by Shawn Green
As a professional athlete, such repetitive physical workouts offered many opportunities to seek stillness. But if physical activity or sitting meditation doesn’t fit into your daily schedule, you can still find stillness by focusing in a new way on your daily tasks, specifically, on the “mindless,” menial ones.
Instead of washing dishes or mowing the lawn in a distracted state, why not do it with full attention? By using your own breath to anchor you to stillness, you can connect with the present moment. For example, in my tee work I’d place the ball on the tee and take a breath, step back and take a breath, swing the bat, hit the ball and take a breath, bend and pick up another ball and take a breath, place the new ball on the tee and take another breath. Ultimately, the mindful breathing, which served to focus my attention, was as much a part of the exercise as the actual swinging of the bat.
Concentrate on whatever you’re doing.
Life is full of menial tasks, which means it is full of opportunity. You can transform any task from an act of distracted second nature into an active meditation—the same awareness you’d employ if you were doing it for the first time. And you will discover that being fully attentive is being fully alive.
SPACE AND SEPARATION
Finding stillness through my tee work proved a life-altering discovery. The practice was simple: focus on my breathing, feel the swing without thinking about it, and hit line drives up the middle. My practice swings made their way into games and, by the end of the ’97 season, I’d found my tool for transformation, both on a spiritual and physical level. Additionally, the tee work provided me a safe place from which to explore new possibilities as a hitter, which I engaged during the off-season months between ’97 and ’98 when I confronted negative tendencies in my swing—imperfect stride, hand position, and shoulder rotation—that dated all the way back to my Little League days.
First, my stride had always been on the longer side, in regards to both space and time. Ideally, a hitter wants a short stride, so his swing can be quicker, providing extra milliseconds to judge the pitch. Ted Williams often said that swinging at better pitches is the key to getting more hits. The catch, however, is that it is usually that extra length of the swing that provides power. My former teammate Paul Molitor had no stride. He just picked up his front heel and put it back down. This made his swing extremely efficient and contributed to his amassing more than three thousand hits in a Hall of Fame career, but he didn’t hit many home runs. On the other hand, Reggie Jackson had a big stride and big swing, striking out often but hitting more than five hundred homers in his Hall of Fame career. Only the very best all-around hitters in each generation, guys like Barry Bonds and Albert Pujols, have the ability to take short, quick strides and still have home run power. I could never do that. The goal for me was to find a happy medium.
Complicating the problem was that I tended to step toward home plate rather than toward the pitcher, which is known as diving in. Instinctively, I was better able to read the pitch by moving my head and eyes toward the plate; however, this misdirection brought every pitch closer than necessary to my body, which made it harder for me to put the barrel of the bat on the ball because I lacked the space to get to inside strikes. Meantime, pitches over the middle felt as if they were on the inside corner, meaning the only pitch I could hit truly well was the one on the outside part of the plate. And Major League pitchers very quickly get stingy with putting pitches in the location you prefer.
My other two unhealthy tendencies were both related to the loading of my upper body for an aggressive swing. Most hitters push their hands and bat back as they stride for the ensuing swing. An analogy is the act of throwing a punch. The first move is to cock one’s arm back before thrusting the fist forward to create the blow. The farther back the fist is loaded, the more power in the punch. However, the farther back the loading, the longer the time the punch takes to be delivered. As a hitter, I brought my hands back as far as they would go, to the extent that my right arm was no longer bent. In hitting, this is referred to as barring out the front arm. Additionally, I rotated my right shoulder too far toward home plate in an attempt to generate more bat speed by coiling backward. I’d developed these habits of overextension as a child, simply by trying to hit the baseball harder. Unfortunately, they’d accompanied me all the way to the big leagues.
Such imperfections might make you wonder how I ever got a hit at all! However, the truth is that all hitters have negative tendencies in their swings; the challenge is to navigate through obstacles and work with what you have. I probably could have played an entire career simply putting bandages on these issues by finding strictly physical ways to compensate. However, I’d never have developed the power and production that I found after that ’97 season.
Through my tee work, I obtained the necessary mental space to finally solve problems like a stride being too long or a right shoulder being overrotated toward home plate. In the process, I began to answer for myself the question of just how good I might be at this game and how problems of all sorts might be overcome. No longer content to merely patch up weak spots, I was beginning to form a vision of how to heal them.
What of all the work I’d put in on the diamond since the time I was a child first in love with baseball? Was it wasted?
No, it was all a part of the process.
I’d just never arrived at a proper solution to the problems with my swing because my mind had always been filled with analytical thoughts. Those four summer months in ’97 of swinging in stillness created the necessary space and emptiness of mind for the solution to just come to me. (We often solve life’s most complicated dilemmas when we sleep on it, or in my case meditate on it.)
