Geoff Miller

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Milton Bradley: Role Model

In Mental Game Info on May 6, 2010 at 8:39 pm

I wrote a brainstorm with a lot of ideas that came to mind when I heard about Milton Bradley asking the Seattle Mariners for help in dealing with his stress and personal issues this week, but the only message that I think is really important for all of us to take out of watching Bradley’s situation is that it should be easier and more acceptable for people to ask for help.  I think that’s true in our society, not just in baseball and I am hopeful that this is one of those situations that makes it easier for players in the future to feel like they can ask for personal help when they need it. I did some research a couple of winters ago, asking college coaches if they thought there was still a stigma associated with sports psychology.  Many of them said that the stigma was still there, but that sports psychology was becoming more widely accepted in recent years.  So I wanted to offer encouragement to Milton Bradley and applaud him for his bravery in asking for help, something that may have been a long time coming, given the trouble he has experienced in his career.  And I wanted to point out how well it seems like the Mariners organization, from Jack Zduriencik to Don Wakamatsu to Bradley’s teammates, is handling the situation.

If you’re wondering, my work is almost never involved in helping people with personal or family issues or anything clinical in nature.  My role is to help players with on-field performance and development of their mental skills.  There can be a lot of overlap between off-field issues and on-field performance and I have the responsibility of recognizing where my work stops and the work of psychologists begins.

Every team offers an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) to its players, coaches, and staff and EAP provides support for people needing help with alcohol and drug abuse, marriage and family therapy, clinical depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, and other therapeutic services.  In my experience, I’ve met with many players who were hesitant to ask for help when they needed it from EAP, and I’ve been proud to explain the value of this service. It’s similar to going to the trainer when your arm is sore or going to the doctor when you have the flu. We all experience stress in different ways and we all come to the field with our own unique personal and family situations.  Sometimes those situations make it difficult for us to stay focused on our jobs.  That’s nothing to be ashamed of, and I’m glad to see some positive light being shed on the process.

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For more information on Winning Mind programs for athletes and executives, please contact Geoff Miller at miller@thewinningmind.com.

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Babe Ruth: Sport Psychology Experiments in 1921

In Mental Game Info on December 17, 2009 at 8:04 pm

For my final post of the year, I am including the text, link, and citation to a great find for anyone who loves baseball…an article describing a psychology experiment with Babe Ruth as the subject.  In 1921 at Columbia University, Ruth took part in a battery of tests designed to understand why he was such a great hitter.  The tests included measures of the Babe’s coordination, dexterity, memory, cognitive processing, vision, reaction times, and intelligence.  There were a number of tests also done on his swing, his generation of power, whether or not he held his breath when making contact, and predictions of how far he could hit the ball.

The article’s original title was “Why Babe Ruth is Greatest Home Run Hitter” and was published by Hugh S. Fullerton in Popular Science Monthly in 1921.  The link itself will take you to the web site of Christopher D. Green, at York University in Toronto.  I’ve put a few excerpts on this post, but you have to click on the link to view the photos of Ruth participating in the experiments and read the original captions from Popular Science Monthly.  Beyond my amazement in reading such a treasure to baseball history and the history of sport psychology and sport science, I was amused by some of the language and descriptions of the time.  My brother and I always used to tease our Dad about how he would describe a good curveball by how much “English” the pitcher had put on it.  I see now that this was a common term in the 20’s and his own father must have taught him that phrase.  Same goes for the experimenter wanting to understand the likelihood of a player “pulling a boner”…which I’m sure might draw a laugh or two from my adolescent readers (regardless of your ages!) But anyone who knows their baseball history will recall that “Merkle’s Boner” cost the New York Giants a chance at the 1908 World Series and is still considered one of the worst mental mistakes in the history of the game.

Thank you for your continued interest in the blog. I won’t be posting anything new for the rest of the year, but will be ready in 2010 with more interviews, the rest of the mental skills manual, and more case studies that identify key mental factors and describe development approaches.  Wishing you and your families Happy Holidays.

Excerpts from “Why Babe Ruth is Greatest Home Run Hitter”

The game was over. Babe, who had made one of his famous drives that day, was tired and wanted to go home. “Not tonight, Babe,” I said. “Tonight you go to college with me. You’re going to take scientific tests which will reveal your secret.”

“Who wants to know it?” asked Babe.

“I want to know it,” I replied, “and so do several hundred thousand fans. We want to know why it is that one man has achieved a unique batting skill like yours — just why you can slam the ball as nobody else in the world can.”

So away we went. Babe in his baseball uniform, not home to his armchair, but out to Columbia University to take his first college examination.

Babe went at the test with the zeal of a schoolboy, and the tests revealed why his rise to fame followed suddenly after years of playing during which he was known as an erratic although a powerful hitter. How he abruptly gained his unparalleled skill has been one of baseball’s mysteries.

Albert Johanson, M.A., and Joseph Holmes, M.A., of the research laboratory of Columbia University’s psychological department, who, in all probability, never saw Ruth hit a baseball, and who neither know or care if his batting average is .007 or .450, are .500 hitters in the psychology game. They led Babe Ruth into the great laboratory of the university, figuratively took him apart, watched the wheels go round; analyzed his brain, his eye, his ear, his muscles; studied how these worked together; reassembled him, and announced the exact reasons for his supremacy as a batter and a ball-player.

