The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 mph

by Shawn Green

“No, you can’t go to the cage anymore without my supervision.”

But I learned that the most efficient way to accomplish this was to remove myself each day to a place of stillness, a place removed from time.

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.

Ted Williams often said that swinging at better pitches is the key to getting more hits.

Instinctively, I was better able to read the pitch by moving my head and eyes toward the plate;

The farther back the fist is loaded, the more power in the punch. However, the farther back the loading, the longer the time the punch takes to be delivered. As a hitter, I brought my hands back as far as they would go, to the extent that my right arm was no longer bent.

three swing issues in a new light that off-season. One day, it hit me. I had always viewed the challenges in my swing as three separate issues and had tried to fix each problem on an individual basis.

In reality, all three issues were the result of one underlying flaw in my swing: the upper half of my body and the lower half of my body were working as one connected piece. In other words, my hands going back too far during my stride, ultimately causing my arm to bar out, was directly proportional to my stride being too long. During the time that my foot was in the air, my arms and bat had to go further back in the other direction to act as a counterbalance. The tendency for my stride to dive in toward the plate also forced my right shoulder to turn in toward the plate with it, and vice versa. To fix these problems, I had to begin with my setup.

One might think Major League pitchers should know better than to tip their pitches. After all, they’re the best of the best. But Major League pitchers are actually more likely to tip than even high-school pitchers or Little Leaguers. This is because less experienced pitchers aren’t likely to have thrown enough pitches to have ingrained consistent mechanics, whereas major leaguers throw thousands of pitches each year in the bullpen to recreate the same deliveries over and over.

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.

“Watch his glove. He flares it on a changeup.” I

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.

distraction! To become responsive, I had to move my awareness off the surface, to move deeper.

Now, responding rather than reacting put me in control of my relationship with the pitcher. Common sense would tell you that the pitcher is always in control because he decides what pitch to throw, whereas the hitter isn’t supposed to know what’s coming. Of course, much of the time I did know what pitch was on the way, but even when I didn’t, I was still often in control of my at-bats. This is because I knew which pitches I wanted to hit, so I simply watched for those pitches. I didn’t sit on pitches or jump at pitches, as many hitters describe their calculated anticipation of a particular pitch. In my view, these practices rely too much on an effortful process of guessing and analyzing and reacting. 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.

“Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish … Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” I needed to live

I made the mistake of allowing the numbers to distract me from the deeper truth I should have recognized about my rushed swing.

However, my obsession with chasing after imaginary numbers wouldn’t allow me to return to a place of presence. I knew what my wise, former teammate Tony Fernandez would have done.

By swinging a heavy, long bat, he had to start his stride early. He had to create the proper separation and space so that his entire body could pull that log through the strike zone.

Everything the home run obsessed hitter does, beginning with the stride, becomes rushed, until you’re jumping out to meet the ball almost before the pitcher releases it. Inevitably, you chase a lot of bad pitches. Additionally, when you try too hard to hit for distance, you often rely on your upper body rather than your legs to generate the power. Subsequently, the path of the swing becomes longer and so, even as your body moves more rapidly, the bat actually moves more slowly. I knew all this, but it didn’t matter. My desire for more home runs became an obsession. I needed to hit 10 homers in June to get back on pace for 40. I approached every game like a junkie searching for his next fix. “Home runs, home runs, home runs …” was all I could think about, even when I wasn’t at the stadium. My swing fell apart.

Because I was no longer responding to the pitcher but had returned to merely reacting, every pitch appeared to come at me at one hundred miles per hour. I didn’t have time to respond. Each night at the plate, I rushed through at-bats, hitting tough pitches in counts when I should have been more patient, grounding out to either the first or second basemen.

There’s a reason why Hall of Famers such as Rod Carew, Tony Gwynn, and Wade Boggs managed to chop so many grounders between the third baseman and shortstop for base hits. They didn’t have to hit the ball harder than others because they hit it better. By

All of my growth over the previous two seasons had been undermined, as my attention turned from the present moment to an illusory image of who I was supposed to be. I’d lost the ability to find the stillness and meditation even during my tee work, as those

Of course, it’s not uncommon to make the mistake of comparing where we are in our lives to where we should be. The truth is that there is no such thing as where we should be; we are where we are, period. Nonetheless, our culture provides limitless illusory images of what our lives should be. We are objectified and trained from an early age to drive toward the future to achieve and acquire more. We’re told that’s where the happiness lies. This only distances us from happiness. Consider the workaholic, who tells himself he’ll be satisfied with the next promotion, conquest, or raise. He dreams about acquiring a bigger house, fancier car, golf membership, trophy wife. However, should he reach these goals, he will not be satisfied because new ones immediately arise. His life will feel empty because he continues to believe that only the next acquisition or achievement can fulfill him, but it never does. Ironically, if that same hard-driving man ever discovered how to live in the moment, rather than in the past and the future, his work would likely produce even better results than his obsessive drive ever did.

“I’ve been working on slowing down my stride and being a little more balanced. Last year, my feet were quick and my bat was slow. This year, I’m trying to slow my feet down so my bat can speed up.”

Chop wood, carry water.

When the gloves came off in the dugout, I let go of the bad at-bat. And my use of batting gloves in my spiritual practice didn’t stop there.

circumstances often provide us with clues and opportunities as we navigate our twisting paths. I knew exactly what I was going to do.

Life isn’t about continually getting to the next level. Too many of us view life as if it were a school in which we constantly are trying to graduate to the next grade.

Habitually, we label ourselves and others, and before long these labels create a false sense of identity that we spend far too much of our energy trying to justify. Sometimes we habitually identify ourselves with our jobs, our possessions, our goals; other times we habitually identify ourselves with our problems, our frustrations, our illnesses, our weaknesses. Better to just be where you are, to just feel what you feel.