Baseball Mental Game Tips Exposed by Expert

Listen up, here are several baseball mental game tips shared by Coach Rick Harig from PlayInTheNow.com. I did an interview with him recently.

Often times people focus solely on the mechanics of baseall but they miss another aspect of the game. The mental game. In the interview he shares some little known methods to improving your mind and your focus when in the game. The end result is playing baseball better and faster.

You can download the transcript and the MP3 file at the end of the interview.

Matt: Alright. Welcome tonight, my name is Matt Santi from www.TopBaseballTournaments.com and tonight I’m doing a short interview with Rick Harig from www.playinthenow.com. He created a new program that focuses on the mental game with baseball. It’s an aspect of baseball education and development that most people, parents, coaches don’t really ever think about. There’s more focus left on actual hitting and hitting drills and what not. And Rick, thank you for coming on tonight why don’t you just kind of tell me about yourself.

Rick: Thanks for having me man. So I’m basically a performance and development coach and about seven or eight years ago I wrote a player manual and a mental game baseball for minor league baseball players for a major league organization. And had the opportunity to work in the minor leagues with some players and player development. And it was really a great experience and I did a lot of seminars to colleges and I still do around the country.

And as I would be traveling I would get a lot of feedback from just all kinds of people that were very, very interested in the topic. So I realized that I had a market in terms of too many people to reach and not enough airplane trips. And so I put the whole program on video and it’s called a Cognitive Advantage Program and it’s a mental skills training program for baseball players and their parents.

Matt: Okay, So one of the things originally I found you when I was just doing some research through Google just trying to reach out to different baseball experts. Yoggi Barro said it best 90% of the game’s mental. I mean can you expand upon more of that because nobody ever really talks about it, it’s a cliché phrase on baseball but they don’t know what it means and even internalize that.

Rick: Right. And really I call baseball the most on and off sport there is because between every pitch of the game whether you’re a shot stopper or outfielder or a hitter, a pitcher, every pitch is an on and then between every pitch is an off and others and a nine in a baseball game is approximately 142 pitches. So you need to be on 142 times on cue and then in the off times you need to be able to put your mind in certain places to be on again when you’re supposed to be.

And baseball tears people up because off times they tend to drift if you are young kid you have a hard time focusing and being on cue when you’re supposed to. You just have a lot of time to stage and thinking ends up causing a lot of people call it paralysis by analysis. You start thinking too much and then you can’t play the game because there are just too many thoughts and kind of get in your own way.

Matt: Got you. Hey, now just out of curiosity with just really over thinking some things too much, do you find that players, that are 11,12, 13 do you find that they are hindering much of their own progress or coaches or parents it’s really a combination of everything, what’s your experience?

Rick: I think it’s a combination. I think some coaches give players too much to think about, you watch a coach over an instructor in the game. If you’re dividing a player’s attention in the middle of a bat you’re really not doing any justice to anybody. And you don’t realize that a lot of times as a coach and I coached on the field for a long, long time and know that I’ve been guilty of that. To hit a baseball as an example is a very difficult task and if your attention is divided and you really have a hard time performing your task so that you’re thinking about how to hit a baseball while you’re trying to hit  baseball you’re not going to really get it done.

I get an analogy actually about reading a book and everybody has done this. When you read a book sometimes you’ll turn the page and it’ll dawn on you that you just finished the whole page but you didn’t comprehend a single word in that page. And for whatever reason your attention was divided and yet you read the whole page and it was the physical turning of the page that made you sort of aware that wow I didn’t comprehend the whole thing I’ve got to start it all over. But for whatever was going on in your head you were divided and you couldn’t do the task you’re reading the page.

And so in a baseball game this happens to people all the time and the key is to be able to recognize it before the physical turning of the page in the analogy. You want to recognize it before that next pitch and be able to take care of it and put a system in place that allows you to be on cue when it’s time to be instead of missing out on it.

Matt: I got you. You mentioned something that was really key when you’re actually hitting a ball versus thinking about hitting the ball it’s kind of hard to do both things at the same time. Do you have a simple tip or suggestion for how to well break that mentality?