Baseball employs scores of scouts to explore the country and discover baseball talent. These scouts are known as “Ivory hunters,” and if baseball-club owners take the hint from the Ruth experiments, they can organize a clinic, submit candidates to the comprehensive tests undergone by Ruth, and discover whether or not other Ruths exist. By these tests it would be possible for the club owners to discover — during the winter, perhaps — whether the ball-players are liable to be good, bad, or mediocre; and, to carry the [p. 20] practical results of the experiments to the limit, then may be able to eliminate the possibility, or probability, of some player “pulling a boner” in mid-season by discovering, before the season starts, how liable he is to do so.

The scientific ivory hunters of Columbia University discovered that the secret of Babe Ruth’s batting, reduced to non-scientific terms, is that his eyes and ears function more rapidly than those of other players; that his brain records sensations more quickly and transmits its orders to the muscles much faster than does that of the average man. The tests proved that the coordination of eye, brain, nerve system, and muscle is practically perfect, and that the reason he did not acquire his great batting power before the sudden burst at the beginning of the baseball season of 1920, was because, prior to that time, pitching and studying batters disturbed his almost perfect coordination.

Ruth the Superman

The tests revealed the fact that Ruth is 90 per cent efficient compared with a human average of 60 per cent.

That his eyes are about 12 per cent faster than those of the average human being.

That his ears function at least 10 per cent faster than those of the ordinary man. That his nerves are steadier than those of 499 out of 500 persons.

That in attention and quickness of perception he rated one and a half times above the human average.

That in intelligence, as demonstrated by the quickness and accuracy of understanding, he is approximately 10 per cent above normal.

The first test to discover the efficiency of his psychophysical organism was one designed to try his coordination; a simple little test. The scientists set up a triangular board, looking some thing like a ouija-board, with a small round hole at each angle. At the bottom of each hole was an electrified plate that registered every time it was touched. Ruth was presented with a little instrument that looked like a doll-sized curling iron, the end of which just fitted into the holes. Then he was told to take the instrument in his right hand and jab it into the holes successively, as often as he could in one minute, going around the board from left to right.

He grew interested at once. Here was something at which he could play. The professor “shushed” me, fearing that I would disturb Ruth or distract his attention as he started around the board, jabbing the curling-iron into the holes with great rapidity. He would put it into the holes twelve to sixteen times so perfectly that the instrument barely touched the sides. Then he would lose control and touch the sides, slowing down. Only twice did he pass the hole without getting the end of the iron into it. With his right hand he made a score of 122. Not unnaturally, his wrist was tired and Babe shook it and grinned ruefully.

Then he tried it with his left hand, scored 132 with it, proving himself a bit more left- than right-handed — at least in some activities. The significance of the experiment, however, lies in the fact that the average of hundreds of persons who have taken that test is 82 to the minute, which shows how much swifter in the coordination of hand, brain, and eye Ruth is than the average.

The scientific “ivory hunters” up at Columbia demonstrated that Babe Ruth would have been the “home-run king” in almost any line of activity he chose to follow; that his brain would have won equal success for him had he drilled it for as long a time on some line entirely foreign to the national game. They did it, just as they proved his speed and his steadiness — by simple laboratory tests.

For instance, they had an apparatus with a sort of a camera shutter arrangement that opened, winked, and closed at any desired speed. Cards with letters of the alphabet on them were placed behind this shutter and exposed to view for one fifty-thousandth of a second. Ruth read them as they flashed into view, calling almost instantly the units of groups of three, four, five, and six letters. With eight shown he got the first six, and was uncertain of the others. The average person can see four and one half letters on the same test.

When cards marked with black dots were used, Ruth was even faster. He called up the number of dots on every card up to twelve without one mistake, The average person can see eight.

To test him for quickness of perception and understanding, he was given a card showing five different symbols — a star, a cross, and three other shapes — many times repeated, and was told to select a number — one, two, three, four, or five — for each symbol, then to mark the selected number under each one as rapidly as he could go over the card. He scored 103 hits on that test, which his the average of all who have tried it. But when given a card covered with printed matter and told to cross out all the a’s, he made a score of sixty, which is one and a half times the average.

The secret of Babe Ruth’s ability to hit is clearly revealed in these tests, His eye, his ear, his brain, his nerves all function more rapidly than do those of the average person. Further the coordination between eye, ear, brain, and muscle is much nearer perfection than that of the normal healthy man.

Full Article:

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Fullerton/

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For more information on Winning Mind performance programs, please contact Geoff Miller at miller@thewinningmind.com.

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Positive Role Models in Sports

In Mental Game Info on November 28, 2009 at 11:33 am

A few years ago, I was at a networking event in downtown San Diego and I had an executive tell me that he thought you could count the positive role models left in sports on one hand.  I immediately pointed out that 30 Major League Baseball players had been nominated for the Roberto Clemente Award for outstanding community service.  The problem isn’t that there aren’t enough positive role models in sports, it’s that we don’t hear enough about them and instead we hear about scandals, steroids, affairs, and police reports.  So on a weekend that reminds me how much coverage those negative stories get (I’m not going to bother mentioning the headlining story, but you all know what it is and I’m sure we’ll be hearing more events unfolding for weeks after this), I wanted to make sure that the world knows that both AL MVP Joe Mauer and NL MVP Albert Pujols were their teams nominees for the 2009 Clemente Award and that Derek Jeter won it this year in addition to his fifth World Series ring.  Here’s MLB’s page on the Clemente Award and the full list of nominees.  You can click on each nominee to find out why he was nominated.

I also wanted to share two more links.  The first is a story on NBA player, Baron Davis.  I used this story to teach minor league players more about perspective this year and I think it’s a great example of how an athlete’s identity shouldn’t just be as an athlete.  The quote that really sticks with me is from his grandma, who asked him when he was growing up, “If I take that ball away, who are you?”

