Mike Trout says he wants to increase his stolen bases and decrease his strikeouts. Kolten Wong wants to hit for a higher batting average. Joe Kelly is aiming to win the American League Cy Young Award. While the rest of us make our resolutions on New Year's Day, baseball players seem to wait until spring training to voice their hopes and aspirations for the coming year.
Twins pitching prospect Trevor May is also focused on his goals for the new season, but he is content to leave the stat-counting and award-seeking to others. This is not to say that he is content with what he accomplished in his first exposure to the majors last summer. Having made nine starts and a relief appearance after getting his first call to the big leagues last August, May's 3-6 record and 7.88 ERA were not the sort of results that sit well with one's ego or set the stage for a successful career.
May entered spring training with a lot at stake, as he was one of five pitchers vying for the fifth spot in the Twins' rotation, along with veterans Tommy Milone, Mike Pelfrey and Tim Stauffer and fellow prospect Alex Meyer. On a variety of levels -- from a bloated ERA to soaring walk and home run ratios and and inconsistent release point -- May clearly had work to do and would seemingly have had much to gain by paying close attention to his stats. While he was looking to improve his results and cares greatly about the process by which he achieves them, May's number one goal this spring was one that would have been hard, if not impossible, to quantify.
He wanted to be mentally focused for every single pitch.
On the morning of March 28, the Twins delivered the news that May surely did not want to hear: he was being optioned back to Triple-A Rochester. May's demotion came three weeks later than it did a year ago, and he lasted in the race (which was ultimately won by Milone) longer than either Stauffer or Meyer. Those signs of progress are likely to be of little comfort to him. However, this isn't a story about May's struggles to win a rotation spot, but rather a story about his quest to be a different kind of ballplayer. To understand that quest, we have to go back to the numbers and his orientation to them.
Seemingly everyone involved with baseball, from the fans to the media to front offices, and oftentimes players themselves, gets caught up in using numbers to judge a player's value and as benchmarks to catalyze future improvement. In this era, a great deal of focus is placed on arguing over which numbers are the best indicators of productivity and progress. It's a debate in which May, a 25-year-old righty whose career has already experienced several peaks and valleys, isn't especially interested.
The statistical analysis of pitchers has advanced from the comparison of won-loss records and ERAs to more nuanced stats like strikeout, walk and batted ball ratios. More recently, "process stats" measuring phenomena such as the location of release points, the frequency of spin in a ball's rotation or the distribution of pitches in various quadrants of the strike zone have gained greater currency. In general, though, the mental aspects of the game have received less attention.
Jim Bauman, a sports psychologist at the University of Virginia, has worked with Olympic and college athletes for more than 20 years, and he cites two reasons for athletes' neglect of developing their mental skills: Coaches, he says, have been focused on building up their athletes' "hardware," which Bauman characterizes as "everything below the chin," but they have not given much of a priority to the "software" that lies above the chin. Even if coaches were inclined to help their athletes to enhance their own "software" packages, it's harder to demonstrate the impact of those changes, as we are just beginning to learn how to quantify changes in mental processes.
Plenty of athletes know the importance of the mental part of their game, but because many have lacked training, few address it with the same fervor and rigor that they apply to their physical training. May, in contrast, is quite serious about it. While other ballplayers use social media the way the rest of us do -- to tell jokes and vent about how their favorite teams (in other sports) are doing -- May's Twitter timeline is peppered with references to his meditation practice. (It is also heavy with discussion about his work as a house music DJ and his eyebrows, but those are other stories for another time.) May begins his day by setting out his schedule, and meditation, yoga and journaling are a regular part of it.
May's story this spring could be read as another "he's in the best shape of his life" narrative. In his attempt to stave off a return to Triple-A and move his career forward, May has pursued personal development with a laser-like focus. Instead of the primary focus being on a particular fitness regimen or diet, he has set his sights mainly on sharpening his mind.
That entails a daily meditation practice, which normally involves sitting or laying down for periods of 10-to-20 minutes, doing nothing but breathing and noticing what he notices. This isn't just recharging in order to deal with the demands of being a professional ballplayer. For May, this is a form of practice in the same way that a bullpen session is practice. These extended periods of silence prepare May for the emotional ups and downs of pitching in game situations. He sees his ability to stay even through these emotional waves as an even more critical factor to his success than the actual execution of his pitches.
