Weekly Hitting Tips – Know When To Give Up

An unfortunate reality for a hitting coach is hitters tend to be more interested in what you have to say when they are struggling. Those are usually the best conversations. This is why it is important for a hitting coach to have a solid understanding of and relationship with failure as a hitter, part of that understanding being how much failure a top-tier hitter experiences in their best years, let alone a league average guy who may be underperforming halfway through this season.

Knowing how much failure comes with the territory – especially with the struggling hitters you will talk to the most – it makes sense that you would make a bigger impact teaching the proper way to fail than how to succeed. Learning not just how to endure failure but how to interpret and learn from it. When to adjust versus when to stay the course. Even when the lesson is about processing success, it’s more likely the hitter will not be ready to receive the lesson until they are struggling again.

A .900 OPS season does not feel like a .900 OPS season for the entire season – mainly because it is not a .900 OPS for the entire season. One day it’s .250, the next it’s 2.250, then it’s .000 for a few days, then it’s 1.500 for a week, .700 for a month, so on and so forth. Often what separates the tiers of players at the higher levels of the game is not only the ability to maintain confidence when performance is down but also to process the transitions from low to high, high to low that are bound to occur.

So much of what dictates success or failure in hitting is out of the hitter’s control that it’s not crazy to say that as the season goes hitting gets easier and harder more than hitters get better or worse. Both happen, to be clear. The thing is the high performing hitter often overestimates his ability to affect his outcomes. This is most true when a hitter gets “hot”, so when a hitter transitions from a stretch of mostly great outcomes to mostly not great outcomes they are more likely to assume that 1.) it’s because they were either doing something or not doing something then that they are doing or not doing now, 2.) that if they rectify that discrepancy or figure out something new they will begin seeing the same outcomes as before. These types of false assumptions is where pressing starts. The results don’t show up, so the hitter tries harder to do what they were doing before. Thing is when they were hitting really well before they were present, they weren’t trying to recreate a swing from the past. Now instead of just being the same hitter hitting in a tougher environment, a fully capable, competitive hitter having a rough go of it they are now also a less effective version of that hitter due to self-imposed mental interference.

So what do you do to break this cycle? The answer is infuriatingly simple – give up. No, I don’t mean quit baseball. Give up means letting go of perceived control (and responsibility) for the poor results – “charge it to the game”. Evaluate what you are actually in control of (and responsible for). You are in control of your preparation, your effort, and your perspective. You can put in the work before the game to put yourself in the best position – give yourself the best chance – to have success. You can play hard, and as hard as it can be sometimes you can find a perspective that allows you to be a positive teammate. As counterintuitive as it may sound the best way to go about finding – or getting back to – that perspective might just be accepting that sucking at the plate is something that every hitter is required to do from time to time, and this is your turn.

So the next time you catch yourself pressing remember this, and decide if you want to fight yourself (and the game) – good luck – or embrace the suck the way great hitters do. Happy Hunting!