I began to see my three swing issues in a new light that off-season. One day, it hit me. I had always viewed the challenges in my swing as three separate issues and had tried to fix each problem on an individual basis. In reality, all three issues were the result of one underlying flaw in my swing: the upper half of my body and the lower half of my body were working as one connected piece. In other words, my hands going back too far during my stride, ultimately causing my arm to bar out, was directly proportional to my stride being too long. During the time that my foot was in the air, my arms and bat had to go further back in the other direction to act as a counterbalance. The tendency for my stride to dive in toward the plate also forced my right shoulder to turn in toward the plate with it, and vice versa.
To fix these problems, I had to begin with my setup.
Through the ’97 season, I’d always had a square stance. In other words, my back foot and front foot were in a straight line, parallel to home plate and in line with the pitcher. The other two stance options are a closed stance, wherein the front foot is closer to home plate than the back foot, aiming more of the back toward the pitcher, or an open stance, wherein the front foot is further from the plate than the back foot, aiming more of the stomach toward the pitcher. In my square stance, my right foot, right hip, and right shoulder were all perfectly aligned, aiming at the pitcher. However, as I took my stride I’d wind up aiming more toward the shortstop than the pitcher, with my right shoulder aimed somewhere between the third baseman and the shortstop. Thus, my up-the-middle approach was defeated when I actually took my swing. How to correct the problem? Instead of fighting where my body wanted to go, I went with it. Keeping my entire body locked into its natural position, I danced my feet around clockwise so that, when I swung, my right shoulder would be aimed directly at the pitcher rather than at the hole between third base and shortstop. I looked down and saw that I was now in an open stance with my feet, but my shoulder was in perfect alignment for hitting up the middle. The open stance that I practiced for the rest of my career was born.
My next step was to get into that open stance and work through my natural tendency to bar out my right arm. I pushed my arms back as far as they could go, enabling me to shorten my swing, since I wouldn’t have to load up as I took my stride. However, I noticed that the f
arther I pushed my hands back, the farther my right shoulder turned in toward the shortstop. I wanted to keep that shoulder straight. But that’s when I had my big discovery. If I pushed my arms back, while at the same time I opened up my right hip in the opposite direction, I could prevent that right shoulder from turning in! This proved to be the key to resolving my swing issues. At the midpoint of my body, my hips separated my swing into two pieces, the upper half and the lower half. Previously, my right shoulder, right hip, and right ankle were all perfectly aligned and moved as one piece. Now, I had found a way to sever that connection and enable my different body parts to work independently, thus making my swing much more efficient. My right hip and right knee formed my control mechanism. From that day forward, anytime I felt my shoulder turning in too much or my hands moving too far back, I simply pushed my hip and knee slightly clockwise to lock my upper body back into place.
My initial reasons for making these changes were to free up the inside part of the plate and to shore up my weaknesses as a hitter, but in the process I had unwittingly created much more power in my swing. It stands to reason. The lower half of my body was now twisted toward the second baseman while my upper body was facing the pitcher, thereby creating more torque as my body unwound with each swing. Visualize a toy airplane with a propeller and a rubber band. The more you rotate that propeller, the more tension is placed on the rubber band. The greater the tension, the faster the propeller will spin upon release—simple physics.
I still had one remaining swing issue to work through: the stride.
It was one thing to create the proper setup and stance, but it was a greater challenge to maintain the integrity of my positioning as I took my stride. Nonetheless, I knew that if I succumbed to my old habit of striding in toward home plate, I’d undermine all the body separation that my new positioning sought to create. My front foot still wanted to dive in; after all, it was now positioned farther than ever from home plate. But, in my stillness at the tee, I found an answer to the nagging call of habit. Using white athletic tape, I put a line on the floor of the batting cage, providing a border across which I did not allow myself to stride. With each swing I looked down to make sure I hadn’t crossed the line. Mechanics alone were insufficient to overcome the old habit, however. I knew that I also needed to create a mental image of the proper stride that I could focus on each time I swung (taking care never to slide back into thinking my way through each swing). So I called upon my imagination to control my stride, and it answered my call.
I discovered that I could actually imagine with my foot and my shoulder.
I imagined with my front foot that I was striding to hit a pitch that was way inside and in the process managed to avoid diving in toward home plate; a mere fraction of a second later, I imagined with my front shoulder that I was going after a pitch that was on the outside corner. My lower body moved on an inside pitch, my upper body on an outside pitch. Thus, separation! The success of these two almost simultaneous intentions ultimately awakened my awareness into my right hip and torso area as a feeling of torque and potential energy arose there that I had never before felt as a hitter.
To most people, imagining with my foot and with my shoulder probably sounds insane. It surely would have sounded that way to me prior to practicing my meditation that summer. The only way to imagine with my foot was to place all my awareness there. And the only way to place all my awareness in my foot was to remove that awareness from my head.
Prior to this work, I had never considered that awareness could reside some place other than the head. How would I have known? After all, most of us go about our whole lives with our awareness trapped in the mind. We believe we are our thoughts and egos and nothing more. I always suspected there was more to my true essence than my incessant and repetitive thoughts and the insatiable desires of my ego. I had been searching for that greater part of me via the exploration of Zen and meditation, but it wasn’t until that meditative work took root in my swing that I truly began to disconnect from my thoughts and connect with my deeper sense of being.
