Baseball is crazy! I mean, I love it of course but at the same time baseball and the belief system we have in baseball is enough to drive me nuts. Baseball, more than any other sport is attached to the past. While this attachment provides baseball with the richest history of any other sport it also robs us of progress. Baseball’s attachment to the past and it’s attachment to it’s records doesn’t allow for improvement. It doesn’t allow us to ponder, “What is possible?” I mean we think we already know. For some reason in baseball we have decided what the limits to human performance are. We have decided that hitting .300 or 60 homeruns is the limit to what we can do naturally. If for some reason these numbers are to be surpassed then we immediately believe that the player who did it must have been cheating.
Think about it! It’s almost blasphemy to say that Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, or Lou Gehrig couldn’t compete today with the mechanics they had back then. We want to believe that we will never see anyone who can live up to their talents. This mindset prevents us from surpassing the records these athletes set. Could they really compete today? Could a car, even the best car, built in the 1920’s compete in a race with an average car today? Of course not! The game doesn’t resemble the game these athletes played in. Their mechanics would be exploited in today’s game and they wouldn’t come near the level of success they had back then in today’s game.
The one thing these athletes had however was a limitless mindset. Babe Ruth who played in an era where whole teams were hitting around 20 homeruns a year, saw no reason why he couldn’t hit 60 and as a result he did. Ted Williams saw no reason why he couldn’t hit .400 and he did that very thing. It was their mindset that allowed them to reach these levels not their mechanics. It was this mindset that would cause them to change their mechanics if they played today. If Babe Ruth or Ted Williams played today I believe their swings would look vastly different then the ones we remember. As such they would have been able to compete today but not with their old mechanics.
Over the years and through advances in training, instruction, video analysis, etc., players have become better and more efficient at producing a desired result. Just like in the development of cars, tvs, and other technological advances, we make small improvements over time. When we develop something ground breaking we immediately go to work to make that item a little better. We go from black and white tvs to color, from color to cable, from cable to plasma, from plasma to HD. We didn’t jump from black and white to HD overnight, we made small improvements over time. So then why have the statistics of players not gotten that much better considering they are stronger, faster and better mechanically?
It has everything to do with our mindset as a group. In baseball, when an athlete at any level hits .300 or a certain number of homeruns we immediately think, “He’s got it. He knows what he is doing.” Once they hit these numbers we stop looking for ways for that athlete to improve. We take the, “We just don’t want him to loose it” approach and we are happy with that production. Nobody ever steps back and wonders if we could do more. Nobody wants to take the risk of, “screwing him up” in order to improve upon already good statistics. Everyone wants to believe that .300 is good enough and that hitting .400 is impossible. But what about .450? What about 80 homeruns in a season? Is this possible? I believe it is.
Think of other sports. Every 4 years in track and field we see what we think is the limit to human performance and every 4 years those limits are erased. Look at extreme sports, every couple of months or so we see someone do the “impossible” only to have someone perform an even more difficult trick a few months later. Why is it that there is so much progress in other sports but not in baseball? The track and field athlete is completely focused on running faster then the world record. They know it’s possible and as such they study and look for improvements in training, nutrition, mechanics, and mental skills to make this feat possible. They don’t just shut it down because they are winning races, they are racing against the clock. They are focused on breaking records, their mindset, their goals are focused on doing the impossible. And guess what? They do it all the time.
As everyone knows, baseball has had a run of bad press. We have just finished what could probably be the darkest time baseball has ever seen. Baseball needs someone to change the game. It needs someone to do the “impossible”. We need to improve the sport from the inside out and show the world that it truly is the greatest sport ever invented. In order to accomplish this we have to change our mindset. The limited mindset leads to steroid abuse, the limited mindset leads to complacency and causes our sport to grow stale. The impossible is possible. We can hit .450 in the major leagues. We can hit 80 homeruns in a season. Don’t let the past dictate what you accomplish in the future. Believe in what is possible, change your mindset and help me change this great game.