Baron Davis Story

The second link is a story about Pirates pitcher, and a former client, Ross Ohlendorf.  Ross is doing an internship with the Department of Agriculture in DC this winter after earning 11 victories in his first full season as a starting pitcher in the big leagues.

Ross Ohlendorf Story

There are plenty of positive role models in baseball and in all sports that we can all learn from.  Let’s make sure that their stories get heard and that we continue to develop character on and off the field in the athletes we teach and coach.

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For more information, please contact Geoff Miller at miller@thewinningmind.com.

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Helping Athletes Develop Perspective

In Mental Game Info on November 23, 2009 at 11:27 pm

“Any time you have an opportunity to make a difference in this world and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on this Earth.”

- Roberto Clemente

We worry about a lot of silly things in our lives.  One of the most intriguing elements of my work with athletes has always been the fascination I have taken in what constitutes pressure in sports.  Sure, most people think there is pressure in the situations that have become cliché.  The full count with two outs and the winning run on second base, the free throws down by a point with no time left on the clock, the fourth and long in the middle of a two-minute drill on a snow-covered field in January.   But the thing about pressure is that no matter how many reporters will be waiting to grill us after the game, pressure is something we choose to feel.  Some players feel pressure to perform on the field.  Some feel more pressure to explain their performance after the game than they did executing their skills during the game.  Once in a while, special players come along who don’t appear fazed by what’s happening on the field and they are able to sign every autograph, gracefully accept every interview request, and seem to say the right things to their teammates to maintain the mood in the clubhouse.

I have found that more baseball players feel pressure from the daily grind of the game than from the big moments.  In the big moments, it seems as if batting average and OPS and all the statistics that help us evaluate performance go away and it becomes easier to simply compete because the outcome is so close that the only statistic that matters is the win or loss.  Lots of players get so wrapped up in results that they have lost sight of the competing part of the game and they end up competing with themselves instead of with their opponents.  The pressure we place on ourselves to perform is almost always greater than the pressure that others place on us.  Over the years, I began to notice a pattern in the sources of pressure that professional baseball players placed on themselves, so I proposed an idea that would change their perspectives and gave them chances to see just how silly it was to be worrying about how many hits they got each night.

On the surface, this wasn’t an idea about performance at all.  It was a community service program meant to teach the minor league players in the Pirates organization how to become role models in their communities, a valuable skill in its own merit.  Each player would volunteer a total of ten hours of his time helping out at Boys and Girls Clubs, serving breakfast at homeless shelters, visiting children in hospitals, or spending time with seniors in assisted living facilities.  Each minor league affiliate would appoint a liaison to coordinate volunteer opportunities and track player involvement and the players would sign up for events and attend as representatives of the Pirates and of their minor league teams. We packaged the program with a personal spin for the Pirates, telling our players that we believed they had a greater responsibility to volunteer in their communities as this was Roberto Clemente’s organization and his legacy.  Most of our players knew that Clemente was a great player and that he had died in a plane crash, but few of them knew that his plane went down on it’s way to bring emergency supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.

So the communities in Indianapolis, Altoona, Lynchburg, Hickory, State College, and Bradenton would benefit from the program, but the players who truly got involved would benefit just as greatly.  The goal was for each player to develop perspective, to see how silly it was to worry about how many earned runs he gave up the night before when someone in the world was worrying about how many white blood cells he had coursing through his veins.  Or how silly it was to wonder when he was going to move up from Lynchburg to Altoona when there were people wondering where they were going to sleep the next night or what they would eat the next day.  I wanted every player to remember that he should be grateful to have the physical strength, health, ability to be on the field every day, to remind himself how lucky he was to have the opportunity to earn millions of dollars doing something he loved.  If our players could embrace that perspective, then there wouldn’t be any pressure to get a hit or to throw strikes and they would end up getting the results they were trying so hard to achieve.

I thought that this was an appropriate story to tell as we join our families and friends in beginning the holiday season.  Wishing you and your loved ones a Happy Thanksgiving!

If you would like to receive new posts from The Winning Mind in Baseball by email, please CLICK HERE.

For more information, please contact Geoff Miller at miller@thewinningmind.com.

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Poor Self-Evaluation

In Mental Game Info on November 22, 2009 at 9:49 pm

Last Spring Training, I did extensive research with Pittsburgh Pirates minor league players to understand more about how they evaluated themselves in a number of areas of character.  I first asked players to rate themselves on character traits like relentlessness, integrity, passion, energy, etc.  Next, I asked their coaches to rate them on the same traits.  What I found was not surprising, but was a nice confirmation of what we suspected…that players rated themselves higher than their coaches would.  I listed four reasons for inaccurate self-evaluation and thought this would make for an interesting topic for today’s post.

The four reasons players are poor self-evaluators are:

  1. Lack of experience.
  2. They rate their intentions rather than their actions.
  3. They are afraid to admit weakness so they project false confidence.
  4. They don’t take their evaluation process seriously.

Lack of Experience

Many younger players may fall into the category of poor self-evaluators because they don’t have enough experience yet on or off the field to know how to rate themselves.  Ratings on skills are more about the results achieved than on the learning and progress that has taken place.  And there is no criteria to rate themselves on intangibles that have always simply been words on posters to them in the past.  Young players who lack experience need to be taught how to properly evaluate themselves.

Intentions vs. Actions

Players that rated themselves based on intentions rather than actions need to start developing greater awareness of when they are truly demonstrating proper execution and good character and when they are not.  I have found that this is especially true with respect to character.  The majority of players WANT to have good character and can make improvements in the way they carry themselves simply by tracking their behavior in the same way they would measure success in throwing first-pitch strikes or moving runners over with situational hitting.

