The Way of Baseball

by Shawn Green

  Sarge watched the whole thing. He chuckled from where he hung on the back of the net that surrounded the hitting area. “Are you going to let him talk to you like that, Greenie? Show him how it’s done.” He was always quick to stir the pot.

  I took six of my hardest cuts, aiming at the restaurant in centerfield. On my last swing I hit my best bolt, which cleared the fence in centerfield. Still, it was short of the restaurant. I walked out of the cage feeling happy about my effort, but Carlos deflated me as he laughed, “Little man hit it!”

  Heading into the clubhouse to prepare for that night’s game, I turned to Carlos and said, “I’ll bet in BP I can hit more home runs to centerfield than you can.”

  “Centerfield?” he asked.

  It’s easier to hit home runs down the line than to centerfield; most big league centerfield walls are roughly 400 feet away, whereas down the lines the fences are only about 330 feet away. I knew better than to challenge Carlos to a straight-up home run derby because I knew the dangerous temptation of gearing my swing to pull the ball down the line. (Hadn’t my issues with Cito and Willie been about avoiding that very thing?) My recent work in the cage, which was geared to improve my up-the-middle approach but in the process was increasing my power to all fields, suggested that swinging harder wouldn’t damage my swing so long as I remained focused on hitting the ball to centerfield. I trusted my daily tee work to keep my swing disciplined.

  “That’s right, centerfield,” I said.

  The next day, Carlos, Sarge, and I set the parameters for our game as we got loose before our group’s fifteen-minute BP session. A sign on the right-centerfield wall of the Sky-Dome would serve as the foul pole. Anything hit to the right of the sign would be foul, ensuring we wouldn’t try to pull the ball. Next, we set up a scoring system: one point for a ball hit over the wall, two points into the seats, three points into the second deck of the stadium, and four points off Windows. Sarge would serve as umpire. Finally, we set the stakes: At the end of every month, the loser had to buy dinner for both the winner and Sarge at the restaurant of their choice. At every stadium we subsequently visited, the foul pole and point system would have to be reset because ballpark configurations were different. And, in this way, our batting practice home run derby was born.

  It was fun. More than that, this simple contest had an enormous impact on my career. Initially, Carlos and I intended only to add flavor and intensity to a long season by bringing light-hearted competition into our daily routines. I had always heard coaches admonish players to “practice how they want to play.” Though I wasn’t a big home run hitter at that early stage of my career, I began to wonder what would happen if I practiced hitting home runs every day to parts of the field that weren’t optimal for hitting home runs. Dead center—the biggest part of the ballpark … Coaches had always wanted me to hit for more power, but, oddly, they’d never told me to practice hitting home runs during batting practice. Instead, they’d give mechanical suggestions as to what changes in my swing or approach would help me hit more home runs, but they never suggested I simply practice hitting the ball as far as I could.

  Often, the simplest ideas are the best.

  Because of the framework of our friendly competition, I needed to swing all out, every time. I couldn’t beat Carlos by hitting balls that barely cleared the wall. Rather than use the same easy swing I practiced at the tee, I swung with 100 percent of the force my body could muster, actually swinging harder during BP than in the real games! We had about thirty swings each and, by the time we finished, both Carlos and I would be dripping with sweat. After a couple of months of his whipping me on a regular basis (during which I paid for dinners at two of the best restaurants in North America), I began to hold my own. Hits that used to barely make it over the fence in centerfield began to make it to the seats. Balls I hit to the opposite field began landing where right-handed power hitters drove homers to their stronger side, their pull side. Eventually, I was hitting balls off of Windows, and a handful of times I actually hit balls over the glass and into the open-air section of the restaurant located just below the Jumbotron.

