A Lesson in Concrete Reflection- Seeing Beyond the Box Score

        You may have noticed I like to read through post-game stories from Major League Baseball.  It's part of my morning routine.  In a way, it connects me back to my childhood and sitting with my Dad reading through the newspaper on a Sunday morning.  I'd always want to start with the sports but would impatiently read through the comics until Dad was done.  When I finally got the sports section, I would study the box scores and see how many hits my favorite players got.  This was prior to the internet and the instant access to that information in real time.  You had no choice but to see the next morning (we did have Sportscenter, of course, but I couldn't stay up that late).  My obsession with the numbers likely played a part in my being very results-driven as a hitter.  If I could go back in time, I'd tell a young me not to look to those numbers but rather to how the numbers happen.  What are these hitters specifically doing to have their performances?  Enough looking to the past though because I'm happy to be able to share that lesson with many others today.  Now, my favorite part of looking at results from the night before isn't the box score.  I love looking through the recaps and seeing how players and managers go about explaining the game that has just ended.  How they react to both the good and bad games is just as interesting to me.  Do they take responsibility?  Attribute it to luck?  Tip the cap to the other team?  Just part of the game?  At a loss for an explanation?  All of those reactions are just part of what I find fascinating in reading the recaps.  In going through them on a morning by morning basis, I start to notice patterns either with teams or with them all in general.  One such pattern has stood out to me, and I think it's something we can all learn a lesson from regardless of your sport or level of play.

        The word concrete, as an adjective, means "existing in a material or physical form; real or solid; not abstract."  More broadly applied, if something is concrete, it's there.  Perhaps more importantly, it can be worked on.  As teachers, we look for concrete reasoning in what our students write.  If it isn't there, we're able to specifically tell them what needs to be added.  As a coach, we should look for the same.  What actually happened?  How can we make it happen again, or what can we do to make it work out differently next time?  This may be surprising because some think of psychology as this abstract way of explaining how the mind works.  In my opinion, it's the opposite.  Sport psychology helps to provide reasoning for performance and looks to explain the "why" rationally.  It's not to frustrate athletes and coaches with what isn't there but to help them best handle what is.  In my morning reads of MLB recaps, I see over and over again performance explained by what actually happened- what was visible.  To provide a look at what I'm talking about, below is a "case study" of comments from the Cardinals-Nationals game last night.  I'll give you a setup, quote and quick comment on what was said:

Mike Matheny on Jaime Garcia's performance: "You can tell when his (sinker) is there.  He had very good movement and used his changeup and slider, but the sinker was a great pitch for him tonight."  Movement = concrete, used his changeup and slider = concrete, sinker being great = I could see an argument for this not being quite concrete, but I'd argue you the movement and type of contact make it pretty concrete

Dusty Baker on Max Scherzer's struggles in a 5-run inning: "It wasn't the home run pitch.  It was the walks before the home run.  That's what really hurt." Walks led to more runs, magnification of the home run = concrete?

Stephen Piscotty on Scherzer pattern: "Including the (previous) at-bat he threw me four straight sliders.  Luckily I got that one." Four straight sliders = concrete (Piscotty is a Stanford guy so of course he noticed the pattern!), Luckily = not concrete; I'd argue he's being humble and doesn't really think he was lucky.

Scherzer on the bomb: "I know I've been giving up a ton of home runs, but that one, that's just an execution thing.  That's just me not throwing the right pitch at the right time and with poor execution." Ton of home runs =  15 so far is indeed a ton and concrete, Poor execution = concrete, middle to inner third, thigh high on 0-1 count

Jaime Garcia on his performance: "I made some adjustments I needed to make.  That's part of baseball, that's part of pitching." Only he knows for sure, but I'd say it's concrete again.

