The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 mph

by Shawn Green

It’s the most common thing in the world to forfeit a fulfilling routine when one’s schedule becomes more demanding.

At first, it seemed accidental that I found my own meditation with a bat in my hand. I know now that there are no accidents—everything is as it’s supposed to be.

A novice at any skill will fail to find meditation in the practice of that skill until he or she has achieved a level of technical expertise that makes the skill feel like second nature. The pull approach I had been forced to explore with Willie and Cito required my thinking, so it could never have provided the stillness I experienced when I returned to my natural swing.

The difference now was that I was not thinking about mechanics; I was focusing only on my breathing and on the ball.

Whatever was said about me, positive or negative, did not have to affect the way I felt about myself.

Just as I changed my relationship with the baseball by stopping it and placing it on the tee, meditation enabled me to change my relationship with my thoughts.

Contrary to general misconceptions, meditation is not about training oneself to live without thought; rather, it’s about training oneself to move beyond one’s thoughts.

No longer a slave to worry, about either the upcoming game or what my coaches and teammates might think of my antics, I was truly free to enjoy a spontaneous moment.

Because I had the stillness of mind to enjoy what the world was offering me, I was able to connect with others in a new way.

My mantra wasn’t a candle flame or a chant, as in some forms of meditation. My mantra was the ball motionless; the only movement I focused on was the movement of my breath. The swing occurred on its own. Absorbed in the action of hitting, I felt my body moving, I saw only the ball, and I heard the contact of the wood on the ball followed by the swishing sound of the ball hitting the back of the cage—a beautiful practice. I had reduced hitting, an extremely difficult activity, to its most basic form. As a result, I took each swing with full attention.

Finding stillness, however, enabled me to understand the pitfalls of allowing the ever-changing external world to dictate my inner world. If one stranger’s opinion could actually change my stress level, anger level, and overall well-being, then who was actually at the controls of my life? And yet that is how most of us live, whether we’re in the public eye or not.

By using your own breath to anchor you to stillness, you can connect with the present moment. For example, in my tee work I’d place the ball on the tee and take a breath, step back and take a breath, swing the bat, hit the ball and take a breath, bend and pick up another ball and take a breath, place the new ball on the tee and take another breath. Ultimately, the mindful breathing, which served to focus my attention, was as much a part of the exercise as the actual swinging of the bat.

Concentrate on whatever you’re doing. Life is full of menial tasks, which means it is full of opportunity. You can transform any task from an act of distracted second nature into an active meditation—the same awareness you’d employ if you were doing it for the first time. And you will discover that being fully attentive is being fully alive.

Finding stillness through my tee work proved a life-altering discovery. The practice was simple: focus on my breathing, feel the swing without thinking about it, and hit line drives up the middle.

Ideally, a hitter wants a short stride, so his swing can be quicker, providing extra milliseconds to judge the pitch. Ted Williams often said that swinging at better pitches is the key to getting more hits. The catch, however, is that it is usually that extra length of the swing that provides power. My former teammate Paul Molitor had no stride. He just picked up his front heel and put it back down. This made his swing extremely efficient and contributed to his amassing more than three thousand hits in a Hall of Fame career, but he didn’t hit many home runs. On the other hand, Reggie Jackson had a big stride and big swing, striking out often but hitting more than five hundred homers in his Hall of Fame career. Only the very best all-around hitters in each generation, guys like Barry Bonds and Albert Pujols, have the ability to take short, quick strides and still have home run power. I could never do that. The goal for me was to find a happy medium.

Such imperfections might make you wonder how I ever got a hit at all! However, the truth is that all hitters have negative tendencies in their swings; the challenge is to navigate through obstacles and work with what you have. I probably could have played an entire career simply putting bandages on these issues by finding strictly physical ways to compensate. However, I’d never have developed the power and production that I found after that ’97 season.

I’d just never arrived at a proper solution to the problems with my swing because my mind had always been filled with analytical thoughts. Those four summer months in ’97 of swinging in stillness created the necessary space and emptiness of mind for the solution to just come to me. (We often solve life’s most complicated dilemmas when we sleep on it, or in my case meditate on it.)

