Pitching Out of Trouble: Better Trust Yourself, Because There's No Magic Bullet

Dirk Hayhurst,

I am a 16-year-old ballplayer from Wisconsin. Baseball is a huge part of my life, and I really loved your book. I’m a pitcher myself, and have encountered some new adversity in these last few months. Like you, I don’t throw all that hard and rely on pinpoint control and good offspeed stuff to win games.

Lately, my control has evaporated and my confidence is not far behind. I tweeted you back in May and you told me to “pitch better.” That may have been some of the best advice I have ever received. I tried to simplify things and it worked for a little while, but now I’m back where I was and worse. So I wanted to ask you, someone who has encountered adversity and overcome it, what do you do when you simply cannot pitch effectively? Any response at all will be much appreciated.

Dear Mystery Player:

What you need is some good, old fashioned perspective.

Why? Because with perspective you gain trust, and with trust you are able to weather these storms of doubt and get back into the smooth sailing of 1-2-3 innings.

Pitching ineffectively is something all of us pitchers do. In fact, failure is the one thing you can count on happening in your career of gambling on a little white ball.

No one likes failure because failure hurts, and it burns, and it makes you wonder what you’re doing with your life by investing so much emotion into a silly game like baseball. Unfortunately, a competitor has to invest himself in his craft.

Winning and losing have to feel like everything if you’re going to summon the fortitude to get through those extra miles, grueling workouts and pain. It’s this “do or die” thinking that gets you where other people can’t or won’t go.

It’s an all or nothing business, or so they say.

But this precludes the thinking that there is life outside, beyond, and all around the game, that, even when you blow it, keeps moving like nothing happened.

The do or die part of you makes you believe that, when you blow it, you’re no longer a part of that life but some dead man, murdered by your inability to get the job done on the playing field.

Well, you’re not.

You’re the same you that you were before the game started (or ended poorly), except now you don’t believe in yourself. This single thought, the one all of us competitors have when we’ve failed, is the hardest opponent you will ever face in your career.

Doubting your ability is just the start. Soon, because you’ve invested so much of yourself into your ability, you connect your ability with your self-worth. Then you begin to see failure as proof that you are worthless.

You’ve dedicated so much of yourself to the pursuit of accomplishment that when you don’t get it, you question things much more deeply than the simple, “What should I have thrown him?”

You’re in dangerous waters when you get to this point. Baseball is not something to judge your worth on. It’s a game that children play thinking they’ll be great men someday if they’re good enough.

News flash: Being a good baseball player hardly makes you a great man. It just makes you a good baseball player.

Here is where perspective comes in. All of that hard work you’ve done still counts. People that push themselves beyond their limits are often rewarded, even if they have high ERA’s.

People who don’t give up even when there are no fresh arms to relieve them are always valuable. And, most of all, people who can pick themselves up after a firm butt-whooping go farther, last longer and command more respect than those who cave in when the going gets tough.

If you can see the value of what you’re doing beyond the narrow lens of baseball success, it will make the lack of it a lot easier to bear. There is no magic bullet in this game, no secret pitch that makes you unhitable.

But the way I see it, that’s a good thing because the pitches that get hit teach you a lot more than the ones you blow hitters away with.

Trust in that. Trust yourself. Believe that you’re valuable and that what comes out of your hand next is the product of all you’ve put into it and I promise you’ll be successful.