To understand the importance of May's mindfulness practice to his performance, it helps to understand how he approaches in-game situations. He views every pitch as a three-step process. First, he determines what pitch he wants to throw and where to throw it. Second, he gets his mind in a focused state. Third, he executes the pitch. So while Yogi Berra said 90 percent of the game is half mental, May's game is two-thirds mental. And if the first two steps of pitching -- the mental steps -- aren't executed properly, the physical work of making the actual pitch is all for naught.
If May seems enthusiastic about meditation and yoga on Twitter ("Clarity is key"; "Consistently being mindful and present is the most underrated skill a person could have"; "Time to get my tree pose on"), try having a conversation with him about it. On a recent evening in which he was recovering from the flu, May spent 35 minutes on a phone interview recounting the role that mindfulness practices play in his life. He talked about having "an awareness of awareness." He explained how this meta-awareness allows him to break "problems big and small" into their simplest forms. He advised that one should "never try to meditate lying down when you wake up at 5:30, because you're bound to fall right back to sleep."
May is not alone in using meditation as a means to performing better as an athlete and trying to live a better life, but he is rare in his candor about it. May professes to enjoy reading about psychology and alerts his Twitter followers that Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and Norman Doidge's The Brain That Changes Itself are on his #nerdreadinglist.
By contrast, one of the figures at the forefront of bringing mindfulness to the game of baseball is more reticent about embracing the roots of his teachings. Steve Springer, a mental coach for the Blue Jays, has been working with hitters for 15 years on developing a process-oriented approach. He encourages them to break their task down to its simplest form -- focusing on making hard contact -- and not worrying if the outcome is an out. Yet with all the emphasis that Springer puts on managing stress and anxiety and building self-esteem, he is quick to point out that he "can't spell psychology."
In other sports, meditation, yoga and other mindfulness practices have gained modest acceptance, but as author and motivational speaker Mike Robbins has noted, that acceptance only came after outspoken advocates like Phil Jackson and Pete Carroll achieved a high level of success. Even in these cases, the mandate for meditation came from the top down, with a high-profile coach being the catalyst. Pau Gasol and Russell Wilson may have meditation practices, but one has to wonder how their practices would be received by the media and fans if they hadn't achieved great success and played for coaches who bore much of whatever stigma might attach itself to the marriage of mindfulness and sports. Even after having won a Cy Young Award and two World Series, Barry Zito -- the baseball player most strongly associated with mindfulness -- was often labeled as a "flake" or "hippie."
Robbins himself, a former minor league pitcher in the Royals organization, meditated during his baseball career but didn't advertise it. That was in the mid '90s, but as a result of his more recent work as a consultant for the Giants, Diamondbacks and Braves, Robbins knows that today's players are more concerned with the mental aspect of the game. He says that nowadays, "players want to know how to relax and stay focused." Even so, most keep their mindfulness practices "in the closet."
May is not shy about sharing his passion for his mindfulness practices, but then again, given how far they have taken him, his passion is understandable. A class valedictorian at Kelso High School in Washington State, May describes himself as always having been a "cerebral kid," but one who was hyper-competitive and easily sidetracked by his emotions. After being taken by the Phillies in the fourth round of the 2008 MLB amateur draft, May started off on the bottom rung of the farm system, pitching in the Rookie-level Gulf Coast League. He moved up steadily through the system, but control issues plagued him at nearly every level.
In 2010, May was in his first season in the Florida State League facing the most difficult stretch of his minor league career to date. He was averaging nearly eight walks every nine innings, and his control was particularly absent over a six-week stretch in the middle of the season. Over a period of seven starts and one relief appearance, May issued 40 walks over 34 1/3 innings, and by the first week of July, he was sent back down to the Class A South Atlantic League.
After May was demoted, he started writing a gratitude journal at the behest of Jack Curtis, a sports psychologist. The idea was for May to process the emotional vicissitudes of playing baseball for a living. Initially, May went through the motions with his journal entries, but he eventually came to see it as a useful learning tool. He started using his entries to note when he had success in executing certain pitches, and that process helped May to determine what purpose each pitch could serve.
