One Pitch at a Time

This post starts a new series on the mental side of the game.

I'll start it the same way I start it with my players. I tell them, "Fill in the blank. Baseball is __% mental, __% physical."

They say 80/20. Eighty percent mental, twenty percent physical.

Then I ask them: "If it's 80% mental why don't we train it more? Why do we only train the 20?"

Most of our practice time goes to the 20: swings, ground balls, throws, conditioning. That work matters. But if the players themselves say the mental side is the bigger part of the game, it deserves real time too. That's what this series is about.

Where it starts for me

I'm a huge proponent of Heads Up Baseball by Ken Ravizza. The full title is Heads-Up Baseball: Playing the Game One Pitch at a Time, and he wrote it with Tom Hanson.

I tell my boys it's literally one pitch at a time. There's nothing you can do about a failed occurrence. You have to be able to stay in the moment, stay focused: one pitch at a time.

That's the whole idea. The pitch that just happened is over. The next one hasn't happened yet. The only one you can do anything about is this one.

Can't live in the past

My players hear this from me so much they could say it in their sleep. I tell the boys and they repeat after me: "Can't live in the..." I point back and they say "past." Then I say, "Can't live in the..." I point the other way and they say "future."

I already got these guys trained.

The past is the error you just made, the strikeout last inning, the bad game last weekend. The future is the at-bat you're worried about, the scoreboard, who's watching. Neither one is the pitch in front of you.

Two parts of this game

I tell them that's why there are two parts of this game.

Baseball has offense and defense. If you make a mistake in the field, you still get to hit. If you strike out, you still get to go play defense. A mistake in one part doesn't have to carry into the other. But that only works if you leave it where it happened.

What Bryce Harper did with it

We just got a great example of this on the biggest stage.

In Game 2 of the Phillies' Wild Card series against the Braves, Bryce Harper misjudged a fly ball in right field. It got past him and a run scored, in a game where the Phillies' season was on the line.

After the game, ESPN shared a clip of Harper talking about it. He said he was thinking about his son, Krew, and what he would tell him in that same situation. Then he said, "I think you try to flush it as quick as possible."

He talked about turning the page, because he knew he was still coming up to hit. And he said, "It's what you do in that moment."

Bryce messed up in the outfield and came and got a good hit. The very next inning, he hit a home run that tied the game.

That's both parts of the game, one inning apart. The mistake happened on defense. He didn't carry it to the plate.

You can watch the clip here: ESPN on Instagram.

Why I teach this to young players

Every player is going to make mistakes. That isn't a coaching problem. That's baseball. The question is what happens on the next pitch.

A young player who drops a fly ball and is still thinking about it in the box isn't really hitting. He's living in the past. A player who is already worried about what his coach or his parents will say isn't really hitting either. He's living in the future. One pitch at a time is how you get him back to the only pitch he can do anything about.

That's why I want to train the 80, not just talk about it. We'll keep going on this in the next posts in the series.

I tell my players this too: "You're going to be a human being a lot longer than you're going to be a baseball player. My goal is to make you a great human being, but in the meantime let's get really good at baseball."

Train the whole player

The physical side is still part of it, and that's where Proteus testing comes in. EXPI runs Proteus testing waves in our Ontario garage, with group and team rates available. Reach out to book your spot in the next Proteus wave.