Baseball is one of the absolute loves of my life. I am so fully immersed in baseball I couldn’t ever come out of it. From Opening Day to the last game of the World Series, I am 100% in. But there are many people out there who think baseball is boring, slow, and mostly a bunch of guys in tight fitting pants (honestly, that’s a huge bonus in my opinion) who are just standing around eating sunflower seeds and adjusting their batting gloves for the 100th time. And to you people I say: You are deeply, aggressively, undeniably wrong.
Baseball is not just a sport. It is a full mental game, a mental game that will either make or break you.
Football is tough. Wrestling is brutal. Basketball is fast. Hockey? They are basically unlicensed psychopaths on tiny blades of steel. But baseball? Baseball is different. Baseball doesn’t always beat you physically first…..It beats you psychologically.
Baseball is a game where you can literally do everything right and still fail. Baseball is a game where hitting the ball 3 out of 10 times makes you a good player. A game where one bad inning, one dropped ball, one terrible at bat, or one dumb little error can cost you the entire game and haunt you for the rest of your life. Sure, this can happen in other sports. But baseball takes the cake on psychologically shutting you down. And there is absolutely nothing you can do about it besides just think about it. A lot.
Let’s pretend you are a kid in school. Your teacher tells you “Hey! If you get a 30% on your test, you are elite.”
What? No one is ever going to tell anyone that…
Unless you are a baseball player.
A 30% in baseball is completely normal. If anything, it’s respected. It’s the standard. And that is completely wild to think that we are telling someone that a 30% is amazing. I am pretty sure that baseball is the only place where you get a pat on the back for a score like that. And that is what makes baseball so mentally nasty. You can hit a shot perfectly, almost out of the park, and some random asshole catches it right before it goes over the fence. Nothing you did was wrong; it just wasn’t right either. You can hit the ball hard and perfectly and get nothing. You can throw a great pitch and get shelled. You can make one tiny mistake and lose the whole damn thing for your team. And since baseball is so repetitive, you don’t just fail once. You get multiple opportunities to lose your mind. Doesn’t that sound like a great time? All of this can lead to a slump. And let me tell you…
In baseball, there is absolutely nothing that is more terrifying in the game than a slump. Because slumps are usually your brain getting involved, and once your brain gets involved? It’s over. One bad game makes you feel like you are off that day. A few bad games make you think “ok, I am in a funk”. And anything after that? You feel like you obviously have never played baseball before and should quit baseball for good and move into the woods and disappear forever. ( No joke, I have been there. I was going to build a shanty and never speak words again). When the slump hits, hitters are out changing everything they do to try and get it back. Stance, timing, hand placement, loading, their walk-up song, what they eat before the game, hell maybe even their religion. A pitcher? Even worse. The fact that a pitcher can dominate for 3 or 4 innings and then suddenly miss on pitch location by a half inch, give up a double, and fall completely apart; acting like the mound, the baseball, the song playing in the background has cursed them forever. And once their confidence leaves the situation? Good Luck. They are almost always taken out of the game where they will come into the dugout acting like a methed out raccoon throwing shit everywhere and sulking in the corner.
Because if there was ever one true statement about baseball players, its that they are some of the most routine dependent, superstitious and mentally frailly tough people on this planet.
As a coach for the last 8 years, I have seen it ALL. I had a kid that had to wear pink Coban around his wrist to pitch well. One would have to have several days in advance notice he was pitching to do god knows what. Without the advance notice, he looked like he never had picked up a baseball before. One has to eat Nutella prior to the game. One had to have subway prior to the game. Another had to have multiple beef jerky sticks prior to hitting. We also had to have pink eye black, eye black drawn in different shapes, this god awful duck they named Byron that came from a quarter machine that they put eye black on had to be in the dugout or a tiny boat wheel “Who’s driving the boat?” – Once, Byron wore the boat wheel for a while – and one of them could not possibly pitch without a snickers bar. I could write an entire page of the wild things these kids came up with that they HAD to have to function. These are 18 year old kids.. Imagine what a MLB star with millions would request?
The thing about a baseball player’s psychological breakdown is that they are quietly and internally going insane… usually. Football players can scream, Basketball players can run it off, wrestlers can do wild moves fueled by pure rage. Baseball players though, they have a full psychological collapse in silence. You can watch them fall to pieces usually; It’s the 10th extra batting glove adjustment, the thousand yard stares into center field, stepping off the mound for the 5th time while pitching, trying to throw the guy on first out 15 times in a row to try to break the bad rhythm they feel like they are in. Each person has their tell-tale signs of complete meltdown mode impending. You just have to know what to watch for.
With those meltdowns, I feel like we need to talk about catchers. Catchers are near and dear to my heart, and I will always do whatever extra they need because they are the real MVPs. They are the ones that are involved in every single play on the field. They take foul balls off all appendages, control the game, call pitches, and are the ones that watch their pitcher’s body language and know when a meltdown is near and go take a moment to calm them down to continue the game. They are the real MVPs, as they are basically unpaid therapist in shin guards.
With all of this being said… this is why people love baseball. When it is bad, it’s emotionally humiliating. When it is good? It is literal magic. Baseball is heartbreak, superstition, confidence, failure, ego, routine, obsession, and just enough humility to keep your feet on the ground to love the game the next day. Baseball is not slow or boring. Baseball is a slow burn psychological hostage situation. It’s a test of your ability to survive under insane pressure. Its not for everyone, because not everyone is emotionally unstable to enough to survive it. And really, at the end of the day, baseball is just trauma with stats.
And that is what makes the whole thing so damn beautiful.