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The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 mph

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The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 mph

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Highlights & Notes

It’s the most common thing in the world to forfeit a fulfilling routine when one’s schedule becomes more demanding.

At first, it seemed accidental that I found my own meditation with a bat in my hand. I know now that there are no accidents—everything is as it’s supposed to be.

A novice at any skill will fail to find meditation in the practice of that skill until he or she has achieved a level of technical expertise that makes the skill feel like second nature. The pull approach I had been forced to explore with Willie and Cito required my thinking, so it could never have provided the stillness I experienced when I returned to my natural swing.

The difference now was that I was not thinking about mechanics; I was focusing only on my breathing and on the ball.

Whatever was said about me, positive or negative, did not have to affect the way I felt about myself.

Just as I changed my relationship with the baseball by stopping it and placing it on the tee, meditation enabled me to change my relationship with my thoughts.

Contrary to general misconceptions, meditation is not about training oneself to live without thought; rather, it’s about training oneself to move beyond one’s thoughts.

No longer a slave to worry, about either the upcoming game or what my coaches and teammates might think of my antics, I was truly free to enjoy a spontaneous moment.

Because I had the stillness of mind to enjoy what the world was offering me, I was able to connect with others in a new way.

My mantra wasn’t a candle flame or a chant, as in some forms of meditation. My mantra was the ball motionless; the only movement I focused on was the movement of my breath. The swing occurred on its own. Absorbed in the action of hitting, I felt my body moving, I saw only the ball, and I heard the contact of the wood on the ball followed by the swishing sound of the ball hitting the back of the cage—a beautiful practice. I had reduced hitting, an extremely difficult activity, to its most basic form. As a result, I took each swing with full attention.

Finding stillness, however, enabled me to understand the pitfalls of allowing the ever-changing external world to dictate my inner world. If one stranger’s opinion could actually change my stress level, anger level, and overall well-being, then who was actually at the controls of my life? And yet that is how most of us live, whether we’re in the public eye or not.

By using your own breath to anchor you to stillness, you can connect with the present moment. For example, in my tee work I’d place the ball on the tee and take a breath, step back and take a breath, swing the bat, hit the ball and take a breath, bend and pick up another ball and take a breath, place the new ball on the tee and take another breath. Ultimately, the mindful breathing, which served to focus my attention, was as much a part of the exercise as the actual swinging of the bat.

Concentrate on whatever you’re doing. Life is full of menial tasks, which means it is full of opportunity. You can transform any task from an act of distracted second nature into an active meditation—the same awareness you’d employ if you were doing it for the first time. And you will discover that being fully attentive is being fully alive.

Finding stillness through my tee work proved a life-altering discovery. The practice was simple: focus on my breathing, feel the swing without thinking about it, and hit line drives up the middle.

Ideally, a hitter wants a short stride, so his swing can be quicker, providing extra milliseconds to judge the pitch. Ted Williams often said that swinging at better pitches is the key to getting more hits. The catch, however, is that it is usually that extra length of the swing that provides power. My former teammate Paul Molitor had no stride. He just picked up his front heel and put it back down. This made his swing extremely efficient and contributed to his amassing more than three thousand hits in a Hall of Fame career, but he didn’t hit many home runs. On the other hand, Reggie Jackson had a big stride and big swing, striking out often but hitting more than five hundred homers in his Hall of Fame career. Only the very best all-around hitters in each generation, guys like Barry Bonds and Albert Pujols, have the ability to take short, quick strides and still have home run power. I could never do that. The goal for me was to find a happy medium.

Such imperfections might make you wonder how I ever got a hit at all! However, the truth is that all hitters have negative tendencies in their swings; the challenge is to navigate through obstacles and work with what you have. I probably could have played an entire career simply putting bandages on these issues by finding strictly physical ways to compensate. However, I’d never have developed the power and production that I found after that ’97 season.