False Confidence

Players who are afraid to admit weakness need to learn that there is more strength in admitting weakness than in projecting perfection.  It is important to reinforce honest appraisal of work as well as commitment to the learning process to minimize the possibility of fearful ratings from players.  A first step toward progress in this area could be simply asking the player to re-evaluate his scores and challenge himself to be tougher in his ratings so he can identify important areas for growth.

Effort

Players who don’t put enough thought into their self evaluations need to take their baseball more seriously.  They need to spend more time evaluating the meaning of their preparation and performances.  They should not under-estimate the valuable learning opportunities they have in front of them or the quality of the competition that awaits them at higher levels.  The evaluation and review process should be emphasized so these players don’t just value working hard and playing the game.

I will be releasing more results of my research on self-evaluation in the future, but you are welcome to ask specific questions in the comments section or by emailing me directly if self-evaluation has been a challenge for you and/or your players.

If you would like to receive new posts from The Winning Mind in Baseball by email, please CLICK HERE.

For more information, please contact Geoff Miller at miller@thewinningmind.com.

 

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College Baseball Coaches Discuss the Mental Game, Part IV

In Mental Game Info on November 15, 2009 at 4:48 pm

Before the 2009 season began, we asked 42 Head Baseball Coaches at Division I universities to help us better understand how the mental game of baseball is perceived and used in college baseball. Our goal was to learn more about how coaches taught the mental game in their programs, the biggest mental game challenges their players faced, and where mental skills training could make a bigger difference in the future.  The following summary provides statistics and commentary on the results of our interviews.

The interview began with eight open-ended questions, asking coaches to offer their opinions on a number of topics.  We accepted as many answers on each question as each coach cared to give.

The second half of the interview asked coaches to rate their players on 15 statements that defined different areas of the mental game.  Coaches would hear the statement and then provide a rating on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being most applicable and 1 being least, for how much the statement applied to their team.

Survey Questions

How applicable are these statements on a scale of 1 – 10?

(10 is most applicable, 1 is least)

Rank

Item

Avg.
1 The parents of our athletes put too much pressure on them. 7.27
2 I have players on my team who have trouble slowing the game down. 6.83
3 Our athletes put too much pressure on themselves. 6.71
4 My players get caught up with winning and losing (outcomes) instead of simply focusing on the “basics” (processes) that lead to victory. 6.51
5 I have players who think too much instead of just playing the game and trusting their gut. 6.46
6 I have players on my team who are physically talented, but completely unpredictable in games. 5.68
7 I have players on my team who have trouble concentrating on executing their skills. 5.56
8 I have players on my team who are afraid to face big challenges. 4.85
9 We lose to less talented teams because we get overconfident. 4.34
10 We lose to more talented teams because we play scared. 4.15
11 My players don’t work hard enough to succeed on their own so I have to constantly push them harder. 4.10
12 My players make too many mistakes on routine plays. 4.07
13 My players lose their cool too often in competition. 4.05
14 My team plays well in practice, but not in games. 3.88
15 Our failures can be traced directly to lack of effort in practices. 3.10

These results suggest that coaches believe that they can affect the mental game, as shown by lower scores on statements regarding areas that coaches have direct control.  Coaches are directly responsible for effort levels, quality practices, hard work, and setting the emotional tone for their players.  The statements that coaches agreed with most dealt with sources of pressure (in fairness to parents, it would be interesting to find out from players themselves whether they think their parents place more pressure on them than their coaches do), thought processes, and players maximizing their physical talents.  Perhaps the best individual formula for coaches defining how sport psychology consultants could help their programs is to consider where their players’ greatest challenges lie and to think about their own comfort levels and abilities to help their players overcome those challenges.

This research is meant to be ongoing and we would love to have your participation in completing the survey.  If you are interested in submitting your answers or if you would to offer additional thoughts, please contact Geoff Miller at miller@thewinningmind.com.

Click Here to go to Part I.

Click Here to go to Part II.

Click Here to go to Part III.

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Leadership and Life Lessons

In Mental Game Info, Uncategorized on November 10, 2009 at 9:23 am

As we celebrated the 20 year anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down, I thought I’d include a story that was told to me by a great coach this summer (who you’ll hear from in an interview soon.)  Each of us was assigned a day to discuss leadership in any manner we chose.  This coach found a story about the legendary Georgetown basketball coach, John Thompson on Eric Musselman’s blog.  I’m including a link to Eric’s blog as it is filled with interesting content like this story, which is transferable into any sport setting (and into life, too.)

Eric Musselman’s Basketball Notebook

It’s a Big World Outside of Basketball

Interesting story in Alonzo Mourning’s book “Resilience” about an incident involving John Thompson at a 1989 Georgetown basketball practice (pp. 69-70):

On November 9, 1989, the Georgetown basketball team was, not surprisingly, at practice. The session was physically and mentally demanding. John Thompson towered over every small detail of the game.

Then, for no apparent reason, he sent his players to the sideline bleachers. No one was sure what was up.

Thompson is a serious and intimidating man, who for decades made college players cower. It was no different that day, as he made eye contact with his players.

“Can somebody tell me what happened today?” he barked.

None of the players knew what he was talking about. Did he mean what happened at practice? Had someone screwed up off the court?

No one said a word.

Thompson pressed on, feigning surprise.

“No one? Who read the paper today? Raise your hand if you read the paper today.”

None of the players raised his hand; none had read a newspaper.