  During my tee work, my swings remained smooth and easy, each taken at a 50 to 70 percent effort. Desired mechanics were repeated in a place of stillness and thus ingrained, regardless of the force of the swings. However, the ball was always stationary on the tee, whereas movement and pace are essential elements of hitting. BP became my vehicle for crafting the timing of my stride with the moving pitch, bringing my tee work into the real world. After mechanics are in place, the biggest challenge a hitter faces is timing his swing with the moving ball; inversely, the art of pitching is all about disrupting that timing. For example, Pedro Martinez was untouchable in the late ’90s not because he threw harder than anyone else but because both his fastballs and off-speed pitches looked the same coming out of his hand. Such deception, along with great control and movement, makes it tough for a hitter to get the barrel of the bat on the ball.

  The BP game, which provided me a way to practice maintaining separation and stillness in a dynamic environment where timing was critical, became the bridge between my tee work and the real games, between my meditation and the real world. After all, there was little point in my having a great swing while working off the tee if it was to fall apart as soon as the ball was moving toward me.

  Could a skinny kid who’d come up hitting line drives actually become a power hitter in the big leagues?

  As the ’98 season progressed and I grew more adept, I noticed a subtle nuance in the middle of my swing—a slight pause between the completion of my stride and the forward movement of the bat. What I discovered was the emergence of space. I hadn’t noticed this space in my tee work because the pause was so subtle: the easier the swing, the less separation, the smaller that space. With my vicious swings during BP, however, I discovered that the space existed at a midpoint between the coiling of my body and the unraveling of that position. It is similar to the movement of breathing. There is a slight pause between an inhalation and an exhalation. The deeper the breath, the more pronounced the space. It’s impossible to switch from an inhalation to an exhalation without some sort of pause, no matter how brief that pause may be.

  All the power in my swing arose out of that empty space. The stride and the body separation were necessary steps, but the space itself was where my job ended and the forces of nature took over. Though lasting only a fraction of a second, the space sometimes felt like an eternity, making a ninety-five miles per hour fastball seem to float in like a beach ball. If I liked the pitch, my swing would begin with my lower half, legs and hips, rotating forward while my upper body stayed back. Next, the turning legs and hips would sling my upper body and bat forward with tremendous force. At that point, I wasn’t swinging; something was swinging me. To illustrate this further, consider again your breathing; sometimes it’s difficult to differentiate whether you’re breathing or whether the world is breathing you. Ninety-nine percent of the time, we pay no attention to breathing, but it still happens.

  In the past, whenever my bat felt slow, which inevitably happens in a 162-game schedule, I concentrated on speeding up my hands. Like most hitters, I thought I was supposed to swing a bat with my arms. After discovering separation and space, I realized that the best way to hit was to not swing at all, but to get the body in the proper, separated position, then simply allow the body to naturally uncoil. The bat then falls into the perfect slot and comes through effortlessly with great velocity. It sounds simple, but there is a catch. The stride and all the body movements leading up to the swing must be fluid and happen right on time. That’s the tricky part, the timing, which differentiates mediocre stretches from hot streaks. If the stride is late, then the bat rushes forward, thereby forfeiting the swing’s separation and space. If the stride is early, then the torqued position of the body becomes tense and less effective. For the optimal swing, the striding foot has to land at an instant I came to think of as “the last possible part of
early.”

  When it comes to such subtlety, awareness is imperative.

  For most of us, our awareness becomes trapped within our heads. We are so lost in the fantasies of our minds—egoistic images of who we think we are or should be—that we fail to truly experience the world around us. Instead, we merely think the world. Meditation, practiced in any effective format, trains us to exist and function apart from the mind and ego, allowing us to experience the present moment. In my meditative practice at the tee, my awareness attached itself to my body and its movements. In those twenty-minute sessions, I was no longer thinking through my swings; rather, I merely watched as the swings happened. Whenever self-consciousness crept into my head, I’d shift that awareness back into my striding foot, my shoulder, or my breathing. On many days, I moved beyond even my connection to the body and felt I had actually become the act of hitting, so absorbed in what I was doing that I lost my sense of self.

