The Way of Baseball

by Shawn Green

  A novice at any skill will fail to find meditation in the practice of that skill until he or she has achieved a level of technical expertise that makes the skill feel like second nature. The pull approach I had been forced to explore with Willie and Cito required my thinking, so it could never have provided the stillness I experienced when I returned to my natural swing.

  It took the first couple of weeks of tee work to recover my up-the-middle stroke. But, in my banishment from the cage, I was free to revert to the swing I had been developing since my youth. My priority was to be ready for whatever chance I’d have to return to the lineup. On June 16, the Blue Jays released Ruben Sierra, the former All-Star who had recently been signed as my experimental replacement. My father, Ira, must have blown out some magic candles that day and gotten his birthday wish. The next day, I was back in the lineup for the first time in weeks.

  That was the good news.

  The bad news was that waiting for me on the pitcher’s mound was Greg Maddux, one of the best of all time. I’d find out soon enough if my solitary hours spent at the tee would pull me through.

  I stepped to the plate in the second inning for my first at-bat against Maddux more composed and calm than I’d expected to be. I drove a 1-1 changeup over the fence in right-center field for a home run. Not only was the pitch of the off-speed variety that historically had given me trouble, but it had come out of the hand of a man destined for the Hall of Fame largely because of the effectiveness of that specific pitch. I followed up that first at-bat with another hit in the fifth inning, then a second home run in the eighth inning. Thereafter, I became an everyday player and raised my batting average about sixty points in a month’s time.

  I had a new best friend—the batting tee.

  For the first month after I re-entered the starting lineup, my tee routine remained very basic. I’d place the baseball on the tee with the four seams perpendicular to me, take a breath, and swing with my best up-the-middle stroke. I’d then take another breath, and repeat the process, over and over. Next, I would move the tee around to work on hitting pitches in different locations. The process was similar to what I’d done in the cage my dad built in the backyard of our house when I was a kid. The difference now was that I was not thinking about mechanics; I was focusing only on my breathing and on the ball.

  The improvement in my swing and my newfound comfort at the plate got me hooked on the tee work. Being a spiritual seeker was a passion, but during the baseball season, hitting came first. It was my livelihood. Up to this point, these two worlds had not yet fully entwined. The meditative and subliminal effects of the tee work were more subtle than the immediate improvement at the plate. Inner stillness grew slowly, like the roots of a fruit tree spreading under the soil. However, as I continued my work throughout that summer of ’97, these aspects gradually became apparent and eventually as important to me as my batting success. I began to thirst for those twenty-minute sessions each day at the tee, not just as a means to achieving more at the plate, but as a way into peace and stillness.

  In time, the tee itself became an object worthy of contemplation ….

  Initially, I made do with whatever brand of tee the grounds crew set up at the net. Most stadiums had the awkward, yellow Atec brand tee, which was made of hard rubber that had a plastic feel. The tee could be moved up and down only from thigh high to midstomach and every time I took a swing, I’d feel my bat striking more of the tee than the ball. Worse, the thing tipped over on impact. Some stadiums had similar tees made by Louisville Slugger or Franklin that were slightly better, but still didn’t provide a natural feel.

  Then, late that summer, our team equipment manager Jeff Ross showed me a new tee he had bought from Joe Tanner, a scout from Bradenton, Florida. The base was a small, square piece of wood about half an inch thick. The vertical piece was a telescoping stem that screwed into the base and had a soft but durable rubber cradle to hold the ball. Easily unscrewed into two pieces for transport, one could raise and lower the tee to work on extreme high and low pitches; also, the rubber cradle was so pliable that upon contact it didn’t even feel like the ball was set on a tee.

  I was in love.

  I never envisioned becoming a connoisseur of batting tees, but the tool had become the crux of my two worlds: baseball and spirituality. I put a felt pen to the base of the Tanner Tee and branded it with a big 15, my number. For the last two months of that season and the remaining ten years of my career, a Tanner Tee travelled with me on every road trip.

  I’d begin my work with the Tanner Tee at its maximum height, swinging with a chopping motion, as if I were felling a tree. After several swings, I’d lower the tee a little, taking as many swings as was necessary to capture the same motion of chopping wood at the new height. This continued until the ball was as low as the tee would allow, just below my knees. By starting at the highest point and working down, I ingrained in my swing a chopping feel, thus guarding against long, loopy upward swings. Also, the height of the ball tended to mirror the depth of my meditative state. By the time the ball was at my knees, I’d be deep into the flow of my practice. Sometimes, it was difficult to get to that magical place. On those days, I’d take more swings at the top of the zone. Other times, the process moved rapidly. There was no clock, no race. The process unfolded on its own.