Rick: I do, you know it’s a process. I mean I’ve got these things called white switch techniques that are working a game tomorrow and I’ve got this list of things that can help anybody at any age just be able to focus better and put their mind at rest and do the task in hand. So I have a lot of techniques. A lot of it is about process I want you to think maybe about like a playlist on a music CD. And if you’ve listened to this CD long enough or this playlist long enough you may start singing a song in your head or hearing the song in your head before, in that two or three second gap between songs, you know the next song is common and that’s a trigger.

You’ve trained yourself by listening to the playlist over and over, what the words are in that next song. And so as a hitter you want to train yourself kind of in a similar way where you create routines or trainers you put reminders at certain places so that you can react to pitches versus thinking about what’s coming. Again if you’re dividing your attention about what am I doing here, what’s coming, I’m guessing through, I’m worried about curves, I’m worried about fast balls. Whatever it is you’ve now taken yourself away from the task at hand which is hitting the ball. So there are a lot of techniques to focus that, ways of visual focus to just seeing the ball, hitting the ball and keeping it simple.

Matt: I got you. Now does any of what you teach, just real quick out of curiosity, does any thing that it involves like hypnosis or anything like that or is it just straight, just really retraining the mind to a certain process that you’re talking about?

Rick: Yeah a lot of it is just mostly, it’s a system success and retraining your belief system so that you evaluate what’s important in the game. And most people evaluate like I’m hitting it’s a 13 or 14 year old, 12 – 11 to 14 year old you may say my magic evaluation is hitting 400. If I hit 400 as a batter I’m a great player. But hitting 400 is really a resolve and it’s really to focus on the process of how to concentrate, focus, how to compete, how to gain confidence when you lose confidence, how to learn, those kinds things and if we can set up a system that allows us to look at those and make those important to us then those results will just happen, you’ll be a great player, those numbers will just happen, will be there without focusing on those numbers. Hope I answered your question.

Matt: No, yeah it makes total sense. Your key teaching and principle is focus on the process and over-think the end result.

Rick: Right. Here’s a really good example. You’ll see a kid like line up for the short stuff.

He’ll go ahead he’ll square up to a ball and he’ll just hit a P right to somebody. And you’ll see that kid hit his bat on the ground and be all upset.

And a kid like that is a results driven kid, his dad never just went down 10 points or a point or however many points yet he – that was the most successful thing he could do is see a ball good, square up and just hit a shot.

Now he can’t control the outcome once he releases the ball ahead if it goes out of line to the show stop, hey that’s out of your control you did everything you can do, you need to be happy with that result. Now that result didn’t make your bat average go up but in the long run if you’re just concentrating and focusing and rewarding yourself for being that kind of player, them more times than not those results will take care of themselves.

When you say hypnosis I don’t have any training and any of that kind of thing I do have a very advanced visualization system that I go through and it’s baseball specific and so certainly I do a lot with imagining events and training yourself through mental imagery but I don’t have like something special hypnosis CD or something no.

Matt: Okay I was just. I know a lot of people do personal development and mental improvement type of stuff using hypnosis. But just out of curiosity, you had mentioned your touching base on visualization and I mean how much of that like, you hear a lot of people talk like right brain, versus left brain and mental and I mean are you able to kind of a little bit more into that?

Rick: Yeah, I mean in terms of left brain right brain I mean I really get into that in detail and I mean the brain is much more complex than left and right. But sort of philosophically if you just think two hemispheres have two different jobs even though they’re much more interrelated than that. The left brain is the analyzer the right brain is the regulator, the time keeper, the right brain is picking pictures, getting into the zone, no sense of time, all those athletic things are right brained activities.

And what happens for the baseball players you want to go back to those 142 events, so you’re on your off you’re on your off and that down time you have time to beat yourself up. If you made an error in the field or you struck out I think as an 11, 12, 13, 14 year old that affects most of your game for quite a while. And you’ll see a young guy take a dead bat out to the field with them all the time.

And it’s like this kid now can’t play defense because he struck out or he made an error in the field, now he can’t hit.

And so those are examples of your left brain is basically taking over andgetting in your way so your right brain can’t work. So I have a whole system of techniques that basically shut your left brain up and let that athletic get in the zone right brain and give you the chance to get in the zone and just play the game.

Matt: I got you, now that makes sense. So really to you, you focus on performance coaching what are some basic stumbling blocks that time and time again you see just fundamental errors that your kid, 11,12, 13 is coming in and they’re making do you have any tips just for maybe to just overcoming that or at least just increasing the awareness of hey, you’re not breaking quite the way.

