I was always the youngest player on my teams. So when I played, I did not mature as quickly as everyone else and I just wasn’t as strong. Hitting wasn’t my strong suit until my junior or senior year in high school, so I had to be good on defense and I took pride in that and worked better than everyone else to be good defensively.

To become a good defensive player, you just have to pay attention. I watch what people do in their first couple of swings in an at-bat — if they’re fouling it to one side or pulling everything, you can tell what they want to do. So you position yourself accordingly and that will let you get to more balls than you would have if you weren’t paying attention.

I don’t think people pay much attention to their defense before games. During batting practice, when they’re hitting, they’re locked in and trying. But when they go into the field during BP, they go through the motions. It’s not about taking a lot of balls, it’s about paying attention and doing it the right way and acting like it’s a game. A lot of people in practice don’t treat it as a game situation and when it happens in a game they get flustered because it isn’t routine.

If you’re a good defensive player, you’ll always have value. If you have a bad day at the plate, you can make two or three good plays in the field to help your team win. It’s not about putting more emphasis on one over the other, but defense can never go into a slump.

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Hitting is a very personal part of the game. You sacrifice for the team on some at-bats, but mostly it’s you against the pitcher. When you make an error you feel bad because you’ve put your pitcher in a bad situation. You made him throw more pitches; you’ve made your teammates stand out there longer. An error affects the whole team.

I talk to Barry Larkin a lot about defense. He was a shortstop, so he had to move more and had different angles. But the biggest thing he talks about is footwork, never stopping your feet and lining up to the target, and not throwing flat-footed. A lot of my errors are throwing errors, so that’s one thing we’re working on. I’ll talk to some other players about defense, but most of it is just work ethic. You can’t necessarily make good hands; that’s God given.

I’ve gotten better at it, but I have a long way to go to be where I want to be defensively.

As told The Examiner’s John Keim.

Nats third baseman Ryan Zimmerman is one of baseball’s rising stars and, at 22, the face of the franchise. Now he’ll share his thoughts with The Examiner’s readers each week throughout the baseball season.