Thompson wasn’t happy.

“Can somebody at least tell me what happened on the headlines today — something of historical significance? Did any of you even bother to glance at the headlines?”

Still no one had any idea what Thompson was talking about. Finally, one of the student trainers, Markhum Stansbury, raised his hand.

“Coach, they tore down the Berlin Wall.”

“Right,” Big John said. “They tore down the Berlin Wall.”

Then he turned to his team, almost all black kids, most from poor backgrounds, all receiving the opportunity of a lifetime to attend one of the elite institutes of higher education in this country.

He shook his head.

“That’s a shame. You guys go to Georgetown University, a prestigious, world-renowned university, and not a single one of you can keep up with current events?”

Then his voice got louder, turned into that powerful blast that Thompson was famous for.

“The damn world could be at war, and you wouldn’t even know about it.”

The players were humiliated, which was the point. Thompson was relentless in pushing his players off the court. But it was about more than just earning diplomas, which virtually all of them did during his nearly three decades at the school.

It was about making them grow intellectually, socially, and spiritually. It was about setting up the habits that would continue that growth through the rest of their life.

It was about pushing them, maturing them, and making them aware of the big world outside of basketball. Thompson just could not tolerate anything less.

There are no small lessons with him — just lessons.

Not knowing what was on the front page was no more acceptable than failing a class or not trying for a rebound. It might seem minor to many (plenty of college kids are blissfully unaware of the world at large), but it wasn’t to Thompson.

There was no excuse for an educated adult not to know that the Berlin Wall had been knocked down, so he sure wasn’t going to accept such ignorance from his players.

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Baseball IQ vs Basketball IQ

In Mental Game Info, Uncategorized on November 8, 2009 at 6:39 pm

LZ Granderson wrote a column on ESPN.com’s Page 2 on Nov. 6 on the topic of Basketball IQ.  The theme of the article, entitled “Dumb Words About Hoops Smarts”, was that there were social and racial connotations when a player was categorized as having a “high basketball IQ”.  I found the column to be thought-provoking on a number of levels, but I can’t completely agree with the argument that Mr. Granderson has made.

Here’s a link to the article if you haven’t seen it yet:  Dumb Words About Hoops Smarts

Granderson argues that when players like Gilbert Arenas, Jason Kopono, and Thabo Sefolosha are labeled as having high basketball IQs, it means that the people making those assessments are either knowingly or unknowingly making a judgment that this is a rare occurrence.  He quotes Robert Thompson, the founding director for the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse with the following evidence, “The term ‘high basketball IQ’ suggests two things: that the athlete is only smart about basketball and nothing else, and that there are players in the NBA with a ‘low basketball IQ,’ which is silly.”

In setting up the column, Granderson asks, “Shouldn’t every player in the NBA have a high basketball IQ?” The answer to this question is my point of contention with the column.

Yes, every player in the NBA should have a high basketball IQ, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they all do.  I don’t have any experience in working with NBA players, so I’m not qualified to make an assessment on how much variability there is in knowledge of the game between players in the NBA.  But I can tell you with great certainty that professional baseball players differ on their Baseball IQs, a term I believe most people use to mean their specific knowledge of the game and application of that knowledge in the appropriate game situations.  I have a few thoughts that might help Mr. Granderson investigate the concept of Basketball IQ, but mostly, I’m interested in explaining my thinking on Baseball IQ in hopes that there are some similarities between baseball players and basketball players so that a player who has been told that he has a high basketball IQ can accept this as the compliment I believe it is meant to be.

I started studying Baseball IQ in 2005, my first season as Mental Skills Coach for the Pittsburgh Pirates.  As I was getting familiar with players in the system from Rookie Ball all the way up to the big leagues, I assumed when a player threw to the wrong base, or tried to beat an inside fastball hitter with an inside fastball, he was so affected by the pressure of the moment that he made a poor decision.  My assumption was that professional players should know that they should throw to second on a single with a man on first and no real chance to get the runner going from first to third because that trail runner would advance to second on such a play if they threw to third.  But I kept seeing mistakes like this happening.  As I surveyed coaches and scouts, I kept getting the same answer…that players today don’t really know how to play the game the right way.  It wasn’t that players needed to make better decisions under pressure, it was that they didn’t have the answers to make good decisions.

Most players had grown up practicing the game, but they hadn’t played catch with their friends, hadn’t played pick up games on sandlots like the generation of kids before them.  So while they knew the mechanics of hitting and they threw bullpen after bullpen with a private pitching coach, they hadn’t faced enough hitters, hadn’t had to improvise on the field, hadn’t learned the valuable lesson of throwing to the right base to keep a buddy from advancing.

We decided to begin a program to measure just how much our pitchers and position players knew about the game and we focused on teaching situational awareness in drills, meetings, and intrasquad games.  We tested players specifically on their Baseball IQ, creating an exam for pitchers and one for position players made up from critical information the coaches in the organization thought was important to know if a player were to be ready to play in the big leagues.  We found great variability in Baseball IQ levels between players.  Of course, there are also great differences in the experience levels of professional players, with some being drafted from high schools, some from junior colleges, and some from colleges.  But the greatest determining factor in our results seemed to be years of experience playing professional baseball.  So a Caucasian infielder who had just been drafted from a Pac-10 school the year before might have a lower Baseball IQ, according to our measures, than an African-American outfielder who had signed out of a high school in North Carolina and had two years of professional experience.  These results gave us evidence that the teaching our coaches were doing in the organization was having a positive effect.