  Sure, friends on the team would razz me about my solitary work. Ed Sprague poked fun at me by mimicking some of my unorthodox drills. He was a right-handed hitter, but he’d playfully mock me by standing at the tee in my left-handed stance and overexaggerate my drills. Other teammates found it peculiar that I packed my own tee in my bag for every road trip. Someone was always commenting, “Don’t forget your tee!” It was all in fun and always good for a laugh (back-and-forth banter is part of life in the big leagues). However, as my success on the field continued, the joking sessions gradually turned into interrogation sessions as teammates and opposing players took serious notice of my work in the cage. Smart hitters, like Ed Sprague, gained respect for my theories on hitting. Many of the drills in my practice evolved from discussions or observations of other hitters around baseball. We all share with each other all the time.

  As stillness entered my life, my relationship with the ever-challenging external world also began to change. Late in the ’97 season, I noticed that the outer world wasn’t affecting my inner world to the degree that it once had. A negative newspaper article or comment on the street still might cause me a momentary burst of anger or irritation, but the emotions weren’t as charged as they were before. More important, the negativity didn’t linger obsessively in my head for hours or whole days. Soon, I stopped reading the newspapers altogether, after good games as well as bad. Whatever was said about me, positive or negative, did not have to affect the way I felt about myself.

  Of course, thoughts and concerns still inhabited my mind. Such is the nature of human existence. But now the daily practice of stillness altered my relationship to those thoughts, aiding me to control them rather than the other way around. Finding stillness strengthened my ability to recognize and disarm menacing thoughts, thereby helping me maintain my own sense of being. Just as I changed my relationship with the baseball by stopping it and placing it on the tee, meditation enabled me to change my relationship with my thoughts.

  In the cage, I would place a baseball on the tee, take a breath, stroke the ball to the back of the net, and then repeat the process, over and over. Outside the cage, I was now able to do something similar with my mind. A stressful or agitating thought would come into my head, so I would take a breath, then calmly stroke that thought away, leaving behind only stillness.

  Contrary to general misconceptions, meditation is not about training oneself to live without thought; rather, it’s about training oneself to move beyond one’s thoughts. Skilled practitioners may find themselves experiencing brief moments of no-mind, though not even the most enlightened among them remain in that state at all times. The chatter of the mind always returns. Ho
wever, the more one practices meditation, the more one can control the mind and in so doing, expend less energy reacting to the endlessly challenging circumstances of our lives. Upon lifting the heaviness of charged thoughts, one’s life becomes much lighter.

  One example of such a significant shift in my perspective occurred at a game in Seattle in mid-September of ’97. It was four months since the conflict that launched my unexpected spiritual journey, and I was not only improving my performance at the plate, but also my relationship with the fans. I’d always been conscientious about signing autographs, but I had regarded most interactions with the public as something of a chore. I was too wrapped up in my own thoughts to connect with the people in the stands and so sensitive to criticism of my performance that I’d built a protective wall to keep safe from it. How could I have been anything but distant? However, after several months of working in a place of stillness to become less susceptible to the opinions of others, I allowed the wall between myself and the fans to come down.

  We were finishing batting practice as a sellout crowd made its way into Seattle’s Kingdome to see their first place Mariners, which featured All-Stars Ken Griffey, Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Randy Johnson, and Jay Buhner. I was shagging fly balls in right field when a kid with a baseball glove near the foul pole asked me to toss him a ball. No longer stressed out about preparing for the game, as I would have been in the past, I realized I could provide the kid with a memorable moment at the ballpark. Besides, it seemed like it’d be fun to play catch with him. I threw him the ball and indicated for him to throw it back; at first, he seemed worried about keeping the ball, but after I assured him it would be his when our game of catch was over, he threw the ball back. After we tossed it back and forth a couple of times, an unexpected thing happened. Another kid held his glove up for me to throw it to him. So I did (after again reassuring the first kid that he’d get the ball at the end). Before I knew it I was throwing this one ball to kid after kid after kid, my only criteria being that each needed to have a baseball glove. Before long, batting practice was over and I was left by myself in the outfield with an entire stadium of kids holding up their gloves and yelling for me to throw them the ball. I couldn’t believe that no one tried to steal the ball (I guess the people in the Pacific Northwest are exceptionally honest). This went on for forty-five minutes.

  I thought I was providing a memorable ballpark moment to someone else.

  Yet I’m the one who’ll never forget it.

  That night, I felt a connection with an entire stadium of people. In the past, I’d have been too caught up in nervous preparation for the game I was about to play to experience such a thing, but now I knew that my tee work had seen to my preparation. No longer a slave to worry, about either the upcoming game or what my coaches and teammates might think of my antics, I was truly free to enjoy a spontaneous moment. Later, I would try to recreate it in other stadiums, but beautiful moments cannot always be planned. (Besides, whenever I tried it in New York or Boston it was never long before somebody would just make off with the “souvenir.”) Because I had the stillness of mind to enjoy what the world was offering me, I was able to connect with others in a new way. As the clock hit six-forty, I tossed the ball back to the original kid, waved to the crowd, and headed toward the clubhouse to switch jerseys in time to make it back onto the field for the game. As I ran off, the entire stadium gave me a loud ovation, which felt much more affectionate than any performance-induced cheering. My teammates razzed me a little, but that didn’t bother me. I’d had fun with forty-some-odd thousand fans.

