The Way of Baseball

by Shawn Green

  “Cito, I wanted to let you know that even though we had our differences, I have no hard feelings.”

  He responded graciously. “I always wanted the best for you, Shawn. And I’ve been impressed with your game.”

  “Thanks, Cito.”

  And that was it. No big speeches.

  Still, it meant a lot to me to have reached an amicable closure to a difficult period in my career. I could see now that Cito’s old issues with me as a player hadn’t been personal. In fact, if we’d crossed paths at a different juncture of my career, we probably would have gotten along well. But everything happens as it should and when it should. I began to consider my recently completed season with the Dodgers in a new light. Might there be something other than anguish for me to take from that?

  On an off day, Carlos and I and others from our group took a trip to a famous Buddhist temple in Kyoto—Kiyomizu Temple, the Clear Water temple. It was a place of amazing natural beauty and inspiring architectural and cultural achievement.

  “Why’s your stride gotten so jumpy?” Carlos asked as we wandered among other tourists through the vast courtyard.

  “Home runs,” I said.

  We stopped to take in a three-story pagoda, whose up-swing design seemed somehow to defy gravity.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Carlos continued. “You always wanted to hit home runs.”

  “The Dodgers gave me a big contract,” I answered. “I need to prove that I’m worth the money.”

  “No one’s worth that much money,” he said with a big smile.

  We both laughed and continued our tour.

  “I can’t find the point in my swing that allows me to have separation and space,” I explained as we approached Todoroki-mon (Reverberation Gate). “My weight always shifts onto my striding foot as soon as it lands, making the ball appear to come in faster and my swing actually move slower.”

  “It’s about balance,” Carlos said, taking in the wooded hills all around the temple. “I remember you used to talk to Yoda about it. What did he tell you?”

  Carlos always asked the right questions.

  I reflected back on my discussions with Tony Fernandez.

  One day in camp in the spring of ’99, prior to one of my best seasons, I asked Tony to explain his unorthodox drills. I’d often watched him balance on one foot atop a contraption that was half workout ball and half platform. (Tony was famous for having a bag of tricks filled with workout gizmos.) He’d face the mirror while balancing in his batting stance. As he practiced his swing, he’d stand on his left foot with his right knee up by his waist. He would then do sets of ten reps in which he squatted down on that left leg while, at the same time, taking an imaginary stride with his right leg as the bat moved backward in the opposite direction acting as a counterbalance, just as it moved during his regular stride. He was always careful to keep his shoulders level during these modified one-legged squats.

  “I incorporated his drills into my tee work and weight lifting,” I said to Carlos. “His one-legged stride squats made me feel as if my weight was forward and back at the same time, as if I was on the verge of tipping forward, even as I knew I was never going to tip over.”

  “Exactly!” Carlos jumped in. “You want to feel your energy ready to explode forward and power your swing. As soon as you transfer the weight off that back foot, your hands are released forward. Once that happens, there’s no turning back—that swing is coming, all on its own!”

  “Tony always told me that same thing,” I said. “If you come off your back foot too soon, then your body no longer pulls the bat through the zone with same force. Instead, your hands just drift forward toward the pitcher prematurely.”

  As we made our way toward the Dragon Fountain, Carlos asked the million-dollar question. “You obviously know all of this already; so what’s the problem?”

  That stopped me. “I guess back in Toronto, I didn’t understand balance as well as I thought. Sure, I implemented Tony’s drills into my workouts, into my tee drills, into my batting practice swings, and even into my on-deck swings, but I didn’t truly understand what I was doing. I thought I did. But I only understood one side of balance.”

  “Why’s that?” he asked.

  “Because I didn’t yet understand what it felt like to be off-balance.”

  Carlos nodded and smiled. “Well, after last season … now you do.”