Rick: Right and again I think it goes back to I think the parenting really helps them define what’s important. And if you have this philosophy that I’m going to evaluate how I do based on how I compete, and so if I swing in a pitch and I have a little system and it says I really was horrible on that batter on that pitch as a hitter, a. admit that I was horrible b. what was wrong and c. have a plan to fix it. And so if you can do that on the fly and you can correct, make adjustments in the middle of that bat instead of when you’re sitting in the dugout looking back at the events then you have a chance to be a much better player.

George Brady used to say that after he was out of baseball and for anybody that doesn’t knows George Brady, he was one of those guys that almost hit 400 in a season and he said he threw, maybe he had 500 or 600 bad bats in the season, he said he threw about 50 of them away and what he meant by that was mentally he truly had bat away and he could never get those bad bats back and that was the difference between his and, you know, 385 and 400 was those 50 throwers and because he lost his focus and gave up on a bat at some point or just wasn’t present mentally.

And so let me give you one of those light switch techniques. So a kid has a hard time at 11, 12, 13, 14, at any level because baseball is such an amazing game but whatever level you’re at it has this beauty about the competition around you and at some point you become, if you’re great that you move up a level and you might become average at two levels up or three levels up. It might take you all the way to the major leagues but at some point in time you’re humbled by the people around you. And so at 11, 12, 13, and 14, you’re learning about this, this is going on.

And what you need to do is be able to accept failure because you’re going to fail more than you’re going to succeed especially as a hitter, accept it and be able to turn the page and move on to the next event without it affecting you. And so here’s a really good little trick that will help people right away and I call it the game of positive and negative. And the rule is you have to be positive when you’re in the batters box and you think of that little 4ft by 6ft batters box as positive space.

Anything outside of that is negative space. And so any time you’re standing in positive space the rule is you have to be positive and if you’re not, you’ve got to get out of that space in the negative space and then you can do anything you want. You can beat yourself up, you can tell yourself anything you want that’s negative.

But when you go back in to positive space the rule is you’ve got to be positive, and so when a player finds himself being negative, once that happens, you’re cooked, you’re not going to hit because you can’t think and hit at the same time. Get out of the batter’s box, and you don’t have to fully get out because some won’t let you. You can step out with one foot, then step back in, that physical movement is the trigger mechanism that allows you to change from being spirally negative to becoming positive.

So you might be saying, oh I suck I’m terrible, these guys are eating me up, step out, step back in, I’m coming at you here I come bring it, bring it. And you will be amazed at the mentality difference, how a kid will compete just with that little bit of physical movement but it’s all in a routine and it’s all by plan.

Matt: I love that. You shared a great little hitting baseball secret, I mean that’s something you’re not going to find in a Dummies for Baseball, I mean anything like that, not even, not just normal, anyway—

Rick: No. no, and I have a wild stuff like that. I mean there’s a ton of things like that, that are out and basically it’s just been that kind of trial and error process, working with players for so many years, knowing how they’re thinking and reading body language and do we have the time, I’ve got another story I’ll tell you real quick if we’ve got the time.

Matt: Absolutely.

Rick: I call it the Wrinkle Raising Effect and what it is, is a lot of the game is basically played in your subconscious so all of these things that occur in a game and you don’t know they’re going on, you don’t really think about it. And sometimes you’ll think about something after the fact. Like let’s say you’re a pitcher and you just got pulled out the game and you’re sitting in the dugout and after you get done being mad at yourself, everything is so clear that it was chaos out there in the end when you ended up getting cooked.

And so you don’t really, are aware of it while the chaos is going on and when you’re out of that chaos it’s really easy. And so a lot of the stuff that’s going on is more conscious level. So what I call the wrinkle raising is this and they go back- and they start over with a little study, this is a study that was done in a college and they brought these students in and they sat them in a room and they had the right – they walked down this long hall and they went into a room.

And they had to right words they were given words and had to make sentences out of them and an example might be two words: wrinkled and rays, and make a sentence out of those two words, whatever that is and they did this task and they made all these sentences and then they walked down the long hall and they might have gotten paid a couple of bucks or something to do this study and they checked out well the study was their behavior after they did the words and all the words were about old things, wrinkle and rays as an example, anything that had to do with being old, and so the behavior of the people was what the study was when they left the room down this long hall.