Over time, May's journaling turned into a conscious practice of developing mindfulness about what he was doing on the mound. Even as his awareness of his craft grew, May still encountered difficulties with focus. Prior to the 2013 season, May was dealt to the Twins along with fellow righty Vance Worley in the trade that sent Ben Revere to the Phillies. The Twins had May repeat Double-A, sending him to New Britain of the Eastern League. Though he was making slight improvements in his control, May started allowing more contact, and he frequently got flustered.
"I would lose focus for three innings at a time, and all I really wanted was to get the game over with," May said, reflecting on some of his worst times that season. "I didn't really care about what happened until I came out of the game, and then once I was out, I cared greatly."
May would finish that season with a 9-9 record and a 4.51 ERA. Those marks were actually an improvement over the ones from his last season in the Phillies' organization, but he was a long way from being considered one of the top prospects in the minors, as he had been just two years earlier.
Heading into the 2014 season, May had a new goal: to have a plan for every game. In service of that goal, he decided he was going to keep things as simple as possible, and his three-step approach to throwing each pitch was integral in his quest for simplification. May also set out to be in the moment as often as possible. During spring training, his mom recommended he use a meditation app for his phone, and following her advice, he has used it for his daily practice ever since.
May's efforts to be more present appeared to be paying off. Walks became a more sporadic problem. The month of May 2014 was, in fact, the Month of May, as he reeled off four consecutive starts for Triple-A Rochester without allowing an earned run. He was invited to play in the Futures Game during All-Star Weekend, reestablishing his cred as a top prospect, though he didn't play due to a calf strain. He returned after the break to make four more starts, over the first three of which he allowed a single earned run.
May's self-styled curriculum, which provided a foundation for his breakout minor league season, actually bears some resemblance to the methods used by Bauman in his work with Olympic skiers and swimmers as well as with Navy SEALs. Bauman uses a variety of methods, including meditation, relaxation and guided imagery, to teach his clients how to clear their minds. Once centered, he gets them to identify which tasks are biomechanically necessary in order to do their jobs, and then he has them practice those tasks repeatedly.
Perhaps that sounds obvious, but a lack of focus is endemic even among top performers in demanding fields. As a sort of experiment, Bauman created a fifth-grade level story problem that he has given to more than 500 subjects to solve. He intentionally included extraneous information and misspellings into the problem as distractors. Among the subjects who have attempted the problem, which includes athletes from a variety of sports, Navy SEALs and business people, only 10 have ever solved it within the allotted time.
Armed with an appreciation of the difficulty of focusing in stressful situations, Bauman uses several methods to help athletes keep things simple. Sometimes, the most effective methods are the least exotic. Bauman recounted an instance in which a coach was getting frustrated with a ski jumper who had trouble executing the optimal jumping posture on a consistent basis. Over and over, the coach implored the jumper to "keep your butt down!" After several tries with the jumper failing to follow this singular instruction, Bauman grabbed a marker and wrote "BUTT" on the jumper's left ski and "DOWN" on his right ski. The next jump he made was a success.
Even athletes, like May, who are fastidious about maintaining their mental focus, can get caught up in distractions. After receiving his first-ever big league promotion on August 9 of last year, May arrived in Oakland to make his debut that night against the then-first place Athletics, and he was about to have his own "butt down" moment. All began well for May, as he retired leadoff hitter Coco Crisp on one pitch, and he started off No. 2 hitter Sam Fuld with a called strike. On the next pitch, Fuld slashed a liner into right field for a single, and then May's control issues returned with a vengeance. After a total of 63 pitches, only 28 of which were thrown for strikes, May was yanked from the game after only two innings, as he had given up four runs on three hits and seven walks.
Given the utter abandonment of his control, it seemed that May left his calm, mindful ways back in Triple-A, but he says that no such thing happened, at least not initially. "I was focused but I was on Cloud Nine. My body just wasn't doing what my brain asked it to do." May's next three appearances didn't go much better, as he allowed 10 earned runs over a combined 12 1/3 innings. "In that first start, I was hyped up," May explained, "but in the next three, I was anxious, trying to fix the problems from the first start."
