In April of 2005, I made my first professional road trip as the mental skills coach for the Pittsburgh Pirates. I joined our Lynchburg club in Winston-Salem N.C. and then drove to Hickory to see our Low-A team at home. We played a day game on Sunday and then Brian Graham, the Pirates Farm Director, invited me to join the staff for dinner. I was still getting to know everyone as I was new to the organization. As we ordered appetizers, a few of the guys were asking about what I did. There were only a handful of mental skills coaches in baseball at that time.
One asked, “So you do visualization?” “Yes, of course,” I replied. “Wouldn’t you want to see yourself hitting Randy Johnson’s slider before you faced him?” Everyone started laughing. I didn’t know what was funny about that. But we had three former big leaguers at the table who had faced Randy Johnson. Jeff Branson told me why it was funny.
“I don’t think I ever made contact with Randy Johnson’s slider! If you want to hit Randy Johnson, you’d better just hit the fastball,” he explained, still chuckling.
It was one of many lessons I learned early in my career about the difference between preparing yourself and realistically preparing yourself.
Mental training has come a long way since I broke into baseball in 2005. I’ve been lucky to be around a lot of great coaches and players in the last 20 years. As your seasons get underway, whether you’re a Division I coach who went to Omaha last year or a high school coach trying to get 13 kids to come out for baseball, you all have goals and aspirations about what your year will hold in store for you and your players. A good friend told me that everyone thinks they have prepared mentally before they play meaningful games with stats that count. I thought it would be helpful to have a few ideas for starting your season out right mentally, so you don’t have to go back and make adjustments if things don’t go the way you expected in the first few weeks. You can set your players up for success with two simple concepts: setting the right goals and doing frequent and realistic mental practice to build responses to adversity.
Setting the Right Goals
Every Spring Training, I would sit down with dozens of minor league players, some in their first camps, others grizzled veterans. I’d ask them their goals for the season. And almost every one of them had three goals very similar to these:
- I want to hit .300 or hit 30 home runs orwin 20 games or strike out 200
- I want to move up a level
- I want to make the All-Star team
My next question would be, “what if you didn’t accomplish any of these this year, but you still made it to the big leagues someday? Would that be okay?” They all agreed it would be just fine!
So those aren’t goals that really help you get closer to the big leagues. My advice in Spring Training was to pick a developmental goal. Something that would help you hit .300 or get 200 K’s. If you want to hit .300, maybe you need to work on your plate discipline. If you want to move up to AA this season, maybe you need to develop command of a third pitch. These are the kinds of root causes that create results. And players don’t feel as much pressure with goals like these because they have control over them. By now, you know phrases like “control what you can control.” But if you want to realistically operationalize them, then you have to focus on something that matters to your performance that you can do on every pitch. Like seeing the ball out of the pitcher’s hand. Like keeping a quick tempo on the mound, or slowing yourself down when you get behind in the count. If you focus on simplifying keys to your success and making executing them your measure of success, you’ll see more consistent results throughout the season.
Mental Practice for Overcoming Adversity
I have found that visualization is most often used for building confidence. Most people see themselves playing well. But this is the danger and the difference in preparing yourself and preparing realistically. Pitchers aren’t going to throw immaculate innings with three K’s on nine pitches. But they mentally practice them. And when they walk the leadoff hitter or give up a leadoff double, they aren’t prepared because what happened in the game didn’t match what they had been rehearsing in their minds. I’m not saying you have to see yourself get pulled after two-thirds of an inning, but you have to mix up your mental practice to include failure. You have to be ready when you walk a hitter and see yourself get a ground ball for a double play with the next man up. You have to see yourself strike out, be willing to stick to your approach, and come up with a big hit later in the game. Ultimately, you’re still visualizing success. You are just doing it by overcoming adversity instead of by dominating your competition. You want to feel like you’ve been there before when there’s a man on third and nobody out. That’s how you end up stranding that runner. So practice it now, practice it often. You’ll be ready when it matters.
Learning and Perspective
Your players want to prove to you that they can play. They want to put up numbers. They want to earn and keep starting spots. They want to get drafted. Pro guys want the same. They want to move up, get put on the 40-man roster, play in the big leagues, and earn long-term deals. These are all strong motivating factors and so are the numbers goals I mentioned. But when we start out slowly, it can get tough to dig out of that hole, especially having to get six hits out of 10 to make up for an 0-for-10 start! Keep your players focused on learning. There is so much to learn from an at-bat, even a strikeout. If players feel like they can learn something that will help them achieve their ultimate goals, they will stay positive in the face of adversity. Help them see that, help them stay patient. Help them set the right goals now and engage in realistic mental practice and you’ll find fewer bumpy starts to your season.
Geoff Miller has spent the better part of two decades working in Major League Baseball for multiple organizations. His mental skills training series and commentary are available through Optimize Mind Performance, an app that links athletes with some of the most renowned mental skills coaches from around the world. For more information, visit www.optimizemindperformance.com.