        Although I think it's certainly possible to argue against the concrete nature of some of the quote, I think the real key is the messages in the quotes can be taken and used to work on and improve performance.  The movement of pitches Matheny talked about can be physically worked on in bullpens, flat grounds, drills, and just playing catch.  Scherzer's walks were likely a combination of things that can be broken down further and worked on.  Recognizing patterns of the opposing pitcher, as Piscotty did, can be worked on.  Executing an 0-1 slider can be worked on.  Making adjustments and understanding when they are necessary, as Garcia did, can be worked on.  In sum, everything in the quotes is behavioral and can be worked on.  What the quotes aren't are judgments of character made by a singular pitch, at-bat, or performance.  When we tell players or teams they failed because they were scared, weren't tough, or some other judgement, the likely resultant is a feeling of confusion about what they can do moving forward.  Likewise, when we attribute good performances to talent or luck, we are also missing on an opportunity to learn.  I'm not saying those judgments aren't sometimes true, but they are more difficult to take in and use moving forward than behavioral observations.  Understanding the why behind performance is critical to being able to repeat performance consistently.  It's equally critical in being able to avoid, as often as possible, the feeling of helplessness that comes with not understanding why things are going so poorly.  Staying as concrete as possible in reflection allows us to more easily take what has happened and use it to move forward.  The big leaguers are doing it, and you should too.

Kershaw on His Historic Month

        You may have heard Clayton Kershaw is pretty good at throwing baseballs.  He's won 120 games, 3 Cy Young Awards, and has led the league in a seemingly endless number of stats.  What's hard to believe is I think, despite all he has done, he get's overlooked at times because of his "boring" consistency.  Dave Roberts said after last night's game, "I think every time he takes the mound, you're looking at penciling in 10-12 strikeouts, eight innings....It's something that we don't take for granted around here.  We appreciate Clayton."  The Dodgers may not take Kershaw for granted, but I think baseball as a whole does at times.  Except when he has a month like he just did.  Kershaw went 5-0 with a 0.91 ERA and 65/2 strikeout to walk ratio in May.  "Just throw strikes," right?!  Naturally, when athletes have months like Kershaw has had, we want to know what they think about it.  Kershaw keeps it simple, and here's what stands out to me about what he had to say when asked what he thought about the month he'd just completed.

1. "Uh, not much."  This says to me Kershaw doesn't get too caught up in thinking too much about what he has done.  The numbers are the numbers, and to reflect too much about the past is to do so at the expense of what is now.

2. "We beat the Mets."  I love this, and I think it's far from the exception in baseball.  Whenever I read the recaps and players are asked about their performance, there are two basic answers:  1. "I'm just glad I could help our team win."  2. "It would have been a lot better if we had won."  Those are it, and I don't think players are just saying that.  They play to help their teams win.  It's not to say they don't take personal pride in individual performance, but it's a distant second to the team.

3. "Come back again the next time I'm pitching, figure out who we're playing and get ready for them."  For starters, Kershaw doesn't know who he will be pitching against next.  As he doesn't stay reflecting on the past for too long, likewise he doesn't look to what is coming too quickly either.  The quote also speaks to the process nature Kershaw has to prepare for his starts.  "I shove, enjoy it with my team, see who's next, and prepare to do it all over again."

        As you can tell from my Twitter feed, I really love the quotes from players and managers after games.  What I really love is what we can attempt to infer about who the players are and what they do.  Kershaw says so much about who he is as an athlete in a simple, four sentence answer.  I'd encourage you, whether you're a player or coach, to pay attention to what athletes say.  There is a lot of free advice being given every single day.  It's just a matter of taking the advice and applying it to what you do.

Kids Today are...Givers?