Most of them walked like old people and so the study was showing how could words, the meaning of words change behavior? And then the second part of the study they brought two different groups and one group had passive words and they had to put passive words in the sentences and the other group had aggressive words.

And so they walked- then they walked down the hall and that wasn’t the study this time, the study this time was at the end of the hall where you had to get checked out, there was a staged conversation and the passive words people would wait up to ten minutes to break into the conversation to get checked out, the aggressive words people would immediately break into the conversation to get checked out and when I first read the study I was like wow that – baseball is so much like that and what I mean by that is that we do so many sub conscious things, both in our body language and in our verbal, that change our behavior.

The perfect example is the kid in front of you I don’t care how old you are and you watch this, strikes out. Nine times out of ten, the kid puts his head down and he mops back to the dugout and he walks past to the guy that’s up next. And what that guy just did was he threw the on-deck butter wrinkle raisins. Subconsciously he basically took that guy down and it’s not on a level of I suck you suck too but that’s basically what it’s saying and just see the contagiousness of both directions that pitchers mowing down guys and player after player is getting out and that sub conscious level of failure is just being passed on in body language and everything.

And the other way around that aggressiveness is you’ll see a guy get a hit and you’ll see the contagious side of hitting where guy after guy after guy gets hit you’re like this is unexplainable. It’s the same concept in the reverse and so, so much of this game is played at that level and we don’t put a finger on it, we don’t know how to handle it, we don’t even understand it.

And so lots of this stuff we talk about, is really getting to the heart of things like that and trying to teach, not only players but coaches how to recognize what, how their body language is affecting their players I mean that happens tremendously all the time.

Matt: There’s so much in just in the last sentences that you were talking about. People don’t even, between mental and also then too just the way your body language is just. Is there a way, okay so, say I’m a student I’m 14 years old and like I’m serious about playing ball I want to improve my game and here’s where I’m thinking I’m going to focus on hitting and batting and the stuff normally parents and coaches, your average coach will think about.

Do you have any suggestions for and not just suggestions, what’s something you’re going to focus first in just getting down to hitting technique we are in the first game? I mean do you separate the two or do you blend them together?

Rick: I think they’re both very important, I think that it’s so difficult for most coaches to not focus on the mechanics of baseball and we’ve all done that. And it’s so hard to find the time for the mental side and it doesn’t feel like necessarily you’re doing baseball. And so for 11,12,13,14, year old kids to sit and listen to some of this stuff isn’t really easy and so you have to put it out there in pieces, you can’t just shove it down the throat.

Like when I do a clinic to a college I can literally go for six straight hours and they will take notes and every 50 minutes we take a 5 minute break and I have 10 guys come up to the podium and ask extra questions and they’re that hungry for this kind of stuff and they’re that mature for it. You look at a kid that’s under 14 and you have to give it in bits and pieces.

And so it would be very vital for a coach to have a feel for how to do that, it would be very vital for a parent to have a feel for how to do that; know the system and then to be able to put it out there for the player. I mean you’re like have a whole video on light switch techniques you know that positive and negative kind of stuff that anybody can pick up and use right away and get something out of.

You know the systematic setting goals and definitions of success and those kind of things would be a little harder for somebody under 14 but very important to learn and not be trained. Some of the kids that are trained to be left brained players because we make them analyze because we yell at them after failure because we do all these things, we’ve train them to be left brain players instead of right brain players and so it’d be so important for their coaches and their parents to really get a grasp of this and then be able to kind of put it out there over time for them.

Matt: I got you, so if I want to learn more about actually buckling down and getting the mental side of the game, getting that developed too, how much I want to play, even if I do coach a 16 year old team, what are some of the really basic tips you can offer. And I mean you offer your course, a video course which sounds like you’re able to digest some information in bite size pieces. It’s not you don’t need to worry about trying to absorb six hours worth of information.

Rick: Right, it’s I mean the video class is basically a step by step laying it out for you process. And really my advice to anybody is lay out your future. You need to know who you want to be and you need to know how you’re going to get there and you keep, like when I was working with minor league players they had no idea that those questions like how you are going to get to the major league because they’ve always just been the best and they just were going to be the best. And then all of a sudden they had no coping skills to be average.

