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Mike Schmidt, for about the first ten years of his career, got a boatload of boo'ing in Philadelphia:  "They just want to spank me so I'll try harder and do better," Schmitty said with a wan smile one day.  Y'ever notice, when an athlete is performing badly, our flinch reaction is to go get a hickory switch and give him a good lickin'.  Bear down out there, you little pansy.  

We don't always grab hickory switches, throw AA batteries onto the field, or jeer.  Sometimes we're more civilized about our bitterness and we indulge only in

• Booooo'ing, Chone Figgins for striking out (think about it)
• Yowling, for Ichiro to be moved down in the order
• Pounding our spoons on the table, demanding that Justin Smoak be sent to AAA
• Blogging our little alter egos out, calling for Brendan Ryan to catch some splinters in his gluteus maximus

Of course there are times that our calls for a player's demotion are rational, such as whenever Dr. D does it .... Justin Smoak was getting to be a serious issue.  But you know whutuhmean.

Ask Bill ran this little snippet:

Bill: It seems to me--based both on what I can imagine and what I've read/heard--that there are 4 things that influence the year-to-year variability in a single player's performance: actual current level of ability, health, luck, and desire/commitment/focus. My own hunch is that the last of these 4 is both regularly underrated and from time time wildly overstated. What is your view? And can you see any way to isolate and/or quantify it? Or any views on whether & how management (or teammates) can affect it? John

Asked by: wwiyw

Answered: 8/4/2012

We've worked hard to learn to measure the luck components, and we've made some progress.   I would guess that, at the major league level, more players struggle because of over-commitment, excess desire, than because of a lack thereof.    Anxiety, tension, over-correction. ...these things are major blockages to success in baseball.    Baseball is a read-and-react sport.   You have to learn to relax and play the game.    When players have bad years, it is very often because they're trying to hard and working too hard. 

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That read-and-react point has legs.  Or neurons.  Or something.  I was kind of wondering where Bill came up with this, because for everything else he is, I hadn't thought he'd competed at much...  

Dr. Daniel Amen is the world's leading researcher on brain imaging - one thing that he has found is that when a human being is under pressure and feeling frustrated, an attempt to concentrate will actually result in less brain activity.  Well, yeah.  Your thoughts flow most freely when?  When you're dreaming...  In speed chess, where each move is made in 1-3 seconds and complex strategies have to be executed, we're in a read-and-react context.  Some Grandmasters, such as Lajos Portisch, have fallen asleep during play... 

Same in kendo.  In swordfighting against a better opponent, you gotta be loose.  Your pulse might be 70 or 80 even though you're exercising.  Well, theirs might; mine never was.  O'Sensei, the father of aikido, made this one of his Four Golden Principles.  Relax.

Timothy Gallwey, author of The Inner Sport of Tennis, was ultra-relaxed when he offered thoughts to his disciples.  "Where was your foot on that groundstroke?  Is that where you prefer it?"  John Wooden might never have raised his voice a single time in a UCLA championship season.  Coaching isn't about making demands.  It's about convincing your athletes that they are capable, and it's about delivering information that actually changes the game for them.  

In the absence of information, we coaches yell.  If we don't have light, we offer heat.  Darren Oliver came into the game one time and walked a lefty hitter.  Lou Piniella came out and chewed his keister, right there on the mound.  "I called you up here to get lefties out, kid.  Not to walk them."  Guess why my man Lou didn't choose instead to propose a technical idea to Oliver.

Do you think that baseball coaches, baseball writers, and baseball fans would react differently if they got this?  That Dustin Ackley has been too shrill, not too chill?