Rhythm Performance Blog

Category: Space & Time

  • Command vs Control

    I control a thing when I hold it in my hand. No freedom for the thing, no surprises for me. Until the thing is out of my hand. Now there’s no control, the thing does what it will, leaving me to hope for the best. This gives control an anxious touch, as much thought and energy needs to go into establishing and maintaining control of the thing as actually using the thing. Naturally then control is very limited as well as stressful.

    Command is a different deal. I have command of a thing whether it is in my hand or not. Command gives the thing its freedom out of hand, requires of me trust and understanding. I don’t need to control the thing because I know what it does and why. Therefore whether the thing is currently in hand (or even in sight) or not is of little concern. Once I’ve established command I can commit myself entirely to the actual use of the thing.

    Many young hitters approach the game with the intent to control the swing – the movements involved – consciously. Whether those controlled movements are effective or not becomes irrelevant as the game speeds up. What is essential in training hitability is developing command over the movements involved in the swing. To make these movements “natural”, accessible when the brain is busy putting out fires elsewhere – namely “seeing the ball”.

  • I Could Use a Strikeout

    I could use a strikeout. As a hitter, I can use a good strikeout. In reality it took quite a few strikeouts just to learn how to identify the good ones. The good ones go according to plan. The good ones provide answers, not questions.

    I can use bad strikeouts too, simply by recognizing that they are not good strikeouts. Bad strikeouts evoke questions and usually a good bit of fear. There’s usually an urge to go ask somebody what’s wrong with my swing or my move (there’s never anything wrong with my swing or my move). Sometimes a bad strikeout alerts me to the reality which is a barrel is no longer the expectation or even the aspiration. Let’s just get a quality plate appearance on the books, be present in the actual competition between me and the pitcher. If the result of said plate appearance is a strikeout – so be it.

    Even when I’m swinging it well I can use a good strikeout, probably even more so then – simply as a reminder that this game is still hard, the pitchers will adjust, there’s still work to do. Strikeouts also provide context for the more easily-appreciated outcomes as a hitter. What’s a walk-off grand slam without a good strikeout to end the game with the tying run on third?

    Thing is, anyone could use a home run, or a hit, or even a barreled out. These are the tools we all want to use, the feedback every hitter wants to interpret. An easy way to separate yourself in any arena is to embrace the work no one else wants to do or – in this case – use the tools no one else wants to use.

    When I realize how useful a strikeout can be, when I appreciate it’s value in my development, the fear goes. The outcomes of my at-bats change from either being great or terrible to either being great now or great later. There are no more threats and hitting – actually hitting, the whole experience of it – changes.

  • 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!

  • Weekly Hitting Tips : Slow Down, Breathe

    Everybody knows that timing is important to hitting. What a lot of people fail recognize is as hitters and coaches we tend to fixate on timing as it pertains to moving with the pitcher’s throwing motion, or timing in terms of the mechanical sequence of the swing itself. A critical timing aspect to hitting that hitters usually don’t gain a true awareness of until they get to higher levels of the game is the tempo of the at-bat itself – how fast (or slow) one pitch happens after another.

    There is not a one size fits all tempo for pitchers or hitters. As we saw with the introduction of the pitch clock in the MLB where many well-qualified players on both sides went through some form of an adjustment process learning to navigate at-bats under strict time constraints. This is not to say anything about the pitch clock more so to point out that some hitters do better with more time than others and the same can be said for pitchers.

    While there is variability when it comes to optimal tempo for individual performance in one at-bat for both pitchers and hitters in a broader sense there is a “time of possession” effect that comes into play when we talk about two teams competing in a 7-9 inning game. The more time a team can spend hitting and the less time they can spend playing defense the better. This is to say that up until the point where it hinders the individual athlete’s ability to perform at a high level hitters help their team win by taking their time within their at-bats and pitchers help their team win by working quickly.

    More on the individual performance side of this is a feel versus real conversation. For hitters when we are locked in the game slows down. A better way to put this is when the game slows down we lock in.

    Now the question is how to slow the game down instead of how to lock in. Let’s start with this : what does it mean to say the game is slowed down? To put it simply when the player has fully processed the scenario from a strategic and emotional standpoint they free themselves up to focus fully on the task at hand. This is flow state if you will, being able operate effectively with no mental interference. Important to note we get here by processing relevant information effectively not necessarily by simply blocking out all information.

    So now that we’ve covered what slowing the game down is we get to how to do it. This is where breathing comes in, or more specifically the hitter’s focus and awareness of their breath. Between pitches, having a routine for getting focus back to the breath gives the hitter time and space to process whatever relevant information has come about to that point – the hitter may or may not know exactly what information will be relevant before they step out of the box, still a good idea to create the time to process it – as well as get oxygen into the brain (important) and muscles. Besides the actual physical effects of breathing focusing on it gives you something to think about other than what your front elbow is doing. Most of us haven’t reached a level of zen where we can think about nothing on command, next best option is find something to think about that aides our physical task or at the very least does not interfere.

    Happy hunting, and don’t forget to breathe!

  • Space & Time – Structure

    The thing about structure that is often misconstrued is that it inherently stifles freedom and creativity. In reality it is by establishing and enforcing effective structures in our practice that we free ourselves to find new, creative solutions, effectively expanding the space we can control. In the swing big, complex, noisy movements looks like, feels like freedom. However, if those big moves reduce the hitter’s margin for error and in turn their adjustability that “athleticism” is actually a restriction, only allowing the hitter to experience success under certain conditions. Being able to accomplish the same tasks, check the same boxes with less/quieter movements allows the hitter to repeat their swing more consistently.

    This concept applies to how we approach our cage and batting practice time as well. It is the value of the boring routine. The hitter and/or coach can identify a small number of key checkpoints that can be addressed with a simple, highly repeatable – albeit possibly boring – routine. This cuts down on time the hitter spends chasing their tail – rehashing the same conversations, finding new ways to attack the same problems. At the youth/high school levels this can free up time to talk about/address other aspects of hitting. For example, instead of spending 45 minutes of an hour session every week figuring out how to effectively turn the barrel a player and/or coach may consider implementing a 10 minute routine for that specific issue. This not only allows the hitter to continue the work on their own, it frees up 30 minutes per session to address things like hand-eye coordination and approach/strategy, or of course just to get more reps (at the youth level nothing is going to add more value than an uptick in focused, quality reps). At the college and professional levels – especially full season pro ball – hitters will benefit from conserving mental and physical energy. When you play 5-6 days per week simply figuring out how to “fix” your swing every other day is a costly drain, let alone the 50-100 extra swings hitters tend to take when the new drill fails to give them that “fix” or makes the problem worse. Besides leaving hitters physically and mentally exhausted this type of practice typically does not produce hitters that have the discipline or confidence to perform at the highest levels.

    In conclusion for the coach or player reading this I encourage you to consider the structure of your practice – especially when problem solving for common swing issues. By designing simple routines for day-to-day work, efficient flows for your batting practice and private cage sessions you can free up space and time for a more robust hitting conversation and experience.

    Happy hunting!