Through the ’97 season, I’d always had a square stance. In other words, my back foot and front foot were in a straight line, parallel to home plate and in line with the pitcher. The other two stance options are a closed stance, wherein the front foot is closer to home plate than the back foot, aiming more of the back toward the pitcher, or an open stance, wherein the front foot is further from the plate than the back foot, aiming more of the stomach toward the pitcher. In my square stance, my right foot, right hip, and right shoulder were all perfectly aligned, aiming at the pitcher. However, as I took my stride I’d wind up aiming more toward the shortstop than the pitcher, with my right shoulder aimed somewhere between the third baseman and the shortstop. Thus, my up-the-middle approach was defeated when I actually took my swing. How to correct the problem? Instead of fighting where my body wanted to go, I went with it. Keeping my entire body locked into its natural position, I danced my feet around clockwise so that, when I swung, my right shoulder would be aimed directly at the pitcher rather than at the hole between third base and shortstop. I looked down and saw that I was now in an open stance with my feet, but my shoulder was in perfect alignment for hitting up the middle. The open stance that I practiced for the rest of my career was born.

My initial reasons for making these changes were to free up the inside part of the plate and to shore up my weaknesses as a hitter, but in the process I had unwittingly created much more power in my swing. It stands to reason. The lower half of my body was now twisted toward the second baseman while my upper body was facing the pitcher, thereby creating more torque as my body unwound with each swing. Visualize a toy airplane with a propeller and a rubber band. The more you rotate that propeller, the more tension is placed on the rubber band. The greater the tension, the faster the propeller will spin upon release—simple physics.

Rather than stopping thoughts, meditation is about shifting one’s awareness out of thought by focusing attention on something else.

Importante

At the tee, the flow of the routine became my mantra: take a breath, focus on the ball, swing, take a breath, place a new ball on the tee, then repeat. The work consisted of my swinging in a place of no thought, learning to peel my awareness away from my mind and redirect it into my body. Soon, I was able to move my attention out of my head and into body parts (my foot, my shoulder), shifting my awareness from one to the next without encumbering the movement, or flow, with any thought.

It took me a few weeks of focusing on my new swing intentions to get the mechanics ingrained. Once ingrained, I had a new approach that became second nature. My tee work returned to the deeper, daily meditation that I had created the summer before, except now my swing was much improved; my body parts were no longer pulling each other into unwanted directions, my stance was open and my body torqued, my stride moved straight toward the pitcher and when my front foot landed the coiled position I had created in my stance remained intact.

Swing bueno

Coaches had always wanted me to hit for more power, but, oddly, they’d never told me to practice hitting home runs during batting practice. Instead, they’d give mechanical suggestions as to what changes in my swing or approach would help me hit more home runs, but they never suggested I simply practice hitting the ball as far as I could. Often, the simplest ideas are the best.

Though lasting only a fraction of a second, the space sometimes felt like an eternity, making a ninety-five miles per hour fastball seem to float in like a beach ball. If I liked the pitch, my swing would begin with my lower half, legs and hips, rotating forward while my upper body stayed back. Next, the turning legs and hips would sling my upper body and bat forward with tremendous force. At that point, I wasn’t swinging; something was swinging me. To illustrate this further, consider again your breathing; sometimes it’s difficult to differentiate whether you’re breathing or whether the world is breathing you. Ninety-nine percent of the time, we pay no attention to breathing, but it still happens. In the past, whenever my bat felt slow, which inevitably happens in a 162-game schedule, I concentrated on speeding up my hands. Like most hitters, I thought I was supposed to swing a bat with my arms. After discovering separation and space, I realized that the best way to hit was to not swing at all, but to get the body in the proper, separated position, then simply allow the body to naturally uncoil. The bat then falls into the perfect slot and comes through effortlessly with great velocity. It sounds simple, but there is a catch. The stride and all the body movements leading up to the swing must be fluid and happen right on time. That’s the tricky part, the timing, which differentiates mediocre stretches from hot streaks. If the stride is late, then the bat rushes forward, th...

For most of us, our awareness becomes trapped within our heads. We are so lost in the fantasies of our minds—egoistic images of who we think we are or should be—that we fail to truly experience the world around us. Instead, we merely think the world. Meditation, practiced in any effective format, trains us to exist and function apart from the mind and ego, allowing us to experience the present moment. In my meditative practice at the tee, my awareness attached itself to my body and its movements. In those twenty-minute sessions, I was no longer thinking through my swings; rather, I merely watched as the swings happened. Whenever self-consciousness crept into my head, I’d shift that awareness back into my striding foot, my shoulder, or my breathing. On many days, I moved beyond even my connection to the body and felt I had actually become the act of hitting, so absorbed in what I was doing that I lost my sense of self.