        Stop me if you've heard it before.  "Kids today just don't get it."  "They're so entitled."  "They just don't care."  "Kids today have a 'Me First' Attitude, with their Snapchats, Instagrams, and Twitters."  Chances are, if you work in any sort of field that includes young people of any age, you've heard some variation of those statements before.  You've probably heard them more than once.  As an educator and coach, it bothers me.  Sometimes it bothers me because it can be true.  More often than not, however, it bothers me because the people saying these things are so incredibly negative about the very kids they are supposed to be working to help.  Oh yeah, and also the statements aren't factual.  So there is that too.  The view I'm talking about is incredibly pessimistic.  What I see, and have been guilty of in the past, is people making generalizations based on exceptions rather than the rule.  A couple students misbehaving somehow turns into, "Kids today just have no respect."  Ignored in this statement are the overwhelming majority of students who do what they are supposed to do on a daily basis.  This can create a very negative outlook and is a tough way to go about your days working with young people.  What's to come in this blog will hopefully provide a dose of objective optimism about "Kids today" and their attitudes towards others.

        A few months back, I read a book called Give and Take:  Why Helping Others Drives our Success by Adam Grant.  The book is outstanding.  If you're a regular reader of the blog, you have already read another piece where I relate the book to coaching.  Because this entry is targeted toward a broader audience, I'll run through the basics of the book again.  Give and Take is a book about how we treat others.  Grant splits people into three categories: Givers, Takers, and Matchers.  Givers are people who do things for others for the sake of helping them.  Think of people who may donate anonymously, do nice things without having to post them on their social media accounts, etc.  There is no expectation of anything in return.  Takers do the opposite.  They constantly look for what they can get from other people.  Every time they get in touch it is to ask if you can do something for them.  They look to advance themselves regardless of the cost to others.  Think Veruca Salt.  Matchers look to "match" in their interactions.  Doing something nice for another person comes with the expectation of a favor in the future.  Getting something done for them leads to a feeling of having to make up for it.  I'm reminded of an episode of The Office where Dwight tries to get Andy to owe him something, but Andy is too much of a Matcher to allow that to happen.  The book goes into much greater detail about the three categories of people and even breaks them into sub-categories, otherish behaviors, fakers, and much more.  Grant does a great job of providing plenty of examples that somehow left me feeling like I was clueless at some points before putting it all together by the end of the book.

         The book also points the reader to Adam Grant's website.  On the website is a fifteen question quiz where you read through scenarios and pick what you would do in the given scenario.  At the end of the quiz, you're shown a pie chart with what percentages your answers fit into the Giver, Taker, and Matcher categories.  A high school psychology class I teach went through the basics of the book and took the quiz as part of our unit on Personality recently.  Although the quiz had it's benefits, it was clearly targeted towards adults.  There is no teenager version.  Because of this, we decided to create one.  Students were paired up and assigned a question on the quiz to redesign.  They took the scenarios from Grant's quiz and created similar scenarios targeted at high schoolers.  A reference letter became a letter of recommendation, tasks at work involving others became group projects in class, and ideas for business slogans became ideas for Grandpa's 80th birthday gift.  Each pair presented the question to the class and discussed their thought process in changing the question.  Other students gave feedback, made adjustments until they felt comfortable with the result, and we had one student type up the new questions.  In the end, the class generated their own Give and Take Quiz for Teenagers.

        Upon completion of the quiz, we sent it out through Twitter and email to students and teachers from our school.  We got 144 responses.  The results were a bit surprising and speak towards the topic of this blog entry.  The representative "Kids Today" were overwhelmingly Givers.  In fact, 69% of those who took the quiz were majority Givers.  In comparison, only 15% were Matchers, and 5% were classified as Takers.  Thirteen of the students who took the quiz scored some combination where multiple categories were equal (11%).  The results surprised me a little bit, but should they?  Kids today are much more aware of what goes on in the world today than those of us who spent either all or the large majority of our childhood without the internet.  The same technology we moan and groan about for its negative effects has allowed students the opportunity to "see" the world and understand how lucky they may be to grow up where they have.  They also haven't become pessimistic adults yet full of regret and scorn for opportunities squandered.  In their mind, and rightfully so, they still have an opportunity to make a difference in the world.  I'm not sure if those are the reasons for our results, but I think both could be a factor.  Regardless, the data says "Kids Today" are Givers.