  Through this daily work, I created a kind of bubble around what I came to recognize as my true essence. All that I previously had thought I was (mind, ego, and emotions), was pushed to the surface of that bubble, away from my true essence, which floated at the center. And what filled the gap that separated this essence from the surface of that bubble? Emptiness. Space. Just as hitting a baseball became effortless when separation and space characterized my swing, overcoming life’s daily stresses became effortless when I moved space into everyday situations and conflicts. For example, if someone cut me off on the freeway I’d separate from my rising anger and watch the heat and tension rising in my body; in this process, I gained separation from my highly charged emotions and thereby diffused them.

  Author Eckhart Tolle teaches that a simple way to experience separation and space is to pay attention to your emotions when watching an intense movie. As we find ourselves becoming worked up, we remind ourselves, “Relax, it’s just a movie,” and the tension immediately subsides. We pull ourselves together by remembering that we are sitting in a chair fifty feet away from a screen watching actors work from a script. When considered from this perspective, it sounds a little crazy that a projected strip of celluloid can cause us to experience real physiological change due to serious emotions. Of course, getting pulled into the illusory drama is a big part of what makes a movie an enjoyable, compelling experience. The other critical aspect, however, is the realization that what’s happening on the screen either isn’t real or isn’t actually happening to us. It is the existence of this space that allows us to truly enjoy the shock of a horror movie or the sadness of a tragedy. Without it, we’d lose perspective. Likewise, it is space that allows us to refrain from flipping out for thirty minutes just because we run into a traffic jam; it is space that allows us to keep from getting lost in drama, whether that drama derives from a fiction on a movie screen or an inconvenience or disappointment in our own lives.

  When separation and space were present in my swing, ninety-five miles per hour fastballs seemed to come at me in slow motion and my bat seemed to be pulled through the hitting zone by an external force. Similarly, everyday issues lost their potentially overwhelming velocity when I viewed them from a distance and solutions came effortlessly from my deeper self (rather than from the shallower source of the mind).

  When we don’t think too hard in search of answers, they often appear out of space. Consider how it is often easier to give good advice to a friend with a problem than it is to figure out our own problems; this is because space naturally exists between ourselves and others and so we have a calmer, clearer vantage point. Still, even the most spiritually advanced lose themselves in the drama of daily life. Perfection is not the point. Rather, the key is to catch yourself early when you lose perspective. Meditating daily, we observe our minds, our egos, and our emotions from a distance, learning to watch ourselves as witnesses, no longer drowning in thoughts or emotions.

  As a ballplayer, I was perceived as even tempered. This did not always work to my advantage with coaches, fans, and the press. Some coaches preferred fiery players. Los Angeles Times columnist T. J. Simers once referred to me as “the puddle” because of what he perceived as a lack of emotion. However, I just had a little more space and separation in my life than the guy who chucked his helmet after strikeouts. Being more emotional doesn’t equate to caring more. I cared plenty, but even when dealing with a reporter as hypercritical as Simers, I practiced space. There were many guys on the team who either wouldn’t talk to him or would scream at him. But those players tended to be consumed by their sense of identity and played right into his hand. He’d poke at their egos, knowing that if he touched the right nerve, they’d fill up his column with juicy material.

  Finally, it was no coincidence that I found separation and space in my swing and in my life at the same time. My meditation not only improved my game, but also my ability to leave my successes and failures at the ballpark rather than always take them home with me. In the past, I often felt anxious and depressed. For example, for the first month of my rookie year I lived at SkyDome Hotel and after every game I’d return to my room and watch Dumb & Dumber on my Spectravision just to bring some lightness into my pressurized world. (Talk about having no space, I literally lived at the stadium!) In those days when I slumped at the plate my whole world slumped, and there were plenty of days I was unable to get out of bed until it was almost time to leave for the ballpark. Becoming a major leaguer had been a lifelong dream, but I didn’t enjoy it those first three years. I had no separation from my successes and failures on the field. When I got hits I was happy; when I didn’t I was depressed. My batting average those first years was not bad, about .285. Nonetheless, that meant I was happy only 28.5 percent of the time, and thus sad the other 71.5 percent. I needed the perspective of space.