  I looked across the courtyard and saw Lindsay coming down the steps of the west gate with one of the other players’ wives. I realized that my discussion with Carlos about being off-balance could just as easily have been about the last few months of my relationship with her. This two-week trip to Japan had come at a critical time for the two of us. I hoped it would be our opportunity to dive wholeheartedly back into our relationship, with balance and presence.

  “The question is how you’re going to get where you want to be,” Carlos said.

  It sounded right. But it wasn’t. I shook my head no. “The wording of your question isn’t right,” I said. “It’s not about how to get there. That approach has been my problem. See, I’ve been obsessed about getting somewhere else, when I should’ve been focused on being exactly where I was, in the present moment. No past, no future … I need to just get back into the flow of the present.”

  “The present …” Carlos murmured. He stopped and looked around him. The ancient temple was truly magnificent. “Yeah, the present is the place to be,” he said.

  “Always is, wherever, whenever.”

  He nodded.

  “But the trick, of course, is getting there,” I said. Then I caught myself. “I mean getting here, being in the here and now, whenever and wherever you are.”

  He grinned.

  “Thanks, big brother,” I said.

  “No problem. I’ll send you my bill!”

  After two weeks, it was time to go home. The trip was more than just refreshing—it gave me the chance to close my chapter with Cito Gaston and to reunite with Carlos, whose camaraderie I’d missed far more than I realized during my first season in Los Angeles. After playing together for all eight years of my professional life (along with our friend Alex Gonzalez), it had been more disorienting than I realized to suddenly be on my own in Los Angeles. There was no way I could make comparable friendships in one season. But playing again with Carlos, even for a brief exhibition series, enabled me to rediscover the lightness with which I’d played back in Toronto, reconnecting me with aspects of baseball that had been lacking in Los Angeles.

  Playing with close friends made baseball feel more like Little League, like a game.

  I realized now that after moving away from friendships in Toronto my performance became my sole focus. In Los Angeles, I had a job to do, period. Where is the joy in that? Where is the spirit of the eight-year-old I’d met at the batting cages?

  It’s no way to approach a job. No way to approach anything!

  As our bus headed to the airport and we listened to a young pitcher, Ryan Dempster, perform a two-hour stand-up comedy routine, I sat hand in hand with Lindsay. Our much-needed reprieve from our hectic life back home had done wonders for our relationship. Without ordinary distractions tugging at us, we’d been able to once again be fully present in each other’s company.

  After the long flight home, Lindsay and I headed to my house for some rest. She’d slept for much of the flight, whereas I had suffered the effects of bad sushi and had spent half the trip locked in the tight quarters of the lavatory.

  It was good to be home.

  As I lugged the bags into the house, I caught sight of a box sitting next to the front door. I checked the label. It was from Carlos. Had he been able to find the Playstation 2 that I had fruitlessly tried to track down in Japan prior to its release in the United States? The box was about that size, but when I picked it up I realized it wasn’t heavy enough.

  I took it inside and opened it.

  Wrapped in crinkled newspaper was a little-known hitting apparatus calle
d the Dinger. He must have had someone ship this to me from his home in Puerto Rico after our discussion in Kyoto.

  I pulled the contraption out of the box.

  The Dinger had been invented in the ’80s by several players, including Tim Wallach and my current third-base coach, Glenn Hoffman. The device consisted of an ’80s era, blue leather weightlifter’s belt with a simple pulley system and a tether attached to the back. The batter would wear the belt while the tether was either held by someone standing directly behind him or was tied to the back of the cage. The pulley system enabled normal hip rotation during the swing while the tether held the batter in place. The intention of the Dinger was to prevent the hitter from lunging forward. I’d never used it before, though I’d seen Carlos use it from time to time when he was slumping. This one had a lot of mileage on it, but as the company was no longer in existence, Dingers were hard to come by.

  I couldn’t wait to give it a try.