I’d just never arrived at a proper solution to the problems with my swing because my mind had always been filled with analytical thoughts. Those four summer months in ’97 of swinging in stillness created the necessary space and emptiness of mind for the solution to just come to me. (We often solve life’s most complicated dilemmas when we sleep on it, or in my case meditate on it.)

Through the ’97 season, I’d always had a square stance. In other words, my back foot and front foot were in a straight line, parallel to home plate and in line with the pitcher. The other two stance options are a closed stance, wherein the front foot is closer to home plate than the back foot, aiming more of the back toward the pitcher, or an open stance, wherein the front foot is further from the plate than the back foot, aiming more of the stomach toward the pitcher. In my square stance, my right foot, right hip, and right shoulder were all perfectly aligned, aiming at the pitcher. However, as I took my stride I’d wind up aiming more toward the shortstop than the pitcher, with my right shoulder aimed somewhere between the third baseman and the shortstop. Thus, my up-the-middle approach was defeated when I actually took my swing. How to correct the problem? Instead of fighting where my body wanted to go, I went with it. Keeping my entire body locked into its natural position, I danced my feet around clockwise so that, when I swung, my right shoulder would be aimed directly at the pitcher rather than at the hole between third base and shortstop. I looked down and saw that I was now in an open stance with my feet, but my shoulder was in perfect alignment for hitting up the middle. The open stance that I practiced for the rest of my career was born.

My initial reasons for making these changes were to free up the inside part of the plate and to shore up my weaknesses as a hitter, but in the process I had unwittingly created much more power in my swing. It stands to reason. The lower half of my body was now twisted toward the second baseman while my upper body was facing the pitcher, thereby creating more torque as my body unwound with each swing. Visualize a toy airplane with a propeller and a rubber band. The more you rotate that propeller, the more tension is placed on the rubber band. The greater the tension, the faster the propeller will spin upon release—simple physics.

Rather than stopping thoughts, meditation is about shifting one’s awareness out of thought by focusing attention on something else.

  • Importante

At the tee, the flow of the routine became my mantra: take a breath, focus on the ball, swing, take a breath, place a new ball on the tee, then repeat. The work consisted of my swinging in a place of no thought, learning to peel my awareness away from my mind and redirect it into my body. Soon, I was able to move my attention out of my head and into body parts (my foot, my shoulder), shifting my awareness from one to the next without encumbering the movement, or flow, with any thought.

It took me a few weeks of focusing on my new swing intentions to get the mechanics ingrained. Once ingrained, I had a new approach that became second nature. My tee work returned to the deeper, daily meditation that I had created the summer before, except now my swing was much improved; my body parts were no longer pulling each other into unwanted directions, my stance was open and my body torqued, my stride moved straight toward the pitcher and when my front foot landed the coiled position I had created in my stance remained intact.

  • Swing bueno

Coaches had always wanted me to hit for more power, but, oddly, they’d never told me to practice hitting home runs during batting practice. Instead, they’d give mechanical suggestions as to what changes in my swing or approach would help me hit more home runs, but they never suggested I simply practice hitting the ball as far as I could. Often, the simplest ideas are the best.

Though lasting only a fraction of a second, the space sometimes felt like an eternity, making a ninety-five miles per hour fastball seem to float in like a beach ball. If I liked the pitch, my swing would begin with my lower half, legs and hips, rotating forward while my upper body stayed back. Next, the turning legs and hips would sling my upper body and bat forward with tremendous force. At that point, I wasn’t swinging; something was swinging me. To illustrate this further, consider again your breathing; sometimes it’s difficult to differentiate whether you’re breathing or whether the world is breathing you. Ninety-nine percent of the time, we pay no attention to breathing, but it still happens. In the past, whenever my bat felt slow, which inevitably happens in a 162-game schedule, I concentrated on speeding up my hands. Like most hitters, I thought I was supposed to swing a bat with my arms. After discovering separation and space, I realized that the best way to hit was to not swing at all, but to get the body in the proper, separated position, then simply allow the body to naturally uncoil. The bat then falls into the perfect slot and comes through effortlessly with great velocity. It sounds simple, but there is a catch. The stride and all the body movements leading up to the swing must be fluid and happen right on time. That’s the tricky part, the timing, which differentiates mediocre stretches from hot streaks. If the stride is late, then the bat rushes forward, thereby forfeiting the swing’s separation and space. If the stride is early, then the torqued position of the body becomes tense and less effective. For the optimal swing, the striding foot has to land at an instant I came to think of as “the last possible part of early.” When it comes to such subtlety, awareness is imperative.