  And when I gained it I took off.

  It was a packed Friday night against the New York Yankees, whose presence in any visiting ballpark in the late nineties cranked up the fire for both fans and players. Adding to the drama was that pitching for us was the defending Cy Young Award winner, Roger Clemens, who brought heightened intensity of his own to our dugout whenever he took the mound. In my first at-bat against Ramiro Mendoza, I smoked a ball so hard off the top of the wall in left that out-fielder Tim Raines was able to play the ricochet to hold me to a single. My next at-bat, I hit a home run into the second deck in right field. The game remained close into the seventh inning when Yankees manager Joe Torre instructed his left-handed pitcher Mike Stanton to walk our switch-hitter Tony Phillips in order to face me, opting to play the odds with a lefty-lefty matchup. I battled to a full count, then took the next pitch over the centerfield wall for a grand slam and my fifth RBI of the game. Against the best team in baseball my home run solidified a win for our ace pitcher and I’d come inches away from hitting three home runs—one to left, one to right, and one to center—which confirmed for me the power to all fields approach I’d developed in the BP game.

  Yes, a skinny kid could be a power hitter.

  AWARENESS

  Thirty minutes after my break-out game against the Yankees, I stood at my locker in the SkyDome clubhouse surrounded by a half-circle of twenty or thirty reporters, each holding a microphone, camera, or tape recorder in my face. I picked out a question from among the shouted cacophony.

  “Shawn, were you surprised Torre walked Phillips to pitch to you with the bases loaded?”

  I glanced across the room, to where my teammate Pat Hentgen was watching with a grin. When I was a rookie, he’d advised me how to handle reporters: the more boring the answers, the fewer the questions. “Joe had little choice but to walk the switch-hitter to face me,” I said. “He’s a great manager and he had to go with the lefty-lefty matchup. It was the textbook move.”

  Next question:

  “You’ve already surpassed your single-season career high of sixteen home runs and we’re only in July. How do you explain this new power to all fields?”

  The baseball world was starting to notice me. It fel
t good.

  Nonetheless, I responded with only half the truth. “In my first three years I only got to bat against right-handed pitchers,” I said. “Now I’m playing every day, hitting in the top of the lineup.” This was true, but it left out the core of my story—how just over a year ago I could barely get out of bed to face the struggles of a career hanging by a thread, how my daily meditation at the tee and the discovery of separation and space had altered my life, how I’d tapped into stillness to slow down my crazy world. Of course, none of that would have worked as a sound-bite answer for a locker room interview.

  “What were you thinking during that last at-bat, Shawn?”

  Now, this was an interesting question. The truth was that I hadn’t been thinking anything at all. In the past, my awareness and attention had been confined to my swirling thoughts, but now they’d been set free from the entrapment of the mind. The game of baseball (and my world off the field) was becoming much clearer because I no longer confused my thoughts with my true essence. Still, I didn’t offer this in answer to the reporters. Instead, I gave them only what they needed to fill their columns. “I was doing my best at the plate to battle and, fortunately, I managed to get enough wood on the ball to clear the fence.”

  Dan Millman’s book The Way of the Peaceful Warrior discusses the power of losing your mind and coming to your senses. By the middle of the ’98 season, I’d begun to truly understand what he was writing about. Before, I had always played the game through the filter of the mind, which is distorted by incessant judging and analysis. My awareness, clouded by fears of failure or illusions of grandeur, perceived only my mind’s opinion rather than what was actually before me. I barely even noticed the pitcher on the mound! But now, separated from my obsessive internal world, I often felt like exclaiming to the pitcher, “Hey, what are you doing out there? I never noticed you before!” I revamped my swing, by moving my awareness into different body parts, and now I was able to move it even further from my mind to encompass the guy standing 60 feet, 6 inches away.