A quick note to mention that we did not cross-reference scores for race, but that most of the players sampled were Caucasian (we created a test for Spanish-speaking players, but chose not to score their results as educational standards are different between the US, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic, which are the two countries the majority of our Latin players hailed from.)  It is widely known that fewer African-Americans are playing baseball and making it to the big leagues than a generation ago.  As an estimate, I thought that the Pirates had more African-American players in their system than the professional averages.  And there could be pages and pages of sociological discussion on reasons why there are fewer African-American players in the game, a trend I hope is being reversed as more attention is drawn to it.  The relevant point in reference to Mr. Granderson’s column is that we would not hesitate to label a player of any race as having a high or a low Baseball IQ and that there certainly is a knowledge base for playing baseball that can separate one player from another in terms of on-field performance.

So in returning my thinking to the article, here are some questions I considered while reading:

1. What do the experts think?

Has anyone asked NBA coaches if they think the general Basketball IQ of players is lower today than it once was?  Has anyone asked if they experience frustration during games because they have players who don’t know what they are doing on the court?  Do most players become smarter as they gain experience in the league?  Maybe Gilbert Arenas DOES have a higher Basketball IQ than the average NBA player.  Maybe he finds a way to avoid getting picked off his man on defense or knows how to disrupt the triangle offense better than most of his peers.  Maybe he knows how to find an open spot on the floor when his opponents have game-planned specifically to stop him.  Maybe he has learned Flip Saunders’ system faster than any player Flip has ever coached.  Just because there are people in the world who may let their prejudices bleed through in their description of players shouldn’t diminish the possibility that there truly are some basketball players who demonstrate greater knowledge of the game day in and day out on the court.

2. Pick up Games

Maybe the same reason coaches think there are differences in Baseball IQ levels is an explanation for why there would be similarities in Basketball IQ levels.  If there aren’t differences, I would wonder if the amount of time basketball players spend playing pick up games gives them the understanding they need to play the game at the highest level.  But without answering my first questions and finding out if there really is a difference in Basketball IQ levels among NBA players, we couldn’t explain why there is or isn’t.

3. A Paradox in the Argument

I don’t mean to diminish Mr. Granderson’s argument with respect to racial judgments, as I would not deny plenty of overt and implied racism still exists in our country.  But if his reference to the history of African-American quarterbacks in football followed, wouldn’t coaches and analysts only be mentioning the high Basketball IQs of Caucasian players?  Granderson notes accurately that historically NFL coaches and executives had described “black quarterbacks in terms of their physical skills, while white quarterbacks are described in terms of their intellect.”  This is a horrible disservice and I am certain it kept many African-Americans from playing QB before great players like Warren Moon and Doug Williams led a change in culture.  But if the term “high Basketball IQ” were being used in a similar fashion, why would it be used to describe Gilbert Arenas and Thabo Sefolosha?

My gut tells me that when people are using the term “high Basketball IQ”, they are doing so with good intentions.  I’m not naïve enough to believe that some people in the world aren’t comfortable with people whose skin color is different or whose religious beliefs or political views aren’t the same as theirs.  But I don’t believe we should deny smart basketball players (who I’m sure are also smart people when they are not playing basketball) the credit they are due as smart basketball players.  I think that athletes in every sport should be celebrated for their dedication to studying their games, for their willingness to learn, and for the balanced approach they take in working just as hard on mental skills as physical skills.  If we truly valued the IQ of our athletes as much as we did their stats, maybe there wouldn’t be so much controversy.  I look forward to continuing my research in baseball and I hope that others will question my thinking as well…so we can all continue to learn together.

If you would like to receive new posts from The Winning Mind in Baseball by email, please CLICK HERE.

For more information, please contact Geoff Miller at miller@thewinningmind.com.

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College Baseball Coaches Discuss The Mental Game, Part III

In Mental Game Info, Uncategorized on November 6, 2009 at 4:04 pm

Part III of our series on College Baseball Coaches and the Mental Game:

Before the 2009 season began, we asked 42 Head Baseball Coaches at Division I universities to help us better understand how the mental game of baseball is perceived and used in college baseball. Our goal was to learn more about how coaches taught the mental game in their programs, the biggest mental game challenges their players faced, and where mental skills training could make a bigger difference in the future.

We asked a series of questions to find out how coaches view sport psychology and where they see their roles in teaching the mental game:

Q: Do you think there are still negative associations with sport psychology?   Do you think people still don’t understand what it really is or how to use it?  Do you think most coaches think they are responsible for teaching the mental game themselves?

Are there negative associations with sport psychology?

Yes – 15

No – 11

Yes, but fewer now than in the past – 12

These quotes help to explain the current state of sport psychology in baseball:

  • “Yes, there are negative associations, but coaches use it whether they call it sport psychology or not.”
  • “I am trying to teach the mental game but I don’t know if I am doing it right.”
  • “Most coaches are not qualified to teach the mental game but they do it based on what they were taught and what worked for them.”
  • “Many coaches are responsible for mental game instruction because there is little access to qualified baseball sport psychologists.”
  • “I think many coaches are not willing to embrace the mental side of the game because they do not know how to go about discussing it and implementing into their program.  I like to take the responsibility of reminding our players what mental toughness is and making the mental game part of our daily habits.”
  • “Whether I want to affect the mental game or not, I do.”

Certainly, there is an element of psychology in coaching…understanding how to motivate players, communicate with them, helping them turn repetitions in practice into automatic processes that they use in games. However, there is disagreement among coaches on where the line is between using psychology in coaching and teaching the mental game.  This may be a big key to why it is misunderstood or underutilized.

Q: If you are teaching the mental game in your coaching, where have you learned the lessons you are teaching?

