STRIKE OUT

From the moment he was born, Cole Gabrielson was destined for baseball greatness. Both his father and grandfather played at the University of Southern California, his grandfather even going on to play in the Major Leagues.

Now at USC himself, outfielder Gabrielson is one of the most successful hitters on the team, leading the Trojans in home runs and RBIs. However despite his recent success, he can’t overstate the sheer difficulty of hitting the ball, much less hitting it exactly where he wants to at exactly the right moment.

The beats of P-Lo’s “Put Me on Somethin,” a Bay Area classic, fill the baseball diamond as Gabrielson moves toward home plate. The crowd roars, hoping to see magic. Among them, friends, classmates, and even his parents who have moved down to Southern California for the season to watch their son. Holding his bat – an attuned width and weight after years of finding the perfect match – he walks up to the plate, setting his feet in those same two spots beneath him that feel just right.

He performs his personalized at-bat routine: adjust helmet, tuck silver chain into jersey, trace right pointer finger from forehead, to chest, to left shoulder, to right. Now, he’s ready to try to do what he has tried to do since his first day of T-ball at just five years old: hit the ball.

Strike one, strike two, and three go by in a matter of minutes. As quickly as he was up, he’s back in the dugout. His parents hang their heads in the stands and share in a collective sigh, but the odds told them that this was likely to happen. They know that every game, on average, he will fail to get a hit three out of four times – and that’s on a good day.

Baseball players fail. A lot. They arguably fail more often than players of any other major sport. To be considered great, a player might only fail around 70% of the time, according to the Baseball Reference Hall of Fame. In a sport like basketball, shooting only 30% from the field would likely result in getting cut. There is no other sport where this breadth of failure is considered a success. So why is baseball so hard?

Physically, at the professional level, hitting a fastball pitch is not only technically the hardest skill to pull off in sports, but it is also nearly impossible.

The margin of error is faster than the blink of an eye. Faster than the flap of a hummingbird’s wing. It’s no wonder baseball players experience failure like they do.

Imagine a strong, grown man, elevated on a mound of hard dirt, throwing a small, leather-wrapped ball at speeds exceeding 100 miles per hour toward a batter trying to hit it with a long, thin wooden bat. It can seem like this exchange was created to make batters fail. Yet there are 10,400 college players and 750 professionals who spend most of their young lives confronting this sort of failure every day. It takes a special kind of person to not be broken by this constant face of failure.

We all experience failure in life, but rarely exhibit the mental strength to keep at those things which constantly cause us to fail. In baseball, players do this every day. Perhaps their resilience can teach us lessons about mental fitness and our power to learn from failure.

While Gabrielson may be leading the team in RBI’s and home runs now, his road to USC was anything but seamless, and certainly nothing like he expected.

Despite playing well in high school, Gabrielson was not recruited by the type of schools he always dreamt of playing at, including USC. “Unfortunately I didn’t have the opportunities that I wanted out of high school, so I decided to go to junior college,” Gabrielson said. He stayed close to home in the San Francisco Bay Area and played for San Mateo City College.

Watching his friends leave town and go off to college and his teammates play at Division I programs, Gabrielson could see that he had fallen off of his expected path.

“It was tough at first because I felt kind of stuck. I knew my level could definitely be played at Division I right out of high school, and I saw some of my teammates go D1 who I knew I was just as good as, if not better than,” Gabrielson said.

Eventually though, he recognized the opportunity he had at the community college level to get the attention of Division I program coaches and dove into playing at San Mateo City College. After his freshman season at junior college, Gabrielson had done just that: impress enough Division I coaches to land himself some scholarship offers.

But quickly, he faced another obstacle. He tore his ACL during his sophomore season. He had to notify the coaches who had offered him scholarships of his injury and as a result, his scholarships were pulled.

From a sports psychology perspective, this idea of mental fitness goes by another name. “I think of mental fitness really as mental flexibility. It’s this ability to adjust to ever-changing demands and uncertainty with a sense of groundedness and openness,” Dr. Emily Clark, Senior Psychological Services Provider for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, said.