For most of us, our awareness becomes trapped within our heads. We are so lost in the fantasies of our minds—egoistic images of who we think we are or should be—that we fail to truly experience the world around us. Instead, we merely think the world. Meditation, practiced in any effective format, trains us to exist and function apart from the mind and ego, allowing us to experience the present moment. In my meditative practice at the tee, my awareness attached itself to my body and its movements. In those twenty-minute sessions, I was no longer thinking through my swings; rather, I merely watched as the swings happened. Whenever self-consciousness crept into my head, I’d shift that awareness back into my striding foot, my shoulder, or my breathing. On many days, I moved beyond even my connection to the body and felt I had actually become the act of hitting, so absorbed in what I was doing that I lost my sense of self.

Through this daily work, I created a kind of bubble around what I came to recognize as my true essence. All that I previously had thought I was (mind, ego, and emotions), was pushed to the surface of that bubble, away from my true essence, which floated at the center. And what filled the gap that separated this essence from the surface of that bubble? Emptiness. Space. Just as hitting a baseball became effortless when separation and space characterized my…

As we find ourselves becoming worked up, we remind ourselves, “Relax, it’s just a movie,” and the tension immediately subsides. We pull ourselves together by remembering that we are sitting in a chair fifty feet away from a screen watching actors work from a script. When considered from this perspective, it sounds a little crazy that a projected strip of celluloid can cause us to experience real physiological change due to serious emotions. Of course, getting pulled into the illusory drama is a big part of what makes a movie an enjoyable, compelling experience. The other critical aspect, however, is the realization that what’s happening on the screen either isn’t real or isn’t actually happening to us. It is the existence of this space that allows us to truly enjoy the shock of a horror movie or the sadness of a tragedy. Without it, we’d lose perspective. Likewise, it is space that allows us to refrain from flipping out…

When separation and space were present in my swing, ninety-five miles per hour fastballs seemed to come at me in slow motion and my bat seemed to be pulled through the hitting zone by an external force. Similarly, everyday issues lost their potentially overwhelming velocity when I viewed them from a distance and solutions came…

Being more emotional doesn’t equate to caring more.

The game of baseball (and my world off the field) was becoming much clearer because I no longer confused my thoughts with my true essence. Still,

Dan Millman’s book The Way of the Peaceful Warrior discusses the power of losing your mind and coming to your senses.

  • Libro

He wasn’t throwing and I wasn’t hitting, we both became the movement, just as dancers moving in sync become the dance rather than individuals dancing.

By midseason ’98, my connection to the pitcher began to make its way beyond BP and into actual games. I was no longer battling against a pitcher who was trying to get me out. I’d step into the box and, through my rhythmic routines, become aware of my body. Released of the mind’s interference, my awareness (as unselfconscious as a predator striking its prey) was now free to connect to the pitcher. By the time the ball left his hand, I was fully alert in the moment, so that the pitcher was now my partner in hitting rather than my opponent. Since there was no identifying with myself, what was left? Nothing, no one, only a single action, hitting. During my increasingly frequent hot streaks, I became the act of hitting rather than a person who was hitting. In the absence of any weighty sense of self, I’d step into the batter’s box much lighter. Sometimes, I’d step out between pitches to revisit my mind. “Check the signs. What’s the count? What’s the game situation?” But as soon as my spikes returned to their toeholds, my mind would dissipate. My body would move through its routine, extending my awareness out to the pitcher. I’d feel my fingers wiggling around the bat handle and my body subtly rocking, but I’d be completely out there, at once anchored to my body and locked on the pitcher.

