Category Archives: Mental game
Breaking out of a slump
One of the most frustrating things in softball is to one day find yourself in a hitting slump. Things were going along fine, and then suddenly it seems like you can’t buy a base hit. Then no matter what you do you can’t seem to find a way out.
Take heart, though. There are ways to break out of that slump and get your hitting back where it ought to be. Here are a few quick ideas.
Number one, difficult as it may be, is to relax. Players often perceive themselves to be in a slump long before there really is a true slump. They may have been unlucky, not getting the results they wanted, or just having a bad day. For example, you can hit the ball on the nose and have it go directly into a fielder’s glove. That’s not a slump, even if it happens four times in one game. That’s just bad luck. What can send it into the death spiral, though, is feeling like you’re in a slump and starting to press. You’re so desperate for a good hit that you start swinging at bad pitches, which creates weak hits, and before you know it you’re so uptight you don’t know what to do. THAT is a slump.
You just have to relax. Take a deep breath — in through your nose, out through your mouth. Then focus on seeing the ball. If you can relax you can be more positive, and if you’re more positive you will have a better at bat.
Of course, there may be some mechanical reasons why you’re having trouble hitting. That’s where video comes in. Record yourself swinging in a game, and compare it to when you were hitting better. Or even better, have a qualified hitting coach do the comparison for you. Once you see what’s going on, get on the tee and start working out the kinks in your swing. A good tee session can go a long way toward fixing what ails you.
Working with a coach can also act as a touchstone — something that gives you confidence just for having done it. For some players it may be a parent. For others it may need to be someone other than a parent. But just having that familiarity and comfort level can help drive away the “evil spirits” that are afflicting your bat and keeping you from being all that you can be.
Slumps are not permanent unless you make them so. The best thing you can do is change your routine, give yourself a fresh start. The more you separate yourself from the current slump, the easier it will be to overcome.
A book every player and coach should read
Often times on this blog and other sites we talk about various physical skills and how to execute them. That’s important, of course. But nothing can get in the way of one’s mechanics faster than a player’s own head.
Anyone who has played fastpitch softball or baseball knows it’s a game built around failure. There are many, many ways and opportunities to fail, and as they say a hitter who fails 70% of the time is an All-Star. Knowing that, the objective isn’t to avoid failure — you can’t — but instead learn how to deal with it when it inevitably occurs.
Years ago at the National Sports Clinics I had the opportunity to see a presentation by Ken Ravizza. The book he wrote with Tom Hanson, Heads Up Baseball: Playing the Game One Pitch at a Time, is probably the single best book on the subject. Sports psychologists such as Jeff Janssen refer to it often. In the book you’ll find a discussion of what happens in our little brains to make us go all goofy. More importantly, though, you’ll find a series of techniques to deal with them. Techniques, by the way, which have been adopted by many of the top-level athletes.
I had the opportunity to put these principals into action just the other night. I’d watched one of my students pitch in a game where whatever could go wrong did go wrong. Her high school team is not very good, even by high school team standards. She started having some control trouble, and as will often happen that’s about the time her teammates decided to go brain dead. I could see her getting more and more uptight, which caused her to lose both her mechanics and her rhythm, which of course caused her to get wilder and wilder. When she did get the ball over and it got hit, easy outs turned into baserunners, further adding to the frustration. Every pitcher, and every pitcher’s parent, has been there.
So we worked some on her mechanics the other night, but since they were looking pretty good overall I really shifted the focus on her mental game. I showed her how to determine where she is mentally (relaxed, confident, uptight, worried, out of control), and then gave her some of the Heads Up Baseball techniques to use when she’s feeling the pressure. We then applied them in the course of the lesson. If she threw three pitches in a row for balls I would make her use a relaxation technique. Darned if the next pitch wasn’t a strike every time.
Heads Up Baseball costs just $10.17 in paperback at Amazon.com. Most of us spend more than that on a pair of batting gloves. If you’re at all serious about the game, use the link above to go there directly and purchase this book. It’ll do more for you or your players than the most expensive gear you can buy.
Yes-yes-yes-no
This is not a new thought by any means, but it’s surprising how many hitters (and coaches) don’t know about the way you should approach each pitch at the plate.
Ask many hitters what they’re looking for when the pitch is delivered, and they will tell you they’re looking to see if it’s a strike. If it is, then they swing at it.
Problem is, if the pitcher has any kind of speed at all, by the time you look, recognize the pitch, make the decision, and start the swing, the pitch is often by you, or almost by you. This reactive mode doesn’t work too well, no matter what type of talent you have or hitting mechanics you’re using.
The proper way to approach each pitch is to assume it’s going to be a strike, and then hold up if it’s not. This is made easier if you use rotational mechanics, where the hips start the body turning and the hands come through last. You should plan on hitting each pitch, and then hold back if it’s not a good pitch to hit. In other words, you’re thinking yes-yes-yes-no.
Life in the Fastpitch Lane 