BSN Exclusive: Rockies open up on meditation in baseball

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Even people who have never watched a single baseball game know, thanks to the immortal words of Yogi Berra, that the game is 90 percent mental.

It’s the other half that’s physical.

The central irony of hardball has always been that it is a series of isolated and highly measurable events that we can pinpoint with insane accuracy and weigh based on an extraordinary amount of data.

At the same time, it is still a game played by human beings who are governed first and foremost by the muscle that resides in the cranium.

Even the most stringent of modern baseball mathematicians – who prefer to forgo thinking about this aspect of the great game most of the time in favor of the tangibles that we can put numbers to – would admit that a great skill set can be meaningless without the right mindset.

And while Colorado Rockies All-Star Trevor Story wasn’t about to breakdown exactly which half of baseball is 90 percent mental, he made it absolutely clear that his work to improve his process between the ears has been as important to his success than his time in the cage or taking reps at short.

“Just as much as the physical side really,” he says. “There’s a lot of things in my routine where I take time for my mental routine and visualization. Watching film, just kind of visualizing those pitches in my mind and playing at bats out before I even take them. When you step in the box, it feels familiar. And that’s a great feeling instead of just stepping in there without having that. That’s been huge for me. It’s just as much mentally as it is physically.”

Starting pitcher Jon Gray is as intimately familiar with this battle as any member of the clubhouse. His 2018 campaign was practically defined by struggles to get this aspect of his game more under his control. And he agrees with Story on the importance of making mental visualizations. Just like Adam Sandler’s Waterboy, it’s important to visualize and then attack.

“Let nothing else interfere,” he says. “Let no thoughts come in between you and what you are doing. Doing it can be hard, too. I’m not 100 percent successful with it. I throw some pitches and I’m like, ‘Why did I do that? It must’ve come from somewhere else. I shouldn’t be thinking that way.’ It’s the thoughts, you got to kick them. Just focus on what you’re doing here and there, and everything is clear as day.”

Gray attributes a great deal of his progress this season – he is currently sitting on a 138 ERA+ compared to his 94 from a year ago – to time spend on the space between the ears. Like Story, he says it is a consistent battle and one that rages on even while the physical body is at rest.

“It’s constantly going 24/7, really,” he says. “It could be a five to 10 second thought in a day. It’s just something you always keep in your mind. What you’re thinking about on a pitch, you see yourself executing something. A little bit of visualization. Just having that feel-good moment. Just trying to feel what you feel when everything is going good and that helps and that translates and makes you feel positive going into the start.”

But he also knows that the mental game is about a lot more than just making sure your own energy is positive. An outpouring of emotion, even a good one, can throw you off your game if it isn’t properly reserved.

“Make sure that the energy or emotion you’re showing is after the result,” Gray says, knowing full well that he had a tendency a year ago to hang his head when things went wrong, letting individual innings and games get out of hand.

“If it’s negative, you don’t want to show it. If it’s positive it’s good for the team and everyone else, it helps the energy of everyone,” he adds, noting that it is best to keep those moments of fist pumping to a minimum while there is still a job to do.

And, at least for the moment, Gray seems to have finally found a balance.

“I think that’s just from seeing everything clearly and not making mistakes,” he says. “I think it’s from eliminating emotion from baseball. If you can eliminate the emotion from it, that’s when the training takes over. In the training, you’re not pissed off; you’re happy. You’re just there just working on stuff. If you can eliminate everything else, you can think clearly on what you need to do and I think that’s been a big help. I think all that stuff translates.”

It remains to be seen if it will translate for Gray once he takes the mound in those games when the stakes are the highest. He, somewhat unfairly, has developed a reputation for faltering in such contests but he clearly has a new mindset now, which can make all the difference.

Mindset has absolutely made the difference for his battery mate Tony Wolters who has shocked the baseball world with his offensive renaissance in 2019 but who has always been able to perform at the plate in clutch situations.

Most famously, Wolters can claim to have notched the biggest hit for the franchise in the last decade, singling up the middle in the 13th inning of the NL Wild Card game in 2018, plating the go-ahead, and as it turned out winning, run.

Not exactly known for his huge clutch hits the way Nolan Arenado or Charlie Blackmon are, Wolters still has much better numbers with the game on the line. Last season, he drew multiple walk-off walks and had a batting average 126 points higher (.280 vs. .154) in high-leverage appearances.

“You can tell when guys are OK in those big situations,” he tells us. “It looks like time is slowing down.”

That might sound like mumbo jumbo to those stringent analysts who insist on paying attention only to things that can be precisely measured – after all, time is one such measurement that is absolute and exact – but this is an ancient practice that has been perfected over thousands of years by monks in the Buddhist and Taoist traditions.

Probably the most famous of these is Zen Buddhism which focuses on attempting to understand concepts without wordly distractions like thought or language. Time is spent actually practicing breathing and visualizing oftentimes for the specific purpose of slowing everything down into a single moment.

Some say they find a transcendental truth when they do this. And ballplayers do to. Just ask Wolters.

“I think breathing is a big key,” he says. “Always going to your breath. Learning how to breathe the right way. Meditating. I think that’s one of the biggest things that I’ve come about is meditating. It  helps me just realize my breath. Just knowing how to breath the right way and learning how to get back to your breath and being able to look at each moment the right way.”

Buddhists might call this finding your center or your true self. In life, it can create a kind of clarity that cannot be found without purposeful attempts to slow time down. In baseball, it does the same thing so that the split-second it takes for a fastball to leave the pitcher’s hand and arrive at the plate becomes an eternity.

And when the game comes down to just this one pitch, and your teammates, coaches, and fans have their emotions hanging by a thread in your hands, that’s when meditation matters most.

“I think that’s a big time to rely on your mental game,” says Story. “That’s something that I really dug into the past few years. I know Nolan and Chuck do the same thing. If you can’t control your mind, your body is going to follow. If you can control your breath and really just be in the moment and not worry too much about the outcome, then that’s the way I think I try to approach it.”

Wise words for baseball and life.

We watch and measure and analyze the game of baseball based on how results play out on the field but one must stop and wonder every once in a while how much we truly understand what led to those results. The best metrics do a decent job of identifying patterns and making educated guesses, but until they invent the one that allows viewers to understand what is going on inside the minds of the ballplayers, there will always be giant gaps in our understanding.

Throughout the history of baseball, the battle between the hitter and the pitcher has been considered the most important in the game.

But the masters of Zen, including the great Yogi of House Bera, would remind you that this battle is infinitely secondary to the invisible one going on inside each of their minds. Focusing on the physical may be more comforting. But you’re missing 90 percent of the game.