Concentrate On Focus

How and Why the Best Athletes Stop Thinking...

The Winter before he retired I took batting practice with George Brett once a week at Kauffman Stadium and I originally thought it was because he liked me, but eventually figured out George needed someone at the other end of the batting cage to unclog the Iron Mike pitching machine whenever it got jammed which, fortunately for me, was pretty often.

Nevertheless…

I took the opportunity to learn as much as I could about hitting from one of the greatest hitters who ever lived and on top of that, one of the greatest clutch hitters who ever lived – George hit .337 and slugged .627 in the postseason – and when I asked him about that postseason success George said some players couldn’t forget there were two outs with a runner on second in a tie game in the World Series, but he could.

He’d focus on seeing the ball and all the other factors would fade away. He wouldn’t think about the score or the situation or where his hands were or the current Consumer Price Index or tensions in the Middle East.

So being a dope and not getting it, I said, “So you’re just thinking about seeing the ball?”

To which George replied, “I’m not thinking about seeing the ball, I’m seeing the ball.”

Now go ahead and wrap your mind around that one, Grasshopper.

And now that I think about it, the first thing George had me do was stand at the plate and watch balls go past me and keep watching them until they hit the screen behind me and George said when he took a pitch in a game he’d watch the ball all the way into the catcher’s mitt because it helped him focus on the ball and also made it look like he really saw it and if he didn’t swing it must not be a strike and umpires would be more likely to see it that way, too.

(So there’s another thing you can watch for tonight; how many hitters watch the ball all the way into the catcher’s mitt?)

The people who perform the best aren’t just better physically, they also have a better mental approach and have learned to tell their conscious mind (that inner jerk who constantly comments on what we’re doing and why we just said something stupid to a friend’s hot wife and wonders if our hair looked alright when we said it) to shut the fuck up so they can focus on the task at hand.

The Inner Game of Tennis

So after that experience with George I got interested in developing a better mental approach to baseball and someone encouraged me to read The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey and the short version is Gallwey was a tennis instructor who was frustrated by his students’ slow progress no matter how many times he pointed out what they were doing wrong and how to do things right.

As I recall – and I often don’t – Gallwey was also into some Zen Buddhist Meditation Type Shit and decided to try a different teaching approach; he had his students watch some good tennis players and then told them to forget all the stuff he’d been trying to teach them and just imitate the better players as best they could and in the meantime the only thing they should do mentally was try to see the seams on the tennis ball.

Once they put a ball gag in their conscious mind’s mouth, they all got better immediately.

(BTW: The Inner Game of Tennis currently costs $23.49 on Amazon so I just saved you some money and maybe you should consider becoming a paying subscriber because if all the people who read my stuff, paid to read my stuff I could write every day and quit drawing those damn cartoons. An appeal I don’t actually believe will work, but I figured I’d take a shot anyway.)

The Mental Game of Baseball

So now I’m really in to learning about the mental process and sports performance and next up was The Mental Game of Baseball by Harvey Dorfman and the main thing I got out of that book was the idea that being “clutch” was not rising to the occasion, it was being able to stay the same and take a World Series at-bat the same way you take a spring training at-bat.

Block out all the unnecessary (and unhelpful) thoughts and it’s the same task.

The truth of that statement was reinforced when I was watching the Little League World Series and the non-athlete announcer asked his pretty great athlete co-announcer, Orel Hershiser, if the key to success was “rising to the occasion” and Orel said you could try that, but you might be better off just keeping the same steady approach and letting everyone else try to rise the occasion and fail. Then you’d look like you played better because they played worse.

Think about it:

If you could throw the ball harder or hit it farther you’d do it all the time and when athletes try too hard, bad things tend to happen and if you’ve been watching the Royals play the Yankees you saw a pitcher bounce a slider about halfway to home plate because he tried to throw the Best Slider in The History of Sliders.  

We praise the idea of trying harder, but when athletes are going bad it’s almost always because they’re trying too hard. The athlete who can back off and calm down in big situations has a better chance of success.

(The Mental Game of Baseball costs $15.72 on Amazon and by reading this column you have now saved $39.21.)

The Mental ABC’s of Pitching

Next was Dorfman’s The Mental ABC’s of Pitching because I had to manage pitchers and didn’t understand how they thought and why they believed they could get lit up like Times Square on December 31^st and I shouldn’t do anything about it.

Turns out, good pitchers always think they’re going to “find it” if you just let them keep pitching, even though they’ve walked six, gave up four screaming line drives, hit two batters and one of them was still in the on-deck circle.

No matter how bad things are – and they could be standing knee deep in ice water on the starboard rail of the Titanic – they believe they’re about to turn the situation around.  

I once asked Big League pitcher and then bullpen coach Doug Henry if pitchers had to have the same mentality as The Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail – “It’s just a scratch” – and Doug started laughing and said: “Exactly.”

Now here’s a video of me and Doug that I found on YouTube, but thought was lost forever and in it Doug talks about bullpen roles and the mental toughness a closer needs because a guy pitching in the sixth inning knows if things go poorly, the manager can pull him, there’s a line of pitchers behind him and his team still has time to come back, but a closer knows he’s it.

He’s last in line and if he pitches poorly his team will probably lose and it will be his fault.

Some people who haven’t played much baseball like to think pitching is all the same no matter when you pitch, but that’s like thinking walking the length of a 12-inch wide plank lying flat on the ground is exactly the same as walking that 12-inch plank if it was 100 feet off the ground.

Some pitchers can focus on the plank and not the 100-foot drop, but some pitchers can’t.

Which brings us to the main point of Dorfman’s book: pitchers need to focus on nothing but the pitch they’re about to throw because they can’t do anything about the pitch before that one or the pitch after that one and Dorfman would ask pitchers he worked with what color the catcher’s mitt was and when they couldn’t tell him – and a surprising number of pitchers couldn’t – he’d say you’ve been looking at it all afternoon, but you’re not focusing on it.

Dorfman also said pitchers shouldn’t throw a pitch with 25% of their mind thinking about the runner on first base or try a pickoff with 25% of their mind thinking about the hitter at home plate; whatever they did they should do with 100% focus on that task.

He also said Greg Maddux had the right mental approach and after one game he asked Maddux how it had gone and Greg didn’t talk about umpires or hits or the score or his defense, instead Greg said something like (and I don’t recall the exact numbers): “73 out of 94” meaning that was the number of pitches he threw with complete focus.

That’s what Maddux controlled so that’s where he directed his attention and there’s a reason his nickname was “The Professor.”

(The Mental ABC’s of Pitching is $14.59 on Amazon and if you’re keeping track that’s a total savings of $53.80 so you’re welcome.)

So What’s All This Mean To You, The Baseball Fan?

I started thinking about all this while watching the Mets play the Phillies and the situations that are mentally dangerous for a pitcher and they might surprise you because it’s stuff like getting the second out of an inning, getting a hitter 0-2 and getting a Superstar out, because in all those seemingly-favorable situations pitchers often let down mentally because they see the finish line, ease up on their focus and throw a horseshit pitch.

Which goes a long way in explaining two-out rallies, 0-2 home runs and getting a future Hall of Famer out, but then getting beat by a guy most of us never heard of..

So in tonight’s Royals game pay attention to those situations and you’ll see who maintains focus and who loses it and if you’re having people over to watch the game, don’t be a cheap ass; use that $53.80 I saved you to buy pizza and beer.

Enjoy the game.