Through this daily work, I created a kind of bubble around what I came to recognize as my true essence. All that I previously had thought I was (mind, ego, and emotions), was pushed to the surface of that bubble, away from my true essence, which floated at the center. And what filled the gap that separated this essence from the surface of that bubble? Emptiness. Space. Just as hitting a baseball became effortless when separation and space characterized ...

As we find ourselves becoming worked up, we remind ourselves, “Relax, it’s just a movie,” and the tension immediately subsides. We pull ourselves together by remembering that we are sitting in a chair fifty feet away from a screen watching actors work from a script. When considered from this perspective, it sounds a little crazy that a projected strip of celluloid can cause us to experience real physiological change due to serious emotions. Of course, getting pulled into the illusory drama is a big part of what makes a movie an enjoyable, compelling experience. The other critical aspect, however, is the realization that what’s happening on the screen either isn’t real or isn’t actually happening to us. It is the existence of this space that allows us to truly enjoy the shock of a horror movie or the sadness of a tragedy. Without it, we’d lose perspective. Likewise, it is space that allows us to refrain from flipping out for thirty minutes just because we run into a traffic jam; it is space that allows us to keep from getting lost in drama, whether that drama derives from a fiction on a movie screen or an inconvenience or disappointment in our own lives.

When separation and space were present in my swing, ninety-five miles per hour fastballs seemed to come at me in slow motion and my bat seemed to be pulled through the hitting zone by an external force. Similarly, everyday issues lost their potentially overwhelming velocity when I viewed them from a distance and solutions came effortlessly from my deeper self (rather than from the shallower source of the mind).

Being more emotional doesn’t equate to caring more.

The game of baseball (and my world off the field) was becoming much clearer because I no longer confused my thoughts with my true essence. Still,

Dan Millman’s book The Way of the Peaceful Warrior discusses the power of losing your mind and coming to your senses.

Libro

He wasn’t throwing and I wasn’t hitting, we both became the movement, just as dancers moving in sync become the dance rather than individuals dancing.

By midseason ’98, my connection to the pitcher began to make its way beyond BP and into actual games. I was no longer battling against a pitcher who was trying to get me out. I’d step into the box and, through my rhythmic routines, become aware of my body. Released of the mind’s interference, my awareness (as unselfconscious as a predator striking its prey) was now free to connect to the pitcher. By the time the ball left his hand, I was fully alert in the moment, so that the pitcher was now my partner in hitting rather than my opponent. Since there was no identifying with myself, what was left? Nothing, no one, only a single action, hitting. During my increasingly frequent hot streaks, I became the act of hitting rather than a person who was hitting. In the absence of any weighty sense of self, I’d step into the batter’s box much lighter. Sometimes, I’d step out between pitches to revisit my mind. “Check the signs. What’s the count? What’s the game situation?” But as soon as my spikes returned to their toeholds, my mind would dissipate. My body would move through its routine, extending my awareness out to the pitcher. I’d feel my fingers wiggling around the bat handle and my body subtly rocking, but I’d be completely out there, at once anchored to my body and locked on the pitcher.

It’s amazing what we notice when we actually watch with full awareness.

Now, when I knew what kind of pitch was coming, I no longer needed to swing at every fastball or alter my stride to hit an off-speed pitch. If I knew a changeup was coming, I didn’t think about it—I simply watched for a slower pitch in a specific location. If the ball was in that location, the swing happened on its own. I wasn’t thinking, just watching. Over the remaining ten years of my career, close to half of the pitchers I faced (including more than a few Hall of Famers) gave away their pitches.

The most common way pitchers tip is with their gloves. Different pitches are held differently in the throwing hand. A fastball is gripped with the index and middle finger on top of the ball, whereas a changeup is gripped more with the palm. Thus, the hand holding a changeup often makes for a wider hand in the glove. As a hitter, I’d observe from sixty feet away the glove get bigger, or flare, by just an inch or so with this widened changeup grip. The movement didn’t have to be drastic for me to pick it up and know what was coming.

I knew that if I could be on time for the pitch, then I could adjust to the movement of the ball.