The most common answers to this question involved learning from experience.  Second on the list were mentors that coaches had either played for or coached with and learned from when they were assistants.  The most commonly referenced books were not surprisingly Harvey Dorfman’s Mental Game of Baseball and sequels, and Ken Ravizza’s Heads Up Baseball.

Look closely at the second most popular answer to this next question:

Q: Can you give some examples of some athletes you’ve had that developed mental toughness over time? How was this achieved?

  1. Learning from Failure
  2. Mental Toughness can’t be developed…players either have it or they don’t.
  3. Overcoming Adversity
  4. Preparation/ Hard Work
  5. Different for each player based on individual character factors
  6. Practice mental skills (routines, intensity level, attitude, positive self-talk) just like they practice physical skills.
  7. Set standards and expectations that raise level of discipline and accountability.

There is a strong contingent of coaches who believe that mental toughness cannot be developed.  A player either has it or he doesn’t.  For coaches who do not believe that it can be developed, there must be great importance placed on identifying and measuring mental skills in players as part of the recruiting process and sport psychology consultants can be helpful in evaluating these factors.

For coaches who do believe that mental toughness can be developed, the top two answers, learning from failure and overcoming adversity, are overlapping answers.  Coaches believe that players have to fail in pressure situations and extract lessons from them so they will be able to adjust when in those tough spots again.  That’s the benefit that experience brings us.  Failure was a common theme throughout our interviews and clichés on the topic of failure in baseball are frequent.  The best players are the ones who learn from their failures and those players are viewed more often as mentally tough players.  Their learning produces correct processes and leads to better results.

Click Here to go to Part I.

Click Here to go to Part II.

Part IV will conclude this series and will be posted next week.

If you would like to receive new posts from The Winning Mind in Baseball by email, please CLICK HERE.

For more information, please contact Geoff Miller at miller@thewinningmind.com.

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Article on Retired Athletes

In Mental Game Info on November 4, 2009 at 10:18 pm

This article, written by Tom Larson, is the cover story in this week’s San Diego Reader.  Tom did a great job with this topic, exploring many different perspectives from athletes in a number of sports and it’s a long article, so I didn’t copy all of it into this post.  I’ve included the sections that feature Winning Mind partners (myself and Marc Sagal, our managing partner) and the link to the full story if you want to read it in its entirety.

http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2009/nov/04/cover/

The Paradox of Awareness

What’s curious about Marc Sagal, a professional soccer player turned sports psychologist and consultant, is how he balances his knowledge of the athlete’s mind with an honesty about his own. Over lunch, he tells me right off, his fingers poised above a chunk of salmon, that his message to clients is that he can help them “perform more effectively under pressure.” He and two partners at Winning Mind counsel 50 clients. Be it in business (corporate executives), military (Navy SEALs), or sports (pros from around the world), we “understand the psychological characteristics that successful people need to have to stay focused and remain calm in pressure situations.”

Sagal’s journey to consultant began with his career in soccer: “I was one of the first American soccer players to play professionally overseas.” After college (a Phi Beta Kappa in philosophy at Colorado College), he played for a team in Sweden. Of Sweden’s many leagues, Sagal was in a “mid-tier” league, “down a notch or two from the top.” Though he never reached the fame and fortune of the top, he did three years as a pro. But barely. His career was shortened, or better, compromised, by an injury he had even before he got to Sweden.

In his last game in college in 1989, he was hit from the side and suffered a meniscal tear in his knee. Though he “played hurt” the rest of the game (he doesn’t remember if anyone told him not to), it was a moment “I’ll never forget.” (I prod Sagal about the injury; at one point he laughs and says, “You’re making me relive something I don’t want to.”) Sagal thinks that he didn’t realize the severity of what had happened. In fact, he would not have realized it as long as he had an opportunity to play. The injury might have been worsened by his playing that day. He’s not sure. He’s had several operations, and part of the meniscus has been cut out, a procedure that’s not recommended nowadays.

Off-season, “I pushed myself to get playing again. When you’re young, you don’t think about the consequences of real proper recovery.” He rehabbed the knee, went to Sweden, and was on the field every other day. “The coaches and other players were aware I was managing the pain,” he recalls. “Honestly, I think I played hurt every single time I went on the field.”

I ask Sagal whether he uses his experience to help his clients. Not much, he says. “It’s funny, but when I thought about talking to you, I didn’t include myself.” And yet here he is, the consummate wounded warrior and, so common in our sports-obsessed age, the wounded healer. Advising others in whom he sees himself.

What does he see? For the injured player, it’s a combination of several things: competitiveness — “They want to get back on the field as soon as possible because that’s what they love to do”; “aggressiveness,” a macho thing; and “immaturity.” Add to that a medical staff that “knows what an acceptable amount of pushing [the injury] is.” But here the athlete takes the blame. He will downplay pain to get back in the game. Doctors and trainers, Sagal says, must give the okay, but too often they are roped in by the athlete’s avidity, a horse who just wants to run, bum leg or not.

In college Sagal had terrific medical care, but he also had enough “freedom to push my irresponsibility more than I should have.” The dilemma is, when to put the reins on an athlete whose greatest asset is his native aggressiveness, which, though it may have got him injured and contributes to an inadequate recovery, also drives him to win.

