain.
They know well how the game can yield euphoric results and can also crush one’s confidence. How it has earned its reputation as a game that will inevitably produce hitting, pitching or fielding slumps that few can avoid. How injuries can affect or end seasons prematurely. And how teams weather those storms with mental toughness, strong faith in each other, and the ability to keep pressure – internal and external – under control.
“When times get tough, we lean on each other. We always have each other’s backs,” said Miguel Leon, a senior star shortstop with defending ‘A’ conference champion John Carroll School, who is headed for the University of Maryland. “We have a real brotherhood here that will last. It’s bigger than just baseball.”
Leon said he learned lessons about dealing with adversity from ex-teammate Will Rhine. He led the Bel Air school to the ‘A’ conference championship last year and was named MIAA Gatorade Player of the Year in 2025, after overcoming injuries earlier in his high school days. Rhine is now a freshman player at Alabama.
“We saw how Will’s hip problems were very tough on him mentally. We gave him lots of words of encouragement,” Leon said. “Will found other ways to be in the game, like supporting us in the dugout and being in players’ meetings. His resilience was admirable.”
Darrion Siler, John Carroll’s head coach, said the pressures exerted on his players are real. Besides dealing with formidable academic workloads, many players are being recruited by colleges and universities, with possible scholarships hanging in the balance. There can be outside negative noise, in the form of online bullying on social media. Uncertainty regarding the future can be debilitating at times.
“The game challenges us to strip away the illusion of control and it forces us to a more honest place. You can’t fake confidence when things aren’t going well,” said Siler, who supplies his players with various Bible verses to assist them in navigating success and failure and embracing the team’s best interests.
“For a lot of our players, faith is not about asking for results. It becomes less about ‘help me get a hit’ and more about ‘help me stay present, composed, connected to who I am.’ I think of faith as an openness to truth as it reveals itself to you,” he added.
As a certified sports and performance psychiatrist and medical director for The Retreat by Sheppard Pratt in Baltimore, Dr. Michael Young said baseball’s relentless failure cycle can magnify pressure on athletes already balancing academics, recruiting expectations and social pressures.
“Players must constantly bounce back from failure,” Young said. “If you combine that with recruiters watching them, they can become overwhelmed with physical and psychological effects. Emotional stress – muscle tension, headaches, fatigue – can lead to burnout.”
Young also points to the growing trend of year-round, single-sport specialization, which drives unreasonably high expectations, overtraining and injury risk. Injured athletes, he noted, often feel isolated, haunted by questions about their future, which makes support systems even more critical.
Over his 34 years as a coach, Mount Carmel Head Coach Mike Naunton said he has learned the “psychology game” is as important as the “thinking and reacting game” he teaches. His squad competes in the MIAA ‘B’ conference with a school sporting a small enrollment ranging from 225 to 260 at the high school level.
Naunton said it is critical for him to get to know his players and to stay on top of what is going on in their lives. And he has learned over the years to lighten the baseball load on his guys.
“There is a lot more to (coaching) than ‘You’re dropping your elbow (on your swing)’ or ‘your stride is too long (in the batter’s box),’ ” he said. “It’s about knowing how they did on that big test, or what’s going on at home or with their friends’ group at school. Maybe they had a rough night before.
“It’s OK to lose, but they need to learn from it. We try to make the game fun for them,” added Naunton, who makes it a point to divide some practices into baseball work and cutting loose with a fun escape, such as having every player throw with their opposite hand or hit from their weak side or run the bases backwards.
“It takes a certain kind of young man to play a game where you are constantly reminded you are going to encounter failure,” said Mount St. Joseph head coach and alumnus Phil Kraska, whose Irvington team is trying to dethrone John Carroll from the top of the ‘A’ conference with potentially its first title since 2004 – the year Kraska graduated.
Like any typical Catholic school team, spirituality is ingrained in the Gaels’ approach. The team prays before every game, celebrates Mass and visits chapels while on extended baseball trips. At least half his team is deeply rooted in the Catholic faith.
Mount St. Joseph senior pitcher Michael Bahouth, who is headed to Division III Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., is very much in touch with his spirituality. In mid-March, Bahouth suffered a torn UCL in his right elbow, which will require Tommy John surgery. The injury will disable him for nine to 12 months.
“As a pitcher, it’s one of the worst nightmares you will ever have. My teammates are always checking in on me,” said Bahouth, who will study engineering at Rensselaer. “I’ve always been told to have faith God is taking care of it, but work like God has no control over it. This game can go away at any time. I trust in God that this is the place where I should be now.”
Street, of Mount Carmel, has found his own way of responding to the game’s pressures and failures – with a black Sharpie becoming as essential to baseball as his glove and bat.
Before taking the field, he carefully writes a Bible verse on his wrist tape – a quiet but powerful reminder of the faith that has reshaped his life and steadies him through the highs and lows.
“I wanted to grow deeper in my faith and I started diving deeper into it,” said Street, who did not have much of a religious background before he came to Mount Carmel from a public school in eighth grade. “I followed this Instagram page that sent daily Bible quotes. … I would look at it in my Bible when I start the day, and it honestly just stuck with me, and I would read them before games.”
What began as a daily habit soon became part of his routine on game day.
“Why not incorporate it in my game and give all the glory to God?” he said.
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