I used to believe that the goal of meditation was to stop thoughts. But, as I did my work off the tee, I learned that my concept of meditation was inaccurate (maybe highly enlightened people are able to stop their thoughts after years of practice, but that wasn’t realistic for me). Rather than stopping thoughts, meditation is about shifting one’s awareness out of thought by focusing attention on something else.
The tool for accomplishing this feat is often a mantra, or point of focus. Each time your awareness falls back into the mind’s snare, you shift your attention back to the candle flame, the chant, or whatever mantra you employ. Imagine someone meditating with her mantra being a series of words she repeats over and over. As her mind starts to wander off into thoughts, she reconnects her attention to her mantra, and thus separates from those thoughts. At the tee, the flow of the routine became my mantra: take a breath, focus on the ball, swing, take a breath, place a new ball on the tee, then repeat. The work consisted of my swinging in a place of no thought, learning to peel my awareness away from my mind and redirect it into my body. Soon, I was able to move my attention out of my head and into body parts (my foot, my shoulder), shifting my awareness from one to the next without encumbering the movement, or flow, with any thought.
It took me a few weeks of focusing on my new swing intentions to get the mechanics ingrained. Once ingrained, I had a new approach that became second nature. My tee work returned to the deeper, daily meditation that I had created the summer before, except now my swing was much improved; my body parts were no longer pulling each other into unwanted directions, my stance was open and my body torqued, my stride moved straight toward the pitcher and when my front foot landed the coiled position I had created in my stance remained intact.
I worked daily on my new swing through the holidays and into spring training of 1998. My new manager, Tim Johnson, and hitting coach, Gary Matthews Sr., aka Sarge, viewed me as an integral cog of the offense. I was slated to bat third in the lineup, and I didn’t want to disappoint. During the off-season, my work had been done only in the cage, and so I was anxious to discover how my new approach would work in the real world.
Taking my new swing onto the field for team batting practice was like having a new toy. As spring training passed and the season began, balls came off my bat with a new, loud, crack! akin to the likes of my power-hitting teammates Carlos Delgado and Jose Canseco. Each week, I launched more and more moon shots during batting practice, farther and farther into the bleachers. I was now playing every day and hitting in the top of the lineup and for the first time in my career I had a bit of a swagger. I enjoyed talking smack to Carlos and Jose during batting practice as I launched balls into the deep parts of the bleachers that previously only they had reached. There I was, the skinny line-drive hitter hanging with the big boys—and I loved it. Soon, my approach to our daily team batting practice transformed. My new attitude as a power hitter collided with the gamesmanship that Carlos and I had always indulged in the clubhouse to change the way I took batting practice, introducing a childlike playfulness that in conjunction with my tee work would soon transform my career.
Carlos was my teammate for nearly ten of my sixteen years in professional baseball. He was by my side for my first eight years as a pro (including three years in the minor leagues). Highly intelligent both on and off the field, he was always the teammate I admired most; I came to feel about him almost as if he were an older brother. In the minor leagues, Carlos put up numbers I never thought I could match: 30 home runs and 100 plus RBIs. Even in our first couple of years together in the Major Leagues, I still didn’t imagine myself capable of such production. Carlos was a powerful, grown man, whereas I was just a lanky kid. I had always strived to be a .300 hitter with respectable power—inclined to emulate a player like John Olerud, who was built like me and had the same line-drive approach—so Carlos’ ability to hit the long ball was never a source of envy. I’d never felt co
mpetitive toward him in baseball; sure, he and I always loved to compete when it came to playing cards in the clubhouse. However, one day in Toronto in early June ’98, the smack talk moved from the card table to our team batting practice.
My game was about to change.
We usually took BP in groups of four; each group got fifteen minutes to take as many swings as they could. The other players shagged balls on the field and tended to their individual work until it was their group’s turn to hit. This was the first year Carlos and I had been in the same hitting group on a daily basis. He was the cleanup hitter and I was number two in the lineup (with right-handed Jose Canseco hitting third between us lefties). Coaches take care of the guys who have the greatest burden of producing runs, so we were given first choice as to which coach we wanted to hit during BP. Carlos and I preferred Jim Lett.
There’s always bantering amongst hitters as to who’s going to hit the farthest home run, get the most hits in a row, and so on. Carlos began his round of six swings, and I taunted him, “I bet you can’t hit a ball off Windows,” which was the stadium’s glass-fronted restaurant, from which the tables looked onto the field from high above the centerfield wall.
Three swings in, we all heard a pure crack!
The ball left Carlos’ bat, towering toward centerfield, and ricocheted hard off the bulletproof glass.
He strutted out of the cage with a wide grin. “That’s how the big boys do it! But you don’t worry about the long ball, Greenie, just keep getting on base. I’ll be sure to drive you in.”