  The next morning, I asked my dad to meet me at the cages. He always found time to help me with my hitting, and his tutelage during my childhood had provided me with the foundation of my whole game. I put the Dinger belt around my waist and buckled it tight. Because it was made of stiff, saddlelike leather, it dug uncomfortably into my skin. My father stood behind me, holding the leash at a sufficient distance to keep it taut. Had anyone seen me, I would’ve resembled a dog on a walk. I placed a ball on my Tanner Tee and took a swing. At first, the belt felt too restrictive, so I asked my dad to move a couple of inches closer to ease the tension. I took another swing, then turned to my dad.

  “Perfect,” I said. “Stay right there.”

  Even during that first session, I began to feel my old swing returning. The belt gave instant feedback whenever I drifted too far forward during my stride, pulling me into place, keeping me in the present rather than lunging into the future. The Dinger was the missing ingredient in my effort to recapture stillness and presence. I realized now that my body had become addicted to the habit of jumping out to the future with my stride. Even as I attempted to rediscover the sacredness and meditative qualities in my tee work, my body wouldn’t allow it. You can’t find a spiritual connection if your body can’t stay present!

  How did the Dinger enable me to approach the problem from a different angle?

  Over the past months, I had attempted to replicate ’98 and ’99, when my natural swing had evolved out of my meditative tee work, by turning my attention to finding stillness at the tee. But my circumstances were different now, so the process of getting back to my optimal swing needed to be different too. This time, I wasn’t going to find my swing out of stillness no matter how hard I tried.

  Rather, the Dinger helped me to do the opposite, to rediscover stillness out of the process of focusing on the physical nature of my swing. The Dinger enabled me to take correct swings in a place of no-mind by physically jerking me back to my balance point whenever I drifted forward, into the future.

  My swing had been fractured for several months. The Dinger served the same purpose as a cast serves for a broken bone. When I broke my thumb in the minor leagues, I needed a cast for six weeks for the injury to heal. Without the cast, my thumb would never return to normal, no matter how much I thought about it or tried to heal it. My thumb needed a cast to hold it in place, and it needed several weeks for the healing to occur. Similarly, the Dinger served to hold my balance in place, and I needed to use it for several weeks to give both my swing and my connection to the present moment the opportunity to heal.

  By the time January rolled around, I was ready to remove my cast.

  My balance had returned and my tee work was well on its way to becoming a joyful, sacred practice once again. When I started hitting every day off the tee without the belt it felt great! I took the swing into the coin-operated cages and hit off the pitching machines. The first couple of days, my stride was a little jumpy, so I put the belt back on. (Hitting a moving ball requires a well-timed stride and the last time I’d hit a moving pitch was in Japan, when my stride was off.) Fortunately, after a few days of hitting with the belt, I was ready to go.

  The real test came in mid-January.

  Every year, the Dodgers held a media day to kick off the pre-spring-training workouts at Dodger Stadium. These workouts offer players in the organization the chance to get some practice before heading off to Vero Beach. I was excited to take batting practice on the field to gauge my hard work that winter.

  It felt great to throw on the uniform, the classic Dodger Blue.

  On the field during our stretching routine, I caught up with some of my teammates: Gary Sheffield, Paul Lo Duca, Eric Karros, Dave Hansen, and others. Meantime, the media snapped photos and grabbed sound bites. It was great to see the guys, including our new manager Jim Tracy. Later, third-base coach Glenn Hoffman walked out to the mound to throw to my batting group. I couldn’t help but smile that one of the inventors of the Dinger was pitching the first real BP I’d taken since I’d rediscovered my swing using his device! Though normally my swing didn’t feel great until I was well into spring training (sometimes even later), today the balls came off my bat with the same helium effect as my best days in Toronto. I launched pitches deep into the seats from the left-center gap over to the right-center gap. The guys couldn’t help but notice.

  Karros joked, “Don’t peak too soon, Greenie.”

  My new manager, known by the players as “Trace,” was also impressed as he leaned against the cage watching. “Hey, Greenie, let me tell you something. That swing of yours looks a lot quicker than the underwater swing you were featuring after the All-Star break last year. What have you been doing?”