It’s amazing what we notice when we actually watch with full awareness.

Now, when I knew what kind of pitch was coming, I no longer needed to swing at every fastball or alter my stride to hit an off-speed pitch. If I knew a changeup was coming, I didn’t think about it—I simply watched for a slower pitch in a specific location. If the ball was in that location, the swing happened on its own. I wasn’t thinking, just watching. Over the remaining ten years of my career, close to half of the pitchers I faced (including more than a few Hall of Famers) gave away their pitches.

The most common way pitchers tip is with their gloves. Different pitches are held differently in the throwing hand. A fastball is gripped with the index and middle finger on top of the ball, whereas a changeup is gripped more with the palm. Thus, the hand holding a changeup often makes for a wider hand in the glove. As a hitter, I’d observe from sixty feet away the glove get bigger, or flare, by just an inch or so with this widened changeup grip. The movement didn’t have to be drastic for me to pick it up and know what was coming.

I knew that if I could be on time for the pitch, then I could adjust to the movement of the ball.

Another way I’d get out of my mind while at bat was to pretend I was watching an exciting movie starring the guy on the mound, sixty feet, six inches away. The movie started with his windup and continued as the ball moved toward me. In this way, I could take myself out of the at-bat and simply watch. If the pitch was good, the swing just happened with no doing on my part. This movie-watching approach was all about keeping my attention on the pitcher and out of my mind and became one of my strongest assets.

Besides, it’s important in any endeavor to know when to focus and when to relax, when to joke around and flick sunflower seeds, and I was finally finding the right formula.

In the past, my mind analyzed opponents pitch by pitch. Now, I regarded the at-bats as a whole. Separated from the mind, I could perceive more. Like a man standing in an art gallery looking at a painting by Seurat, I was now able to step back and see the big picture, to see what it was all about, instead of being so close that I could see only different colored dots of paint.

However, by ’98, I was ready to track pitchers in a more productive way. This time I made notes that helped me approach pitchers with a general plan, but not an analytical pitch by pitch plan. It was fluid. Sure, I used my mind to analyze the pitchers, but the analysis was done after the seeing, not during. I watched the pitcher with a quiet mind and only called upon my mind between pitches. Still, pitchers often confounded me, but I didn’t have to be right every time. If I correctly anticipated one changeup in an at-bat or two or three pitches in an entire game, I was bound to have a lot of success over the course of a season.

I wasn’t guessing; rather, I was following a plan that provided a few optimal pitches to hit each day. Sometimes I was wrong for an entire at-bat or for a whole game, but I was giving myself my best chance.

I even came to realize that many guys pitch differently with a base runner on second than they do with a base runner on third. In both cases, the runner is in scoring position. However, with a runner on second, pitchers don’t have to worry so much about the hitter making contact, so to keep hitters off balance, pitchers tend to throw curveballs and sliders in the strike zone; with a runner on third and the prospect of simple contact resulting in a run, pitchers tend to throw more fastballs high and inside, as that’s a pitch often popped up or fouled back. Also, many pitchers throw fewer forkballs with a runner on third, because they don’t want to bounce one by the catcher. Others tend to throw the same pitch on a full count as they’ve thrown the pitch before, because they already have the feel for the pitch.

I went up to the plate with general guidelines regarding a pitcher’s tendencies. The pitcher still chose his pitches, but I felt I was in control because I had my plan. I waited for my pitch, not his. I didn’t sit on pitches in the manner other hitters often describe, which involves too much guessing and effort. Rather, I wanted to approach pitches with stillness, patience, and no thought, just waiting, watching, and seeing. This allowed me to respond to pitches, as opposed to my first few years in the big leagues, when I merely reacted to pitches. The difference between reacting and responding is subtle, but immense.

