I have devoted an entire section to Baseball IQ in my book, Intangibles: Big-League Stories for Winning the Mental Game — in Baseball and in Life.  As you’ll read in the book, Baseball IQ isn’t just a test to find out how smart baseball players are, it’s a complete program designed to help develop baseball awareness and knowledge on the field.  I believe that every player’s foundation for a mental game is built on knowledge and the ability to perform under pressure.  In simplest terms, the mental game is knowing what to do and doing it when it counts.

Baseball IQ was meant to help players know what to do so they could execute on their knowledge automatically, without having to think about what to do in the moment.  When I first began working in professional baseball, I watched minor league players throwing to the wrong bases, taking questionable approaches when situational hitting was called for, throwing curveballs to hitters with slow bats, and demonstrating a general lack of understanding of the written and unwritten rules of the game.  Since I had been trained in helping athletes perform under pressure, my first thought was that these players were making mental mistakes due to increased pressure.  However, the more I watched, listened, and asked, the more I realized that the players genuinely didn’t know what to do.  I started to wonder how it could be possible to execute skills under pressure without the knowledge of how, when, what, and why needed to be executed.  This was like asking a student to be a good test-taker without knowing anything about the subject of the test.

I developed a Baseball IQ program to pinpoint the greatest learning areas for pitchers and position players and to give our coaches an idea of how much knowledge our players were retaining from their on-field experiences.

I’ve written a number of chapters in Intangibles on how I came up with the idea for Baseball IQ, how we created our tests, and how we implemented the program. The book also includes full versions of essay and multiple choice Baseball IQ tests created specifically for pitchers and for position players.

As a free resource to players and coaches everywhere, I decided to make those Baseball IQ tests available to the public on my book page.  Here is a link to download Baseball IQ for free:

Baseball IQ Tests FREE Download

If you’ve read the book, my intention was to make these forms available so you would be able to easily use them, without having to press the book to a copy machine.  If you haven’t read the book yet, my intention was that you’d find the forms useful and would want to learn more about how they were created as well. You will, however, need to have a copy of the book if you want to know my answers to the multiple choice tests!

Wishing each of you best of luck in knowing what to do and doing it when it counts.

Geoff Miller’s book, Intangibles: Big-League Stories and Strategies for Winning the Mental Game — in Baseball and in Life, was released in August, 2012. For more information and free sample chapters, please visit:

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