  I told him about my work with the Dinger.

  He yelled out to Hoffman: “Hoffy, did you hear that? Greenie’s been using your belt contraption. What do you think?”

  Hoffy replied with his usual big smile, “I knew he was a smart guy! I was about to ask who our new player was.”

  After my gratifying batting session, I went inside to shower and head home before the freeways got too jammed. Waiting at my locker were reporters looking for quotes. There wasn’t the large media turnout of a regular season game, but most of the LA media outlets were represented.

  One of them asked me, “Jim Tracy said your swing looks much improved over last year. What have you been working on?”

  I kept it simple. “I’ve been working on slowing down my stride and being a little more balanced. Last year, my feet were quick and my bat was slow. This year, I’m trying to slow my feet down so my bat can speed up.”

  “You were launching some long home runs during BP. Have you added some muscle?” another asked.

  “No. My workout routine is the same as always. I do yoga and a moderate lifting routine.”

  He then fired another question at me. “What kind of numbers do you expect to put up this year? What are your goals?”

  This was a question most starters get asked prior to the season. It’s a loaded question and plays into the ego’s most distracting qualities. I recognized its relationship to all that went wrong for me the previous year in Los Angeles—setting a numerical bar, a measuring stick, to chase throughout the 162-game schedule—no thanks. I answered the question differently this time than I had a year ago. “I don’t have any numerical goals for the coming season. I’m going to take it one at-bat at a time or, better yet, one pitch at a time. Last year, I tried too hard to fulfill statistical expectations, including my own. I’m not falling into that trap again.”

  The reporters weren’t altogether satisfied with the answer, but it was the truth.

  “I hear you used Glenn Hoffman’s old batting device during the off-season?” another reporter asked.

  I nodded. “The Dinger.”

  “How did it help you?”

  I considered. “By restraining my body when I swung, it helped me to restrain my mind.”

  The reporters didn’t follow up the question. Sportswriters are rarely interested in discussing m
ind/body issues.

  “You sure you don’t want to project a number of home runs you’ll hit this season, Shawn?” somebody asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  Heading home after the workout, I thought about the connection between the body and the spirit. I wondered why I had seen so many athletes deliver their best performances when they were injured or sick. Dodger fans remember Kirk Gibson’s home run in the ’88 World Series. He could barely hobble up to home plate with his injured knee, yet he hit one of the most dramatic home runs in baseball history. There were many times I saw teammates who could barely get off the training table somehow perform with greater success and grace than they did when their bodies were 100 percent. I, too, had played some of my best games with a bad back or the flu. I never understood this phenomenon. But now, I had a few ideas …

  Often, when our bodies and lives are working perfectly, we take the present moment for granted and get lost in our minds and egos. However, when we suffer an injury or get sick, the body pulls us back by drawing our attention to our pain, which inevitably resides in the present moment. This is why in some monasteries monks are taught to raise their hands during meditation if they grow too connected to their thoughts. The master then comes over and whacks them on their backs with a stick in order to create a painful sensation, which knocks their attention away from their thoughts and back to their bodies.

  Whenever awareness is placed in the body, presence emerges.

  This is why most meditative practices focus on the body. Almost all require some type of connection to the breath. Consider the calming impact of taking a deep breath when upset or anxious. One conscious breath can relax the body, whether at bat, at the free-throw line, in the middle of a contentious business meeting, driving on the freeway, or talking through a relationship issue. One of the simplest yet most effective forms of meditation is to simply observe your own breathing, paying attention to each inhalation and exhalation. Once connected to the body, mind and ego lose their grasp and stillness emerges, but this is not common in our culture. Walk in any big city and you’ll see pedestrians who are focused only on getting to where they’re going rather than connecting with the action of walking or being where they actually are. It may be the forward tilt of their bodies or the focus of their eyes on their next steps that indicates the pull of the future upon them.