I simply watched for pitches with no thought or action, just patiently waiting and seeing. And if I watched for my pitch with full attention, my swing happened spontaneously.

Just as opening my eyes to the pitcher enhanced my success at the plate, opening my eyes to the world improved my life. My meditative work at the tee was the initial vehicle by which I’d begun to know myself, and to realize that I wasn’t an actor playing the role of Shawn Green, baseball player. Now, I was in touch with my deeper, true essence, which before had been lost in mind and emotion. The daily circumstances of life didn’t change, pitchers didn’t change, but my perspective changed and so now I could respond in my own way rather than merely react to both baseball and life. Now, my awareness controlled my life situations rather than life situations controlling my awareness.

Maybe that’s why people love vacation so much—it’s an opportunity to separate from our other lives, our public identities. Sometimes, the awareness of this separation brings more joy than any particular destination.

The mind is closed and rigid, fixated on its desires; it manipulates all perceptions to fit into the paradigm it has created. Awareness, on the other hand, is open and fluid and offers a path to what is real. Awareness opened my eyes as a baseball player, enabling me to connect on the field, and now it was opening my eyes as a man, enabling me to connect to the world, to finally quit trying and to begin living. Pure awareness is wiser than the mind.

Why did it suddenly seem as if the world was guiding me through my journey, taking me by the hand? This is why: I had learned to move out of my mind, which enabled me to see things that I had never before been able to see. My eyes were open to life for the first time and so I was immersed in the world. A year before, I’d been completely absorbed in developing my swing and my meditation at the tee. In the time since, I’d transcended my mind and connected with my true essence both on and off the field.

Over the past year, my statistics had come to define my sense of self. Not good.

ego, a term I use here to mean “one’s consciousness of one’s own identity,” rather than “an inflated feeling of pride in one’s superiority to others.”

“All I need is one more home run, and then I’ll be happy.”

Bad things happen when one’s attention slips away.

Be yourself … Don’t feel like you need to live up to anything you’ve done in the past, and don’t feel like you need to live up to the expectations everyone has for you in the future. Just play the game.

I had read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse many times and thought now of Siddhartha’s words: “Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish … Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” I needed to live it.

but chasing home runs is anathema to finding a good groove—a hitter’s stride gets jumpy and his swing gets both faster and slower. That’s right, faster and slower! How is that possible? Everything the home run obsessed hitter does, beginning with the stride, becomes rushed, until you’re jumping out to meet the ball almost before the pitcher releases it. Inevitably, you chase a lot of bad pitches. Additionally, when you try too hard to hit for distance, you often rely on your upper body rather than your legs to generate the power. Subsequently, the path of the swing becomes longer and so, even as your body moves more rapidly, the bat actually moves more slowly.

Analyzing players by numerical comparison is inescapable. And whether one swings a bat for a living, sells widgets for a corporation, or is a high school student hoping to score high on the SATs, analysis and comparisons are inevitable and not without value. Numbers aren’t the problem. The problem is losing oneself in numbers.

(The ego lives only in the past and future, never in the present.)

But money and pressure weren’t the real causes of my depression. The trouble arose because my ego tricked me into believing that “You’ll only be happy when you live up to all the expectations, just down the road …”

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” The enlightened are distinguished from the rest of us not by the work they do but by the manner in which they do their work.

(How many of us are able to become as fully engaged in our activities as is a child?) No matter how much life wisdom a person acquires, the chores of daily life remain the same. The enlightened, however, do not do their daily work as a mere means to an end: The chopping of the wood is not done for the purpose of building a fire, the carrying of the water is not done for the purpose of cooking food, because everything is done in the same state of presence, for its own sake, without goals. That was how I used to approach my tee work.

  • Importante

The habit of being lost in goals and desires was not easy to break.

back—that swing is coming, all on its own!” “Tony always told me that same thing,” I said. “If you come off your back foot too soon, then your body no longer pulls the bat through the zone with same force. Instead, your hands just drift forward toward the pitcher prematurely.”

