6th Tool: Baseball IQ, Mindset and Mental Makeup
Babe Ruth may have said it best: “Every strike brings me closer to the next homerun.” One of the greatest hitters in history – sums it up that each failure brings him closer to his next success.
As in life, your success in baseball comes down to your mindset. Your state of mind when you approach a situation:
Are you prepared and committed to doing your best in the present situation?
Have you built a team and are leveraging your team to help you succeed?
How do you react to what comes your way – good or bad – and do you react in a way that allows you to achieve the outcome you desire?
Do you learn from every situation to make you better?
At Hard 90 Baseball – we teach a growth mindset that will allow our players to have success both on the field and in whatever they pursue in their lives.
Do Your Best
Specifically, we teach our players to do their very best every time out. Some days their very best will be 4-4 with 4 RBI’s and other days their very best will be 0-4 with 4 strikeouts. When you end the game, when you end your day, when you leave the field, when you put your head on your pillow – you want to be able to say you did your very best – you left it all on the field.
Baseball is a marathon and the victors are those that give their best effort – every time they take the field.
Pick Up Your Teammates
Baseball and life are both “team sports”. Hard 90 Baseball teaches athletes to work together to achieve their goals. Specifically, in training, we encourage our players to push each other to become the best they can be through competition in training.
When a player makes a bad throw on the field, we encourage the players to focus on the player that will make “the pick” – not the bad throw. We teach our players to assume a role and contribute to the team and that role can change depending on the situation. Yes, with one runners on 1st and 2nd and no outs, our three hitter will bunt if the game situation dictates it.
Regardless of how high your aspirations are in the game of baseball – every team, every coach and every player benefits from a good teammate.
Want it More
You cannot control what comes your way – but you can control how you react to it. Winners take the circumstance and make the most of it to impact the outcome. If an umpire’s strike zone is inconsistent, hitters will make the most of the situation by not leaving their at bat up to the umpire.
If a ball takes a bad hop on the field – the best players immediately move on to the next pitch, understand the game situation, be present and compete.
At Hard 90 Baseball, we teach our players to accept what comes their way, assess the situation, take a deep breath, focus and compete on the next pitch.
Success in baseball and in life often times is not dictated by what happens to us, but rather how we react to it.
Always Learn
Martial arts teacher Richard Lee said it best – “you win, when you lose if you learn.”
At Hard 90 Baseball, we teach our players to learn from every situation. If a pitcher snaps off a nasty breaking ball that fools them for strike three, we teach our players to share the information and take that information with them to the next at bat.
If an umpire rings up a player on a pitch two balls outside, we encourage our players to get up on the dish to take that pitch away and encourage our catchers to expand the zone.
As they say “if you are not willing to learn, no one can help you. If you are determined to learn, no one can stop you!”
The 6th Tool is the separating factor – your mindset is a key part to your success in every situation.