Size of the fight in the dog

I'm pasting below a quote from an email Jamie's baseball coach sent to me. I think it's pretty spot-on about his performance this Spring and his personality generally:

"Jimmy is a case study in heart and in intelligence...He has no experience, he knows no one, he is on the smallish side...Yet has improved by leaps and bounds...why? Because he cares. The batting machine is scary as hell, other stronger kids throwing the ball to him at 100 mph...etc. and what does he do he grinds for every little bit of territory he can get, builds on it, never really complains...he has gotten stronger and every one has noticed..great kid"

This came in the wake of an absolutely heart-stopping game last night. Your hometown Aggies, through a bewildering combination of bad luck, loss of attention and general bumbling found themselves entering the bottom of the 6th (last inning) down 9-5. Now the rule here is that you can only score 5 runs in an inning so we knew we could just do it. The first two kids got on and the third hit a ground-ball that began one of those incredible sequences by which a series of over-throws led to him coming all the way around to score, so suddenly it's 9-8 and no outs. The next kid gets on, thanks to a bobble, and gets moved to second on a ground out. So here comes Jamie. Very quickly gets to two strikes. You can tell he knew exactly what was going on and it was very very quiet, which with 24 7-8 year-old boys and their enthusiastic parents is highly unusual. On the third pitch the kid on second stole third. Jamie digs in...and cracks the next pitch to third, bringing home the tying run and putting himself on first. He then stole second and third and I would love to bring this story home (as it were) by saying Jamie got driven in for the winning run but the next two struck out so we ended with a hard-fought tie. But Jamie was grinning from ear to ear at first base after his big hit so that's good enough!