Playing with close friends made baseball feel more like Little League, like a game.

I realized now that after moving away from friendships in Toronto my performance became my sole focus. In Los Angeles, I had a job to do, period. Where is the joy in that? Where is the spirit of the eight-year-old I’d met at the batting cages? It’s no way to approach a job. No way to approach anything!

You can’t find a spiritual connection if your body can’t stay present!

Often, when our bodies and lives are working perfectly, we take the present moment for granted and get lost in our minds and egos. However, when we suffer an injury or get sick, the body pulls us back by drawing our attention to our pain, which inevitably resides in the present moment. This is why in some monasteries monks are taught to raise their hands during meditation if they grow too connected to their thoughts. The master then comes over and whacks them on their backs with a stick in order to create a painful sensation, which knocks their attention away from their thoughts and back to their bodies.

Whenever awareness is placed in the body, presence emerges.

Usually, injuries and illnesses occur when we are lost in time and least capable of being in the moment. Perhaps injuries, illnesses, and failures are sometimes our bodies’ way of telling us that it’s time to refocus our attention.

It takes discipline to remain present. Before I lost it, I took it for granted. I embarked on the new season as a more grateful and humble person.

You can’t force a flower to bloom or fruit to ripen on the vine; it needs to happen when it is supposed to happen.

Maybe fifteen minutes, maybe twenty … until I was dripping sweat and couldn’t take another hack. It was during those last swings, when I was too exhausted to think anymore about my mechanics, that I’d lose my mind and find my way back to the present moment, where impatience for results doesn’t exist.

Becoming attached to success is just as dangerous as becoming attached to failure.

  • Importante

Working as a team in adverse circumstances (without our number three and five hitters) had evoked a sense of camaraderie as well as a sense of responsibility. I once again felt like a player my teammates could rely on. It felt great.

As a Blue Jay, my ego would jump in to take the credit for my success as if I’d done something great. Now, I knew that there wasn’t any doing with which to credit myself; instead, there was only allowing. My job as a wiser hitter was just to take my swings with the proper balance, separation, space, and presence. I needed to do this as my daily, disciplined routine without any further motive or purpose. By creating this environment, I allowed it to show up. I didn’t will it to show up, but allowed it. If it never showed up, I like to think that would have been okay too and I’d have kept on with the daily work regardless. But it did show up and in a big way.

Pride serves as a warning that we are connecting to our egos, which we should only ever do with full awareness.

Of course, it may seem that with all the experimentation, discovery, analysis, and practice I’d already devoted to hitting, I should have permanently conquered its technical aspects by now. But that wasn’t so and could never be. Like every other complex activity, hitting is dynamic, which is what makes it not only a continual challenge but a great teacher. Besides, no one’s body or awareness is ever 100 percent the same from one at-bat to the next; similarly, no two pitches are ever truly identical. Thus the act of hitting, like life, is always a work in progress. One must master a skill, and then master it again in a different way for new circumstances, on and on … Yes, sometimes it’s frustrating, but it’s always enlivening and ultimately beautiful. So, it was back to work on the stride.

It takes discipline to keep your eyes on process rather than on results.

The only real way to exercise any control of the zone is to simply be prepared for its arrival.

When we practice our daily chores without ulterior motives, a routine becomes like the rubbing together of two sticks; if you keep at it fire eventually happens. You don’t know exactly when it will arrive—it just does.

Achieving the state of no-mind is the key to getting into the zone and sustaining that state is key to staying there for as long as possible.

Nothing feels better than exhaustion after a full day absorbed in the moment.

Finishing up this journal marks the end of today’s historic game. When I move back a few rows to where the guys are anxious for me to join their card game, I will have officially let go of patting myself on the back. My ego would love to live in this day forever, but the truth is it’s over. All that matters is right now, sitting here on the plane.

