I like this.

How I Learned To Pitch

A Seattle Mariners coach teaches
me to throw a change-up, and much more.

By Eric Liu

To deceive, a change-up has to be thrown as forcefully as a fastball Bryan Price of
the Seattle Mariners is one of the most esteemed pitching coaches in the major
leagues, and one of the youngest. Only 42, he's been named Baseball Weekly's
Pitching Coach of the Year and is increasingly described as manager material. On
a recent afternoon I met up with Bryan at the sports complex outside Phoenix,
Ariz., where the Mariners hold spring training. His job was to teach me to throw
a change-up. My job, I thought, was simply not to embarrass myself. Only by
accident would I discover something else in the course of our workout.
What makes a great pitching coach? Part of it, of course, is having an eye for tiny
mechanical adjustments in a pitcher's delivery. Today's pitchers are the latest
in a long line of men who've taken the mound as professionals, and nearly every
motion they make is inherited, the accreted sum of many generations of
incremental tinkering. When you see someone come along like Orlando "El Duque"
Hernandez, the fabled Cuban defector and onetime Yankee whose knee-to-nose leg
kick strained the groins of people watching him, you realize how conservative an
institution pitching usually is. El Duque is the exception that proves the
rule.

Pitching demands adherence to a rigorous and unchanging set of
physical rules. But it is only the physical conclusion to a process that unfolds
mostly inside someone's head. And so a teacher of pitching is ever operating on
two levels, a surface curriculum about how to pitch and a curriculum beneath
about how to be. Failure, in many ways, is the default setting in baseball. A
pitcher can be on a roll and cruising through a game, but he is always just one
bad pitch, or one fielding mistake, away from a meltdown. The thing Bryan Price
teaches is not how to win all the time. What he teaches is how to right yourself
when you falter or fail.

When we met, I'd proposed that Bryan teach me a curveball. But he
suggested the change-up instead, because it would be easier on my elbow and
because mastering a change is the first step in separating mere throwers from
pitchers with craft. A change-up looks to the batter like a fastball and is
thrown with all the force and conviction of a fastball. But because of the
unorthodox grip—imagine making an "OK" sign and wrapping it around a ball—the
pitch comes out of the hand more slowly. That slight difference and deception is
enough to upset the batter's timing and balance, tricking him into swinging too
early.

The timing of this lesson, it turns out, was rather apt. All my
life, I've been the equivalent of a fastball pitcher—trying to use blazing speed
and brute force to wow the people I face. Lately I've been realizing that it
would help if I knew how to change speeds from time to time, to be less
predictable.
We got to work. My first few attempts at a change-up were
wobbly. I had no control, no feel for the pitch in my fingertips. Worse, I began
to think about how I had no feel. I began to think how ridiculous I must look, a
clueless amateur. Bryan could see a dozen things wrong with my delivery: arm
slot too low, hips not turned enough, follow-through too unbalanced, and on and
on. But he chose to home in on one thing only: "Keep your head quiet," he
said.
This meant making sure I held my head steady and square as I pitched,
so my eyes would remain fixed on the target. It also meant not overloading my
brain with anxiety and data. A quiet head in the psychological sense is hard to
achieve. Bryan got me there by emphasizing a quiet head in the physical sense.
By worrying only about keeping my gaze steady and my skull centered, I stopped
overthinking.
Sometimes Bryan will do what he calls "dry work" with a
pitcher. He'll remove the ball altogether and simply work on the component
motions of the delivery. Remove the ball: It's a powerful idea, because the ball
is the source of the self-doubt and negative judgment. If you always practice
with the ball, you will measure success only externally—by where the ball ends
up. If you do dry work without the ball, you learn how to measure success by how
intrinsically balanced your movements are. You learn how to listen to your body,
and you learn to "self-coach," as Bryan puts it: Diagnose the tiny flaw in your
delivery, and then fix it.


Keeping a quiet head is the hardest partOn this day, Bryan didn't do dry work with me, but he did a different kind of bait
and switch. After a few dozen pitches, my change-up was getting somewhat better
but it was still very inconsistent. So Bryan asked me to start throwing straight
four-seam fastballs. The good news here was I threw my fastball to the same spot
consistently. The bad news was that the spot was where a right-handed hitter's
face would be. I could feel the spiral of criticism start again. Why do I keep
throwing it there? Why? Can't I get out of this rut?
Just then, Bryan abruptly asked me to throw a change-up. I did, and to my surprise, I nailed it.
It was the same change-up, same grip and delivery, as before. But the context
was different. Now I was thinking of the change-up as an antidote to my wayward
fastball. And now I was able to reel off three, then four, then five perfect
change-ups, down and over the plate with perfectly deceptive presentation.
It struck me only later what Bryan Price had done. He'd used the fastball interlude
as a distraction and had gotten me back onto my original objective—throwing a
good change. Like any good teacher, Bryan is a master of misdirection: working
on a fastball to improve a change-up, using dry work without a ball to sharpen
performance with a ball, and talking about how to keep a quiet head when, in
fact, we were talking about how to keep a quiet mind.
The goal for a pitching coach, ultimately, is to turn his pitchers into self-coaches. After
all, there are only so many times in a game when the coach can walk out to the
mound and point out a problem or suggest a solution. What Bryan Price did that
afternoon was give me a taste of how I could become a self-coach. And though I
am not likely to step on a major league mound any time soon, the lesson is going
to stay with me for a long time.

