Smoltzie: The real story (8/31/09)
Baseball fans just witnessed another example of how our Joy of Sox principles work in real life (I’m counting baseball games as real life here). This one had to do with a Hall of Fame pitcher that the Red Sox recently released. The team had taken a chance this Spring on rehabbing aging pitcher John Smoltz – 42 years old, recovering from shoulder surgery, and on the tail end of a great career that will eventually land him in the Hall of Fame. Our experiment didn’t go well this year, and after winning 2 and losing 5 (with an ERA of 8.32) in his brief stint with Boston, “Smoltzie” (as he was called by his mates) was released earlier this month.
The St. Louis Cardinals picked him, and in his first start with them on August 24, he pitched 5 scoreless innings, struck out nine (including seven in a row, something he’d never done before in his 20 year career), and looked like an All Star once again. So how’d he do it? Why was he a bust in Boston, and a star in St. Louis?
Here’s what he said in an interview after that game: “I made a conscious decision coming into this start to forget everything else, totally wipe out everything else, and try to go have a little bit of fun and not be caught up in story line and impressing everybody, and it worked”. That’s a great way of describing how to focus on the moment, not being distracted by the worries and judgements and scripts we all carry in our head, and letting enjoyment of the situation be the guiding factor.
It was interesting to read the analysis of the baseball commentators, where the consensus was that the Cardinals’coaches made a correction to Smoltz’s pitching style (his “mechanics”) so that he didn’t give away the type of pitch he was planning to make. This assumes that the Red Sox coaches weren’t able to pick up something so obvious that it’s always being scrutinized. The analysts’ misplaced emphasis shows that most folks have a hard time accepting that something as simple as emotional focus can be so powerful. But now we have more good evidence, thanks to Smoltzie.
The St. Louis Cardinals picked him, and in his first start with them on August 24, he pitched 5 scoreless innings, struck out nine (including seven in a row, something he’d never done before in his 20 year career), and looked like an All Star once again. So how’d he do it? Why was he a bust in Boston, and a star in St. Louis?
Here’s what he said in an interview after that game: “I made a conscious decision coming into this start to forget everything else, totally wipe out everything else, and try to go have a little bit of fun and not be caught up in story line and impressing everybody, and it worked”. That’s a great way of describing how to focus on the moment, not being distracted by the worries and judgements and scripts we all carry in our head, and letting enjoyment of the situation be the guiding factor.
It was interesting to read the analysis of the baseball commentators, where the consensus was that the Cardinals’coaches made a correction to Smoltz’s pitching style (his “mechanics”) so that he didn’t give away the type of pitch he was planning to make. This assumes that the Red Sox coaches weren’t able to pick up something so obvious that it’s always being scrutinized. The analysts’ misplaced emphasis shows that most folks have a hard time accepting that something as simple as emotional focus can be so powerful. But now we have more good evidence, thanks to Smoltzie.
posted by Rick Leskowitz,MD at 8:43 AM
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