And so in came I with the system of how to redirect the negatives that are coming into your head because now you feel average compared to other people. And so my advice I guess ultimately is whatever system it is, you need to develop a way to be able to play in the now and that’s there in my website. You need to develop a way to let the last event go and be present for the next event because if the last event is occupying your mind and you can’t play in the now, and so whatever that is some guys just have it some guys just have such thick skin they just don’t care.

It doesn’t faze them and they just get up and they keep on being aggressive and they keep on coming at you. And those guys are awesome and if they can always be that way, don’t touch them, let them always be that way and if they can’t then you need to be able to kind of help them figure out, they need to be in charge of their own mental game.

Matt: Now, that makes a total sense, so, would you say teaching the mental game from a coaching perspective is very few and far between in terms of baseball educators around the country that are really saying hey let’s get both the mental game and the mechanics not just one side.

Rick: It is. It’s very and I think there’s a lot of coaches who really want it, they just don’t know how, they don’t know what to do with it so they’re just taking orders. People tend to coach the way that they were coached themselves and so there’s not a whole lot out there, there’s a lot of good books out there you can read, the problem is it doesn’t tell you the how to it doesn’t tell you this is how confidence is, it just says confidence is the single biggest indicator of success in baseball, period.

It doesn’t say what do I do to get confidence, it doesn’t say how do develop confidence, it doesn’t say what if I lose my confidence how do I, what do I do and there’s so little out there for that part of the game that it’s – people really are looking for ways to do it, don’t even know that they don’t know what they don’t know, you know what I mean?

Matt: Right exactly now that makes sense. So, hey see a lot of what came our a mentioned so do you have a kind of maybe some final parting words or advice to give to an up and coming player or a coach who’s just getting his feet wet, and starting to get improving games and…

Rick: Yeah, I would just say, I would say not to ignore it, integrate the mental game into drills that you do on the field, it’s not very hard like that wrinkle raising thing, think about the opposite of wrinkle raising what’s it picture starting to show negative body language on the or everybody left the pitch are probably conscious level knows that guy is falling apart, that guy may be in that chaos stage and how can my third basement.

My short stuff my second basement pop my pitcher out of that wrinkle raising stage and the coach can say Johnny today you’ve got a power word and that power word is compete and then tell a shot stop, you know Mike, you got a power word today and that power word is leadership and the second basement, gets a power word whatever that word is and when that pitcher starting to show that negative language, when he hears three people and his saying compete, leadership, whatever those words are a. that somebody is encouraging them.

And b. it’s putting that aggressive thought into their head and so then my advice to a coach is or a parent, you know is to try to integrate some of those kind of things into daily routine, don’t sit in the classroom and sit there and make waste of all these things, what is the winner what is the loser, it doesn’t make sense but if you integrate it into a drill, you can make something out of the mental game within your daily practice even if it’s just for ten or fifteen minutes.

Matt: Oh you know what, I just thought of a quick question, so www.playinthenow.com I got your program, I went through implementing, deviate from the program itself, I mean is there a rough timeline even a just a kind of give an idea for when I should be able to start seeing changes, provided I always I’m not going to do my own thing, pick and choose part I only like.

Rick: Yeah, I mean other people email me like the coach move my kids, like what’s gotten into this kid and anything can happens, everybody is so different you can’t predict how somebody is going to go off but if we can keep, if we can get out of our own way and let our abilities come through and just be, and trust ourselves you never know, there’s no limit, I mean there’s – and also to be able to do some of this at an earlier age is pretty critical because in high school and again you become more and more trained to be a left brained versus a right brained player at some point in time you’re going to take yourself right out of playing, and so it can help anybody.

It can help somebody that’s got some fear, it can help somebody that’s the best player on the team and so you can expect to see some things immediately and then you can expect to see sort of long overhaul long course progress as well and it’s so I think you can get it all.

Matt: Okay that makes total sense. Well any other last minute input you want to give or answer the kind of questions I want to ask you get on the line tonight.

Rick: You bet. I appreciate you find and www.playinthenow.com and hopefully some of your listeners find it too and it will help them and their kids.

Matt: Awesome. You got some great content on that site, I definitely recommend checking it out because it’s something growing up high school it’s maybe one or two times, the mental thing was covered, it was all about techniques and so it’s a great way for somebody who wants to gain that competitive advantage, I encourage serious about getting your check out www.playinthenow.com so Rick, thanks for all your time on this I appreciate that.

Rick: Okay. Good to talk to you man.

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