Another way I’d get out of my mind while at bat was to pretend I was watching an exciting movie starring the guy on the mound, sixty feet, six inches away. The movie started with his windup and continued as the ball moved toward me. In this way, I could take myself out of the at-bat and simply watch. If the pitch was good, the swing just happened with no doing on my part. This movie-watching approach was all about keeping my attention on the pitcher and out of my mind and became one of my strongest assets.

Besides, it’s important in any endeavor to know when to focus and when to relax, when to joke around and flick sunflower seeds, and I was finally finding the right formula.

In the past, my mind analyzed opponents pitch by pitch. Now, I regarded the at-bats as a whole. Separated from the mind, I could perceive more. Like a man standing in an art gallery looking at a painting by Seurat, I was now able to step back and see the big picture, to see what it was all about, instead of being so close that I could see only different colored dots of paint.

However, by ’98, I was ready to track pitchers in a more productive way. This time I made notes that helped me approach pitchers with a general plan, but not an analytical pitch by pitch plan. It was fluid. Sure, I used my mind to analyze the pitchers, but the analysis was done after the seeing, not during. I watched the pitcher with a quiet mind and only called upon my mind between pitches. Still, pitchers often confounded me, but I didn’t have to be right every time. If I correctly anticipated one changeup in an at-bat or two or three pitches in an entire game, I was bound to have a lot of success over the course of a season.

I wasn’t guessing; rather, I was following a plan that provided a few optimal pitches to hit each day. Sometimes I was wrong for an entire at-bat or for a whole game, but I was giving myself my best chance.

I even came to realize that many guys pitch differently with a base runner on second than they do with a base runner on third. In both cases, the runner is in scoring position. However, with a runner on second, pitchers don’t have to worry so much about the hitter making contact, so to keep hitters off balance, pitchers tend to throw curveballs and sliders in the strike zone; with a runner on third and the prospect of simple contact resulting in a run, pitchers tend to throw more fastballs high and inside, as that’s a pitch often popped up or fouled back. Also, many pitchers throw fewer forkballs with a runner on third, because they don’t want to bounce one by the catcher. Others tend to throw the same pitch on a full count as they’ve thrown the pitch before, because they already have the feel for the pitch.

I went up to the plate with general guidelines regarding a pitcher’s tendencies. The pitcher still chose his pitches, but I felt I was in control because I had my plan. I waited for my pitch, not his. I didn’t sit on pitches in the manner other hitters often describe, which involves too much guessing and effort. Rather, I wanted to approach pitches with stillness, patience, and no thought, just waiting, watching, and seeing. This allowed me to respond to pitches, as opposed to my first few years in the big leagues, when I merely reacted to pitches. The difference between reacting and responding is subtle, but immense.

I simply watched for pitches with no thought or action, just patiently waiting and seeing. And if I watched for my pitch with full attention, my swing happened spontaneously.

Just as opening my eyes to the pitcher enhanced my success at the plate, opening my eyes to the world improved my life. My meditative work at the tee was the initial vehicle by which I’d begun to know myself, and to realize that I wasn’t an actor playing the role of Shawn Green, baseball player. Now, I was in touch with my deeper, true essence, which before had been lost in mind and emotion. The daily circumstances of life didn’t change, pitchers didn’t change, but my perspective changed and so now I could respond in my own way rather than merely react to both baseball and life. Now, my awareness controlled my life situations rather than life situations controlling my awareness.

Maybe that’s why people love vacation so much—it’s an opportunity to separate from our other lives, our public identities. Sometimes, the awareness of this separation brings more joy than any particular destination.

The mind is closed and rigid, fixated on its desires; it manipulates all perceptions to fit into the paradigm it has created. Awareness, on the other hand, is open and fluid and offers a path to what is real. Awareness opened my eyes as a baseball player, enabling me to connect on the field, and now it was opening my eyes as a man, enabling me to connect to the world, to finally quit trying and to begin living. Pure awareness is wiser than the mind.

Why did it suddenly seem as if the world was guiding me through my journey, taking me by the hand? This is why: I had learned to move out of my mind, which enabled me to see things that I had never before been able to see. My eyes were open to life for the first time and so I was immersed in the world. A year before, I’d been completely absorbed in developing my swing and my meditation at the tee. In the time since, I’d transcended my mind and connected with my true essence both on and off the field.

Over the past year, my statistics had come to define my sense of self. Not good.