This acceptance and change-based approach to becoming a more effective player is difficult to learn and even more difficult to put into practice, especially in a sports context, Dr. Clark explains. “What makes sports unique is that athletes are constantly pushed to the edge of their skill set. Confidence doesn’t just show up when we’re on the edge of our skill set, in the biggest games and at the biggest moments. That’s what makes an athlete’s experience of confidence and anxiety so unique, is they are constantly asked to perform at their best in the hardest moments.”

In a sport as large and popular as baseball, obstacles such as taking the community college route and dealing with injuries are not uncommon. Legendary Yankees catcher Jorge Posada’s illustrious career in New York was delayed by a reroute to junior college as well.

Jorge Posada played 17 seasons for the New York Yankees

Posada was drafted by the Yankees out of high school in Puerto Rico in the 33rd round of the MLB draft, but did not want to settle for an unattractive contract and decided to rather play at the junior college level in Alabama instead. He took this as an opportunity to work on his game and on himself in the meantime, working on his English and getting faster and stronger.

He set specific goals for his time at junior college in Alabama – and kept on track thanks to his professional baseball scout father – like becoming a switch hitter and improving his 90 meter sprint time. It wasn’t until the Yankees third attempt at drafting him that he was satisfied with his contract and finally made his way to the Big Leagues.

In Dr. Clark’s experience, the most common difficulties that make a baseball player’s life as “tough” as Posada describes are a lack of confidence and an unhealthy influx of anxiety. In order to train athletes to push past these difficulties and accomplish their goals, much like Gabrielson and Posada did, Clark teaches a number of specific techniques, linking the mental and the physical.

Everyone experiences moments of high pressure in which they can’t seem to perform as well as when they practiced under low pressure. In baseball, this happens to hitters in almost every game. They wonder why they hit the ball so cleanly in batting practice but fail to make contact when it really matters in the bottom of the ninth inning. According to Dr. Clark, there is a psychological explanation.

“The Psycho-Physiological Principle says for every emotion we have a corresponding physiological response. And conversely, for every physiological sensation, we have a corresponding thought or emotion,” she said. This link may help to explain why the physical challenges of baseball and the mental challenges play off one another to make the game not only a physically difficult one, but a mentally challenging one as well.

In a high-pressure, bases loaded scenario, a hitter’s anxiety will spike and inhibitions will heighten, causing their palms to sweat, heart to race, vision to blur, and mind to wander. As a result, a hitter will usually find it more difficult to hit the ball well when their mind is not on their side, Clark explained.

As Posada continued to move up in his career from high school to college to the Major Leagues, he felt the pressure of this link between his mind and body intensify.

Team sports can bring unique mental challenges of their own, as players might find it hard to strike a balance between competing with their teammates for personal success and working with one another for a team win, Clark explained. When Gabrielson had to watch his high school teammates go off to play at their Division I dream schools while he remained at home for junior college, he grappled with this challenge of weighing his own personal successes and failures with that of his teammates.

Another similarity between Gabrielson’s and Posada’s experiences of psychological challenges in baseball has been the role of statistics. Both hitters pointed out the massive role that the focus on statistics has played in contributing to the narrative of failure surrounding the sport.

“It’s easy to fall into that trap of wanting to chase the numbers. Everybody wants to have a high batting average. Everybody wants to hit a lot of home runs. But when you focus on the statistics, that’s how you can really let yourself fall into a hole,” Gabrielson said.

USC Head Baseball Coach Andy Stankiewicz

To help his players avoid this “hole,” USC coach Andy Stankiewicz tells his team, “don’t chase the numbers, chase the quality.”

Gabrielson recalls one at-bat looking up from home plate at the massive scoreboard at UCLA’s home field and feeling immediately overwhelmed. “It’s literally right in front of your face when you’re hitting and it’s got all of your numbers on it. If it’s not going well and you see all of those numbers right in front of your face, you’re probably going to fall into the trap of chasing the numbers,” he said.

