.

Rauuullllll

The pitch he hit out Tuesday:  94 MPH, to left-center field.  (Is even Kyle Seager capable of that?)  He visibly swung in two stages.  He widened his eyes and deciphered the pitch.  Then, after he understood the pitch, he SNNAPPPPED the bat, real sudden, and hit the ball out -- the other way, to the deep left-center power alley.  It was 416 feet, almost precisely to 105 degrees, the ray that bisects LF and CF.

"You gotta see it first," Jay Buhner tells the M's young hitters.  They're up there just guessing.  Not Raul.  

If you listed the 20 best ML players who ever lived, the worst of them would be like Mickey Mantle, Rickey Henderson, and Frank Robinson.  But Rauuullll is one of the 20 best 41-year-old baseball players who ever lived.  Think about it.  Being a great, great 40+ athlete isn't a technicality, like being the closest player to Hank Aaron in the dictionary.  Jack LaLanne was a great athlete.  Being a historically-great old player is a noble achievement.

More from the scouting eye than on the stats page, Raul Ibanez has still got it.  He is, in 2013, a championship-level role player.  And, at minimum, he's becoming part of Kyle Seager's and Nick Franklin's and Michael Saunders' life experiences.

Mike Blowers marvelled at Raul, saying that what is difficult for most ML players is to find the motivation to want to play baseball, and to do the work necessary, at that age.  Dr. D can relate.  At age 50 he simply isn't motivated to win at games as much.  Other things interest him. 

Kobe's talking about retiring, and I consider him twice the competitor that LeBron or "WOW" are.  Michael Jordan?  They had to rip the jersey off his back at age 40.  Some guys are more competitive than others.  Has Rauuuull ever gotten his due here?

.

Jack LaLanne

How many of you can bang out 100 pushups without stopping?  Sound off.  Dr. D can do 60 ...

You can do 100?  Okay, take 60 seconds and can you repeat it?  Whew ... Third time?  Imagine doing 1,033 pushups in 23 minutes.

There's a YouTube, P90X creator Tony Horton walking onto a base and challenging the champ there.  I think he did 85 in 2 minutes to crush the base champ.  

At 85 in 2 minutes, Horton looked like he was bouncing up and down as fast as he could.  So how do you do 1000 in 23 minutes?   ... hold it, I guess it was 87 in only one minute.  But, man, was Horton gassed.  When you hit failure on pushups, you need a few minutes before you can go again...

At 71 pushups in 2 minutes, you max out your 100% score in the Army, age 17-21.  At 49+ in 2 minutes, you hit Ranger standards.

Picture 86 in 2 minutes... 12 consecutive times, without a break.  That's an athlete.

..........

If you are looking for a role model, you could do worse... LaLanne invented the home workout DVD :- ), invented workout pulley machines, yada yada yada.  

Story goes, about Arnold Schwarzenegger coming to America and calling out LaLanne to a workout smackdown, beachside.  Since they were different weight classes, they decided on a pushup-pullup contest.  LaLanne of course destroyed the Australian Oak ... Ah-nold, sore for four days, warned his buddies off.  "Don't go near that LaLanne guy," he'd say.  "He's an animal!"  LaLanne was in his 50's at the time...

LaLanne hadn't eaten a sugary dessert since the 1930's, and while in his 90's had the energy of a guy in his 30's.  (Maybe Raul's quickness is the result of long years of careful nutrition.)  This is the kind of discipline that transcends table chatter.  A Buddhist magazine interviewed him about self-mastery:

Interview

Andrew Cohen:The topic of this issue is the relationship between self-mastery and enlightenment, and you are the person we wanted to speak to about self-mastery. 

Jack LaLanne: It's the key to everything. 

AC: So my first question for you is: What is self-mastery? 

JL: Self-mastery is controlling one's thoughts, controlling one's emotions and controlling as much of your life as you possibly can. But one will never, ever have complete self-mastery, for that's the human nature. And that's why everything comes down to believing—you have to believe. My whole thing is believing. I believe so strong. If something saved your life, would you believe in it? 

AC: Yes, I would. 

JL: Well, my life was saved by my profession. I was a weak, sick kid. When I was thirteen years old, I developed this terrific habit of eating sugar—my whole life was sugar, sugar, sugar. It destroyed all the B vitamins and affected my brain. I had this uncontrollable temper—tried to kill my brother on two occasions, failing grades in school, troublemaker in school—and then when I was about fifteen, the authorities had the doctors take me out of school for six months.....  Now if something saved your life, would you be enthusiastic about it? 

AC: Yes, sir. 

JL: Well that's exactly it. See, if you get all these things together, you get the spiritual, you get the physical . . . I mean, there is so much that we don't know about life, but there is so much that wedo know. And if we put into practice what we know about the spiritual and about the physical, then we've got a great life, and this is what I try to get over to people—that anything in life is possible. 

AC: So what would you say would be a concise definition of "self-mastery," then? 

JL: Being able to do the things that you believe in your heart you should do. Like being truthful. Being truthful to yourself. If I would ever lie to me, I'd lie to you. And if I were to lie to you . . . I mean, the only thing that Jack LaLanne has got going for him is telling the truth. I've got nothing else going for me; that's it, that's the whole thing. You see, I would never miss a workout, and I would never eat anything that I don't believe in. I'd be cheating!That's self-mastery; that's control, that's discipline, that's pride. And that's what we need more than anything else—pride and discipline.

.....

AC: So what you're saying is that to become truly spiritual, to experience genuine spirituality, you have to really act—you have to do something—and you have to be willing to give everything. 

JL: Everything! Absolutely, no doubt about it; there are no free lunches. The whole plan about this is that you have the power to do it, but you have to take responsibility. I'm a normal human being, but the reason I'm normal is because I've worked at it! Like I said, there's a mental side to all this and you can't separate it from the physical. Too many people dwell on all kinds of things, but I work out seven days a week and that's my penance, that's my price to pay, that's to keep my mind down to where it should be instead of it running away. See, it's a psychological thing. You're actually punishing yourself, disciplining yourself—it all comes down to discipline. With my personality, I could be a runaway, out with a different woman every night, drunk every night, eating and doing things that—well, you know, you've got it in you, we've all got it in us. But that's why you've got to take control! So after I've done my workout in the morning, I've fulfilled my obligation, my price to pay for what I have. Nothing happens accidentally; there's always a reason, somewhere along the line. 

.............

I think Jack Nicholson asked Helen Hunt one time, "[I get how good you are] ... Now is that so bad for you to be around?"

She had no answer.  "No.  No, it's not."

Maybe we're starting to get it, why it ain't bad for young players to be around Rauuulll.  Who's to say he's a less effective coach than are the coaches?