The truth is that while I was in the zone, I moved beyond the whole competition aspect of hitting. Absorbed in the act, it no longer mattered to me what team I was playing against or who was on the mound. There was only this: The ball came at me in slow motion, and I hit it. As the pitcher released the ball there was no me, no him, no bat, and no ball. All nouns were gone, leaving only one verb: to hit.

In sports, if one player is competing and the other has transcended competition, who’s going to win? The answer is obvious. A lot of people talk about the best players being those who compete best. They talk about players whose minds are toughest. They reason that whoever wants it more will win. Yes, there’s a time and a place for this mentality, but it was never what I was after (I relied on it only when I was off my game). What I preferred was to be effortless. Meditation and presence during my daily routines aided me in this. Still, I was never in control of the zone. Rather, it passed through me as it pleased. I was only its vehicle. Top athletes play a different game than others. They have a knack for being in the zone, whether they can explain it or not. These athletes are fun to watch, not just because of their ability to win but because of the grace and presence of their actions.

The zone isn’t something that can be controlled. It is a force of nature—a force of the universe. It shows up when it shows up, and it comes packaged in an infinite number of ways. A great afternoon at the beach with friends, a belly laugh with your kids, and a deep conversation are all examples of it showing up. You can try to plan these moments or try to recreate them at a later date, but they can rarely be controlled or anticipated. Still, we live for moments like these. In the end, all you can really do to ensure them is absorb yourself fully in every moment and be patient. By doing so, the Zone will arrive more frequently in your life, work, and activities than ever before.

Life isn’t about continually getting to the next level. Too many of us view life as if it were a school in which we constantly are trying to graduate to the next grade. In 2000, I’d fallen into the ego’s trap of, “you need to be the hero,” and now that I’d injured my shoulder, I’d fallen into the ego’s new trap of being the unappreciated antisuperstar. The fight is never ending. Was my immoderate labeling of the ego as an evil enemy where I’d gone wrong? After all, the problem is not the ego itself, which is almost impossible to permanently quash, but getting lost in the ego and falsely identifying it as one’s own true essence. Might simply being aware of the ego and watching it from a place of separation and space be enough to keep oneself present? I realized now that I’d doubtless get lost in the ego again—many times—but that as long as I was able to wake up to the present moment I’d always find my way back. Just recognizing the ego for what it is means that you’re not completely lost in it.

This realization helped me to understand a quote from Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse, “The world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided … never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.”

Within a couple of days, the shot took effect and my pain was much relieved and much of my power returned. In the remaining twenty-four games of the season, I had twenty-three RBIs and seven homers and ended the season with a .280 average, 19 home runs, 85 RBIs, and a league-leading 49 doubles. While those numbers were a far cry from the 40-plus homers I’d hit in each of the previous two years, this season was among the most significant of my career, not because of numbers, but because it had exposed to me yet another layer of my ego—a layer that I likely would never have noticed without the injury—and taught me that the more I self-consciously resisted its pull, the more I became attached to the suspect identity that formed in the resistance. I learned acceptance of what is. A place of no judgment, no goals … the place where actual life happens. And that is a much better place to be.

I was finished trying to live up to an image of who I wanted to be or who I thought I was. It is all too easy for any of us to get lost in such manufactured images. Often, the perceptions and expectations of those around us strengthen the weighty images of ourselves we already carry around. Habitually, we label ourselves and others, and before long these labels create a false sense of identity that we spend far too much of our energy trying to justify. Sometimes we habitually identify ourselves with our jobs, our possessions, our goals; other times we habitually identify ourselves with our problems, our frustrations, our illnesses, our weaknesses. Better to just be where you are, to just feel what you feel.

It felt good to hit that homer, but it felt even better to make a decision that was aligned with my heart rather than with my ego.

And so, for better or worse, there was a lot about the 2004 season that fell short of my expectations about Dodgerland; one thing about allowing yourself to acknowledge your emotions as they arise: Sometimes, it hurts.