Posada recalled that the numbers on the scoreboard brought nothing but negativity to his game as well. “You still look up on the scoreboard and see your average and there is a lot of negativity up there, you can’t focus on that. The best thing that helps a baseball player is if you focus more on what the team needs than on what you as a player needs and all of your game numbers, Posada said.

For fans however, these statistics improve engagement and keep the otherwise often monotonous game interesting. Baseball superfan Matt Sorensen even says that the focus on stats makes up for the fact that constant failure at bat can make the game feel boring.

“When you’re watching a game and any guy is up at bat, you can pretty much assume that most of the time, nothing exciting is going to happen," Sorensen said. “But when you’re tracking stats and keeping up with big milestones for players, it makes even those dull at bats a little more exciting to watch.”

The statistics element of baseball is certainly one of the main drivers of fan interest and is also certainly not going away anytime soon. As a result, players like Gabrielson and Posada have found their own unique ways to push through the pressure of the numbers and perform at their best as often as they can.

It’s human nature to find ways to make hard things feel a little bit easier. When you are tasked with something as hard as hitting a fastball, players unsurprisingly have their own pregame methods and at bat tricks to warm themselves up and try to make the impossible, possible.

Gabrielson has a few methods of his own.

One, a breathing technique, he picked up from a USC class called Sleep for Peak Performance. Before he goes up to the on deck circle, Gabrielson practices ten to twelve cycles of a four second inhale, a four second hold, and an eight second exhale. “Part of being successful in baseball is staying relaxed and being where your feet are and so I’ve picked up this technique to really help me slow my breathing and relax before I hit,” he explained.

Another technique he uses before every game is called eye yoga. “It sounds funny but it’s actually almost like stretching your eyes. It really expands your peripheral vision, which is obviously a huge part of baseball so you are able to track pitches and swing at the good ones and not at the bad ones,” Gabrielson said.

Another method he uses is visualization. Whether it’s in bed at night, in the shower, or during pregame, Gabrielson finds that imagining himself in big moments and seeing himself have success in those moments helps to calm him down during the real thing. “You realize then when you’re actually in that big moment that your heart rate won’t go up as high and you’re not going to feel those added pressures because you feel like you’ve seen this before,” he said.

Posada also pointed out the importance of preparing for the big moments before they happen. “Bases loaded with two outs in a regular season game is going to help you later on in the playoffs and the playoffs will help you later on in the World Series. Each smaller moment is preparation, from batting practice to preseason to the playoffs all the way to the World Series. You have to use those moments as best you can,” he said.

Personalized pre-game and at-bat rituals have become a big part of the game for players and fans.

Though Gabrielson, Posada, and all players have methods for resilience in the face of failure, some parts of personal resilience may still be innate.

“We all know athletes who are hotheads and guys who will freak out when they don’t do well and at a young age I used to get frustrated easily too. But, as athletes we also learn to flip a switch when we are out there so it seems like sometimes resilience is something I was born with but also sometimes I feel like it’s something I taught myself over the years. Most days I think it’s a mix of both,” he explained.

For Gabrielson, a major part of resilience is accepting failure as it comes. “As you grow more you realize that the failure is going to come. It’s going to happen. You just learn to tell yourself, ‘when it does come, how am I going to be able to bounce back and prove myself next time.'”

Baseball comes with both large-scale and small-scale failures. The failure to get recruited to a Division I program out of college and the failure to connect with a pitch on any given at bat might not seem to share the same level of weight, but are ultimately interconnected in the ability to build a sense of resilience.

Gabrielson sees a link between his need to persevere to even get to play at USC, and his need to persevere two strikes down during a game.

The other side looks pretty bright for the outfielder, as the Trojans currently lead the Pac-12 and Gabrielson continues to prepare for the upcoming MLB draft. “We hope to win the Pac-12 and then go to Omaha and win a National Championship. And obviously the draft is a goal of mine but from all I’ve learned, I know that if I look too far ahead I don’t think I’ll keep having the same success,” he said.

Taking it one game at a time, and even one pitch at a time, is the only way to keep his mind on track in face of failure.

“For now I just want to keep taking it game by game and treat every game like it’s the biggest one I’ve ever played in my life.”