http://www.slate.com/id/2112258/

Anything that makes baseball sound like the poetry it is, while also
simultaneously revealing what should be widely known, but isn't - that it in
fact holds all of the answers to a life well lived - is definitely a winning
piece of writing with me.

Don't think too much.

Mix it up.

Don't be the ball. Be yourself.

Just don't dwell.

If you
comfortably fit in your own skin, you have command.

You can make the
ball dance. You can make it do anything.

While life has you perpetually
dancing on the lip of the volcano - always an unknowing misstep away from
disaster - there is always, even if you slip down towards chaos, the possibility
of greatness around every corner.

Baseball is a game that deals in
realities. It considers human frailties, and its expectations are adjusted
accordingly. Baseball is that understanding parent. It loves you the way you
are. It doesn't command perfection. It never has. If it did, there would be no
heroes. The threshold for amazing in baseball doesn't even require you to get it
right half the time. Hitters are exceptional for launching a ball that actually
drops one-third of the time. Plus, they can still get credit in other ways for
hitting a ball that is caught and ultimately counts as an out ("Just move the
runner over, baby!" "Sac Fly! Sac Fly!"). Pitchers are impressive if they manage
to give one run up every three innings - for every 2 innings of success, one
inning of failure is not a problem. Hell, a Cy Youg season is winning only 2/3
of one's games.

Problems in baseball arise in a player's own head. They
overthink it and their mojo is gone. Their own overblown expectations are what
lead them to failure. They are what prompt cheap shots like the infamous A-Rod
karate chop, or the inane Kevin Brown punching the wall incident, or the likes
of Bonds, Giambi, Sosa and co. to indulge in chemical enhancements. Baseball
didn't put that on them. Those expectations of superhuman feats of strength
being a necessity upon themselves? The players done brought them on themselves.
And really, that is what is so crushingly disappointing about the whole BALCO
scandal and its fall out for baseball - its utter senselessness. There is no
need to live up to expectations that were not there. Baseball's celebrates the
greatness inherent in mere men. All that which may be achieved in spite of human frailty. That is what captures the child's imagination; what makes
the lifeling fan marvel long after the last out of the season has been made.
What makes baseball poetry.

Chemical achievement rings hollow in the
sweet spot. Gladiators of laughably epic proportions have no place here. Those
of superhuman semblance need not apply. There is a ball field for all of you,
and for the bloodlust and GI Joe fantasies you inspire. But it isn't diamond
shaped. It does not carry the gleam of the prism of dreams.

Character,
not caricature. It may not have always been true of America's pastime; in fact,
it likely never has been true of all of its participants. But it has always been
an aspiration: of commonality, of longevity, of achievement, of joy. Whether the
Game actually achieved any or all of those thing, then, now, always or just for
a bit; those are the things the Game has always wanted for itself. What we have
wanted from it. How those that love to play and those that love to watch them
play, and how they all love to dream, have always wanted from it. They have
stumbled, as we stumble. But the game goes on. Through generations. All of us
together, the players, the fans, all a beautifully knotted and complex family
tree.

In my life, as silly as it may sound, I have had very few rushes
of affection greater than those triggered by hearing a baseball player extol his
love for the game; about the fact that he gets to live out every little kid's
(and most grown ups) fantasy every day when he goes to work. 162 days a year,
superstar or journeyman, your job, your life, is literally the stuff that dreams
are made of.

It is particularly moving when it is a young player at the
dawn of his career, where there is nothing but the long highway of possibility
stretched out before him, professing such prescience. One way or another, you
know a veteran has learned his appreciation of the warm glow of the Game. The
aches and pain and continuing accumulation of off-season past, have taught him
the humility and the
awareness for the Game's beauty and
resilience. But the young one - you know he is just a gamer. He is excited.
He has realized the depth and the eternal nature of his love affair and its
energy will feed him from now until the last days of his life. He will not miss
out. He is the luckiest of them
all.

Baseball has always been exceptional because it is the great
equalizer. There is something profoundly moving in the fact that David Wells is
a damn good baseball player. The man is 42 and pushing 260 pounds and, let's
face it, looks like he would be much more confortable in a wayward biker bar or
seedy bowling alley, rather than any kind of a ball field. And yet, he is a
baseball player. He is an athlete. He is a grizzled competitor. And for all the
disparaging remarks that are made about his physique, there is a respect and
recognition of his inner competitor.