Just as the ski jumper needed several tries -- and some guidance -- to fix his posture, it took May three starts to realize he needed to stop worrying and start standing taller in his delivery. The results didn't improve initially. However, while May was still allowing too many hits and runs and failing to pitch deep into games, his peripherals reflected the changes. He was throwing strikes at a higher rate, allowing softer contact and, suddenly, putting up a robust walk-to-strikeout ratio.
On September 14, May notched his first quality start, holding the White Sox to three runs over six innings, and he struck out 10 batters while walking none. While May allowed opponents to scorch him for a .493 on-base percentage over his first four appearances, he held them to a respectable .333 mark over his last six starts. Over his final 36 2/3 innings, which encompassed seven starts, May struck out 41 batters while walking only nine.
Was it May's mindfulness that enabled him to rebound from a horrific debut and show improvement over the season's waning weeks? We may never know, but it's easy to see how the spiral that began in his subsequent appearances could have accelerated out of control if he hadn't been aware of how he was responding to his struggles. Even with the long leash that the Twins provided May, he rewarded them with only two quality starts and a 7.47 ERA over his final six starts. May wasn't dwelling on those numbers this spring, as he remained focused on the process and not on the numbers. He says he is confident if he had made 10 more starts at the end of last season, his stats would have reflected the improvements he had made.
May's efforts to focus on the mental aspect of his game have deepened heading into the coming season. He broadened his use of phone apps as tools for sharpening his focus and discipline, as he now uses an app to guide his yoga practice and maps out his daily schedule on Evernote. His family continues to chip in with support, as his sister gave him a folio to use for his journaling this past Christmas. While the flu bug that circulated around the Twins' camp delayed May's Grapefruit League debut until March 11, he made the most of his opportunities. He fared well in each of his first three starts (one of which came in a minor league game), but a poor March 27 outing against the Pirates likely sealed his fate. At the very least, the control issues that plagued May during the early part of last summer's stint with the Twins were nowhere to be found. He struck out nine batters in 10 2/3 Grapefruit League innings and walked only two.
While most players and coaches might not be eager to talk about their efforts to hone their mental game, it's clearly a growth industry. Springer says he has made more money through his speaking engagements over the last two years than in his first 13 years combined. Jaeger Sports, a firm whose coaches focus on mental training, has several current and former major leaguers among their clientele, and the practice of yoga has become widespread around the majors. The recent revelation, coming from a Boston Globe report that the Red Sox, among other major league teams, are attempting to quantify the mental processes involved in pitch recognition is not only another sign that interest in the mental side of baseball is growing, but that the gap separating those focusing on outcomes and those focusing on process is closing.
Ultimately, the biggest benefit of mindfulness practices for athletes may be something that can never be captured and boiled down by analysts or front office executives. Meditation and yoga are not the New-Agey, relaxing forms of escape that many see them as, but neither are they iron-bound, one-size-fits-all techniques that can be used to make an athlete bulletproof. Instead, they are means by which an athlete learns to accept whatever is happening in the moment and maintain the calm that is necessary to make the best decision in the next moment.
It's a baseball cliché that, for the players on the field, the game moves fast, but a player who is mindful has the mental skills to slow the game down. In a game where highly successful players -- the .300 hitters and 3.00 ERA pitchers -- still fail on a regular basis, having the ability to remain calm in the face of failure is an indispensable quality. Robbins puts it this way: "Most of us as athletes, and as humans in general, erroneously think that by being 'driven' and trying to 'prove' something, it will motivate us to succeed, not so...While it can seem counter-intuitive, the more they learn how to train their minds to stay present, calm, and in the moment, the more likely they are to not only succeed when they compete, but the more enjoyable the experience will be."
Bauman wonders how much better athletes could be if they started learning how to develop these sorts of skills at a younger age. It's a good question and perhaps we should also ask how much better they would be if these practices came out of the closet and were shared by athletes. There is much to be said about the benefits of practicing anything as part of a community that supports and reinforces learning. When May fixed his mechanics late last season, he didn't do it alone but with the aid of a coach. Just imagine how much he -- and his teammates -- might have improved if there were greater active support for building and maintaining a daily mindfulness practice. Maybe it wouldn't have spared him a return engagement in Rochester, but if putting mental skills on a par with physical skills is good enough for Olympians and Navy SEALs, it ought to have benefits for major league hopefuls like May.