When you peel away the layers of the ego and subdue your expectations regarding how the world should be, then what’s left? Only life itself.

We all have voids in our lives. What makes the world interesting and fun are the often eccentric and always diverse ways we fill those voids. What a beautiful tapestry this makes of life.

As I looked at the different lockers, I’d be reminded how the players in this camp, and every big league camp, also made up a tapestry of diverse strands. Every team consists of players of different nationalities who speak numerous languages, players of different races from every possible economic background, players in their late thirties with growing families who are putting the finishing touches on their long careers, players who are not yet old enough to buy a beer, pranksters, and quiet, reserved guys. Of the sixty or so players at any spring training camp, many never get to the Major Leagues. Others hang on for a few years and only get a taste of their dreams. Few ever actually experience the wealth and fame that those on the outside assume is the norm for those on the inside. Still, in the clubhouse, differences between players weren’t the most important thing. What always mattered most was that we wore the same uniform and played the same game.

Spring training takes us all back several decades, to a time when the empty spaces between the pitches and the swings of the bat were just as important as the pitching and hitting itself, where the space between the actions is just as beautiful as the action itself.

Top athletes get kudos for being fierce competitors. Yet, when I looked at the most accomplished players in sports, I rarely saw wise, happy people. Instead, I more often saw insecure and miserable egos.

The best approach to the game of baseball is just to play it; the same is true of life. The most fulfilled people are the ones who are always playing, the ones who don’t take life too seriously.

That’s one of the things that I love about baseball, one of the things that I love about life: there is no end to the learning. Or teaching. I hoped that someday I’d show up at a stadium or a Little League field and have the same positive impact on a younger person that Tony always had on me. As significant as his hitting advice was, it was his desire to help, his display of friendship, which meant the most.

This was a lesson on the futility of trying to hang on to past circumstances, to hang on to time. In truth, there is only ever the beauty of each moment.

Maybe that’s why youth and pride so often go hand in hand; we need that push at that time to send us off to create our “personal legends,” as described by Paulo Coehlo in his wonderful novel, The Alchemist.

“Actually, it feels a lot like when you first put on a big league uniform. You might not think it would. But love brings you into this game as a kid and now, for me, love is taking me out. It’s exciting.” I didn’t have to elaborate on how I felt about Lindsay and the girls—he knew. “It’s been quite a ride for us, eh, Flaco?”

He nodded. “That’s the way it is, Flaco.” “The way of baseball,” I said. Everything on the surface of life is flux. As a young player, I related only to that superficial level, and so the circumstances of my life dictated my sense of happiness. But as my awareness broadened, I realized that reality runs much deeper. “The way of baseball …” Carlos mused. “That’s good, Flaco.” “The way of life.” Carlos grinned. “It looks like my work here is done.” “Mine, too.” “I’m happy for you,” he said. I started to my seat a few rows behind his. He called back to me with a wry grin. “I don’t think I’ll be too far behind you, big brother.”

Life is filled with moments that seem to just pass us by, indeed, moments that we rush through in order to get to other, bigger moments. What a waste! Why isn’t every moment treated as sacred and beautiful? Circling the bases or sitting on a red-eye flight … what makes one moment more important than another? Maybe life is really just one beautiful moment constantly changing shape. Sure, we sometimes notice the world: crashing waves, a starry night, the majesty of a rainstorm, but we miss most moments.

From time to time, we all need to get inside the monster in our lives before we can emerge into the bright lights.

We are all so different from one another, and yet we are all so much the same. I watched him sort attentively through the rack of bats to find just the right one. One hundred percent focus. I felt confident that whichever bat he chose would work out great for him.

I also would like to thank my family. My parents, Ira and Judy, and my sister, Lisa, provided me with the unwavering support to fulfill my dreams. My father was my lifelong hitting coach and my mother was my cheerleader. And thanks to all my relatives (including many whom I didn’t know), who were always there for me in stadiums throughout the country. Finally, there are my three girls.

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