        Was our assessment flawless?  Certainly not.  Nobody was there to administer the quiz or to ensure students didn't just click random answers.  Only about 7% of our school's population took it so it can hardly be considered representative of the entire teenage population.  144 students is probably more than the number of negative exemplars you could give though.  The pessimists may point to how teenagers aren't self-aware or honest enough to score themselves accurately.  There is probably some truth to that viewpoint.  The adolescent experience is one of great transition and self-searching.  What we would like to be versus what we are may leave a disconnect.  That is really no difference from the adults who take Grant's assessment though.  Something we plan on doing is having students fill out the assessment for other people, as Grant also does in the official quiz, and compare the results.  Maybe that will yield different answers, or maybe it won't.  Maybe, just maybe, kids today are a little better off than we want to give them credit for.  Maybe they care for others and are selfless in their actions.  Maybe if we stop preaching to them on our digital soap boxes about how horrible they are and start listening they might have something to offer.  Maybe the world will actually be a better place when they're running things instead of this Apocalyptic-world the naysayers see in their crystal balls.  Maybe.

Like You Belong

        The quote above came from Joe Maddon after Matt Szczur had a big game for the Cubs about a week and a half ago.  Szczur came into the year with about 130 AB's at the Major League level and a batting average around .220.  While Szczur unfortunately went on the disabled list shortly after his big game, his numbers to start this year are markedly better.  Granted it is a small sample size, he has hit .367 with 2 HR and 10 RBI in only 30 at-bats.

        One of the great challenges in sports is the transition from one level to another.  Nowhere is that more present than in professional baseball.  In the NBA and NFL, athletes make the jump from college to the top level professionally.  In baseball, the process works differently.  Players drafted or signed as free agents, with very few exceptions, spend several years climbing the minor league ladder prior to getting a chance at the Major League level.  While we generally think of the A, AA, and AAA levels, there is a Dominican Summer League, a Rookie Level in three different regions of the US, short-season, and even the A classification is split into low-A and high-A.  The point is there are a lot of steps that are played out over a period of time.  As players move up, others watch with anticipation to see if they can make the adjustments necessary to succeed at that next level.  There is always such great focus on the differences.  Pitchers throw more of their secondary pitches for more strikes, hitters don't miss mistakes, and the speed of the game are three I hear often.  While the differences are certainly a part of the overall picture, they are only a part.  There are similarities in the game of baseball that far outnumber the differences at every level possible.  In my opinion, the players who are able to make the transitions the smoothest are the ones who acknowledge the differences as areas to grow while remaining confident in what has gotten them there.  In other words, "They act like they belong."

        Geoff Miller, who I've written about often in the blog, discusses his work with a pitcher who has been on the verge of breaking in with a Major League club in his book Intangibles.  In sum, the player has struggled in big league camp not just with his performance but with being who he is on a daily basis.  The player tells G something to the effect that he is trying to prove himself and know his place.  G asks the player how this is different than how he'd act if he had several years of service time at the big league level.  The player then explains how he'd probably be much more relaxed and comfortable, and G challenges the player to act that way now because of its effect on his performance.

        Dr. Jonathan Fader has a great quote related to the topic in his new book Life as Sport.  He says. "If you're constantly asking  yourself whether you're good enough to be there, it's hard to actually be there."  If you're questioning your ability and/or how others perceive your ability, then your focus isn't in the present moment.  It's certainly not on the task at hand either.  Your focus is in this alternate universe of judgement rather than playing the game you've played for so long.  Getting back to Maddon's quote, he says realizing he belongs is the last step for Szczur.  What if it were the first step instead?  What if as you moved up each level of play, JV to Varsity, HS to College, etc. you did so with the realization that you belong at that level?  How would it influence your day to day behaviors and performance?  You'd probably have a better chance of succeeding and better yet of enjoying yourself along the way.  That's Win Now.