Reviewing his MRIs with orthopedic surgeons, Sagal realized that “there was nothing to be done.” His doctors were “surprised I could even play.” Since leaving the sport, he’s had two more surgeries. He can no longer run, and he can barely walk. He’s a candidate for knee-replacement surgery. His story is not uncommon. He thinks that about one-third of soccer players have “some kind of injury they’re managing.” Depending on the psychology of the athletes and their awareness, “Some guys can just put it out of their mind, while others are constantly aware of the difficulty.” In that spectrum, Sagal says he was one of those “unfortunately aware of my injury.” He was constantly thinking, “How am I feeling? Am I okay?” But that awareness, though it did begin to impact his playing, also got him to listen to his body and to realize that he should hang it up.

It’s paradoxical, Sagal says, for an athlete to have an “intellectual orientation” because it goes against his training, which tells him not to think but to lose himself in the sport or activity. That “desire to solve problems,” in the midst of the game, is what gets you into trouble.

To help athletes think about themselves as people and not about themselves as performers — that’s the hardest part, he says.

When Is It Time?

Another consultant at Winning Mind is Geoff Miller. At 35, Miller has been a “mental skills” coach for five years with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Miller lives in San Diego but is on the road constantly, traveling with the Pirates and their eight minor-league teams, spring, summer, and fall. Anyone who knows Pirate baseball knows that the team must rely on its young players because it doesn’t have the money to buy expensive players. A lot like the Padres.

Miller, in his knit shirt and khaki pants, accentuates the positive. Over iced tea, he refrains from using the term “psychological,” for it connotes a problem. He employs the word “mental” to focus on learned behaviors: “Mental is, do I know what to do, and can I do it when it counts?” The applications on the diamond are many. One weapon in the arsenal of mental skills is to get young hitters to understand “what is happening when they’re failing.” Failure might be defined as follows: say a kid from Rancho Bernardo hits .490 in high school, then hits .260 in the minors; he hears from his coaches, “That’s a good average.” How’s he supposed to respond? The pros are typically a comedown from high school or college glory, so players must learn how their performance is valued and adjust accordingly.

The way to get players to “redefine failure” is to get them to focus on the bigger picture: to think life more than career, career more than season, and a season more than an at-bat. “I give them a process. It’s a transformation from seeking the results you want to seeking a process that will bring you the results.”

This process orientation is key to career- and life-building, says Miller. It’s inevitable that a successful ballplayer, whether or not he makes it to the “bigs,” will begin to think about his life after baseball, to ask the question, “When is it time?” (The average career for the major leaguer is a tad under five years.) This is important because even though the minor leagues have room for an awful lot of players (some 1500 are drafted every year), very few get to the majors. One estimate is that only 10 percent of players who sign a minor-league contract play one game in Major League Baseball. So, for our kid from Rancho Bernardo, the career that he aspired to and worked so hard at from Little League to PONY league, from high school to college, from the minors to the majors, will most likely be over when he reaches 27.

Five factors compel ballplayers to start the transition.

Pay: during a player’s first contract season, according to the Minor League Baseball website, he makes $1100 a month.

School: to coach baseball in college or high school requires a degree.

Options: players, whose discipline is a plus for any employer, get offers from businesspeople to move on.

Calling: Miller says there’s a lot of Christianity in baseball; at times, players feel called by God to stop playing and go in a new direction.

Women: ballplayers are hit on a lot by women, who make themselves available not for the money but to hitch themselves to a future star (remember Bull Durham?). Leaving baseball allows the player to find the right person who’ll love him for more than his fielding ability.

It drives Miller bonkers to hear about prima donnas like Alex Rodriguez or Manny Ramirez, high-maintenance celebrity hitters who’ve both admitted to using steroids. His experience has been with players who are just the opposite: “Most professional athletes are responsible, they care, they live good lives, and they end up getting lumped in with guys who make headlines.”

One of those good guys, who’s been counseled by Miller, is Dan Schwartzbauer. Schwartzbauer retired from professional baseball two years ago at 25. When he made his intention to retire known, his coaches and fellow players all said, “What, are you crazy?” Even his father, who came to every game it seemed, was “disappointed.” Only Miller helped him know “when it was time.” Schwartzbauer had played ball since he was 7. In college, he studied finance and investment management but kept his eye on the prize — baseball every day, even indoor practice sessions during winters. At 21, he entered A ball with the Pittsburgh Pirates. One team he played with was the Hickory Crawdads in Hickory, North Carolina. In 2007, he learned, just as spring training was breaking, that his hoped-for move to a second-base opening in AA ball had fallen through: a major leaguer was sent down to AAA, and the AAA player who was sent to AA got Schwartzbauer’s slot. He was devastated.

It occurred to him that he had spent his baseball life never thinking about his postcareer. “There was no room mentally for me not to think about baseball.” When Schwartzbauer announced his retirement to his manager, the man said, “What in the world are you going to do?” Schwartzbauer replied, “I don’t know. I guess I’ll go get a job.”

Even now, Schwartzbauer still gets calls to play with semipro teams. And, he says, “I don’t have a good reason why I don’t want to do it.” In our long conversation, he sounds as if he’s struggling to let go as much as the sport won’t let him go — when teams, coaches, and former players keep hounding him: why did you dump the dream? His business degree, something that most of the guys he played with do not have, cushioned his leaving.

But most guys, he says, take a long time to hang it up, some barnstorming well into their 30s. For his teammates, playing ball “may not be something they know they’re going to do forever, but they don’t know what else to do.” They get to the point where they cannot face that “it won’t work,” so they end up doing “whatever it takes” to stay.

In a culture that billboards the idea that everyone should pursue a dream, Schwartzbauer says he gave little thought to a second career. Why think about something he didn’t want to do when he was spending most days doing exactly what he wanted to do?

Today, Schwartzbauer knows what else to do. He sells orthopedic medical supplies.

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