  The next day, Blue Jays announcer Buck Martinez told me that in all the years he’d been in baseball that was the “coolest thing [he] had ever seen.” He’d recognized a shift in me and, though he didn’t know about my work at the tee every day beneath the stadium, his kind words were further evidence that I was progressing in the right direction.

  The ’97 season ended on a high note. I finished what was potentially going to be a career-damaging year so strongly that I solidified myself into an everyday player, and the team rewarded me with a nice two-year contract (more than the boost to my bank account, the raise signified a new level of commitment from the team). In addition, Cito and the faction of coaches that had been less than supportive during that first phase of my career were all let go at the end of the season. I felt as if the shackles had been removed and that I was about to enter my true rookie season come ’98, even though I already had more than three years in the Major Leagues under my belt.

  My measurable growth as a player was obvious from a statistical perspective, but my internal growth was equally important to me. Of course, unlike hitting, spiritual growth can’t be quantified. But I didn’t need measurements. The ball sat still, and I hit it, period. My mantra wasn’t a candle flame or a chant, as in some forms of meditation. My mantra was the ball motionless; the only movement I focused on was the movement of my breath. The swing occurred on its own. Absorbed in the action of hitting, I felt my body moving, I saw only the ball, and I heard the contact of the wood on the ball followed by the swishing sound of the ball hitting the back of the cage—a beautiful practice.

  I had reduced hitting, an extremely difficult activity, to its most basic form. As a result, I took each swing with full attention.

  Previously, when a pitcher threw a ball to me, the ball was in control. I reacted to the ball’s speed and movement. Since the pitcher was the one who threw the ball, I also reacted to the pitcher. Of course, in my tee routine I no longer worked against the pitcher and the ball. Now, there was no pitcher, and the ball was simply sitting there waiting for me to hit it. I didn’t need to speed up or slow down to time a moving pitch. Instead, I could take the same rhythmic swing over and over, reinforcing quality habits until they became second nature. In essence, I reversed my relationship with the baseball.

  And on a deeper level, I was learning to step out of time.

  When baseball players talk about hitting, they often talk about time. In sports pages across the country, you’ll find articles in which a player says, “… my timing is off,” or “… I found my timing at the plate,” or “… I’m looking for my timing.” I too worked continually to find and maintain my timing in games. 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.

  There, in that twenty-minute bubble, I’d connect my swing to my deepest sense of being, training myself to become less reactive and more in control both at the plate and in life. Afterward, I could re-enter the world of time as a more centered and emotionally quiet person (as well as a better-prepared hitter).

  Prior to my meditative practice taking root, I lived my off the field life in much the same manner that I approached hitting: reactive. I might show up to the stadium fuming over a critical article in the local paper, distracted and intent on proving something. Hitting a Major League curve ball is hard enough without attaching to it a personal agenda. And the potential distractions of being a public figure are not limited to how one responds to press coverage. The same holds true for walking across the street.

  In those early years, when Blue Jays fans stopped me to say, “Wow! Shawn Green! You’re my favorite!” it filled me with pride; however, when those same fans tossed off critical comments, such as “Hey, what happened last night on that ball you dropped?” I was left obsessing over an error that I had already lost sleep over the night before. 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.

  Ultimately, hitting off the tee provided me a much needed refuge of deepening absorption and stillness. The practice changed with time and I got more adept at creating drills that finely tuned my swing. The routi
ne I did in ’97 was more basic than the one I was doing by ’98, which, in turn, was a stepping stone to my practice in ’99 and beyond. Initially, teammates and coaches considered my drills more than a little unorthodox. But, like many other businesses, baseball tolerates the unconventional so long as you’re getting hits. Now, it feels good to think I may have had an influence on the game that extended beyond the stats on the back of my baseball card. Over the last six or seven years of my career, I no longer needed to bring a Tanner Tee with me to opposing stadiums, because by then every cage in the big leagues had at least one or two sitting inside. Of course, I still brought my own tee (the little things matter the most), but I couldn’t help smiling at the sight of all the other Tanner Tees, at the big league proliferation of that old scout from Bradenton’s homemade work.

  • • •

  For a major-league hitter, nothing seems more menial than working off a batting tee, but it’s actually in menial tasks that we find the best opportunities to practice stillness. I never outgrew my practice at the tee. Rather, I continued to discover other so-called menial tasks that also could serve as practices of stillness. Exercising is a great domain for meditation. Lifting weights, I concentrate on my breathing while at the same time feeling the subtle movements of my body. I learned from my yoga instructor, Steve Rogers, that “all of your movements are anchored in the breath.” In weightlifting, moving from one repetition to the next requires an inhalation and an exhalation. The weight comes down … breathe in; the weight goes up … breathe out.