by Shawn Green
The space in my swing, slightly off in April and May, worsened in June. Daily, I grew more frustrated as the batted balls stopped finding holes and as I continued to mishit pitches that I used to launch into the bleachers. Still, my swing wasn’t so far off from the previous year, I was one disciplined week away from slowing everything down and recreating the necessary space and separation. However, my obsession with chasing after imaginary numbers wouldn’t allow me to return to a place of presence. I knew what my wise, former teammate Tony Fernandez would have done. He’d have grabbed his ultraheavy 36-inch, 36-ounce bat for about a week’s worth of games and forced himself to hit with separation. I saw him do that even when he was hitting .400! He was never fooled by stats but remained always focused on taking perfect swings. Every time he pulled out those huge logs, we’d laugh and say, “Oh, no, Tony can’t find his legs! He’s bringing out the big bats!” But it worked. By swinging a heavy, long bat, he had to start his stride early. He had to create the proper separation and space so that his entire body could pull that log through the strike zone. He didn’t care that using an oversized bat might cost him a few hits for the week that he used it. He was dedicated to finding the right feel, the right swing, regardless of the numbers. I hadn’t been as wise as Tony. I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my numbers for a few games in order to get it right. I was too connected to stats and the opinions of others. Besides, I still thought I had it all figured out. One day it would just click, right?
Wrong.
By the end of May I had 10 home runs, which put me on pace for 30 for the season. Not bad. The truth was that, as a young player, I’d have been happy to hit 20 or 25 per year. But now my identity was that of a 40-plus homer guy. Besides, players, coaches, fans, and media love home runs. Nike ran a humorous commercial with pitchers Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux working on their swings and saying, “Chicks dig the long ball!” Truthfully, nothing encouraged the overbearing distraction of my ego more than my being a home run hitter. The physical act of hitting a home run feels incredible. Even in batting practice, there’s nothing like the feel of a perfectly timed swing; as the concentration of all of one’s energy and power is transferred into the ball to send it soaring, it’s intoxicating. The body feels so alive. In games, the home run hitter gets to take a slow victory lap amongst thousands of screaming fans. How can that not tug at the ego?
Entering June, my ego insisted I catch up with my home run pace from the previous season, 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. I knew all this, but it didn’t matter. My desire for more home runs became an obsession. I needed to hit 10 homers in June to get back on pace for 40. I approached every game like a junkie searching for his next fix. “Home runs, home runs, home runs …” was all I could think about, even when I wasn’t at the stadium. My swing fell apart. Not only did I manage a measly 2 homers that month, but my batting average dropped 30 points. And even my ability to read pitchers’ tendencies and pick up tips was compromised. After all, those skills had arisen only when my awareness was out of my mind and connected to the pitcher. Now, the little man was running the show again. Once again, I was guessing what pitches were coming next, seeing the pitcher through my mind’s eye rather than seeing the reality of what was unfolding before me.
By July, with my home run total down and my batting average dropping, the coaches and media began to push the panic button. Because I was no longer responding to the pitcher but had returned to merely reacting, every pitch appeared to come at me at one hundred miles per hour. I didn’t have time to respond. Each night at the plate, I rushed through at-bats, hitting tough pitches in counts when I should have been more patient, grounding out to either the first or second basemen. Sure, I hit plenty of balls hard. Some of my teammates told me what bad luck I was having. “Man, you’re making so many hard outs!” I knew the opposite was true. Actually, I’d been getting by on a run of good luck the first two months and now I was back to reality: a flawed swing.
I already understood what some players never figure out; baseball is a perfectly designed game. If a player has great mechanics, with separation and space in his swing, then the balls he hits will find the holes even if he doesn’t hit them as hard as others who have inferior mechanics. There’s a reason why Hall of Famers such as Rod Carew, Tony Gwynn, and Wade Boggs managed to chop so many grounders between the third baseman and shortstop for base hits. They didn’t have to hit the ball harder than others because they hit it better. By the time the All-Star Game (which didn’t include me) rolled around in mid-July, I was swinging to hit my numerical goals rather to simply hit the ball. I was swinging to reach the future rather than the present. In the process, the present was lost, along with any chance of playing up to my potential.
I was a mess!
All of my growth over the previous two seasons had been undermined, as my attention turned from the present moment to an illusory image of who I was supposed to be. I’d lost the ability to find the stillness and meditation even during my tee work, as those sessions had transformed into a daily, desperate search for results.
My obsession with trying to live up to a new image carried over into my relationship with Lindsay. I was preoccupied, stressed, and irritable, and I lost track of her needs and the needs of our relationship. We temporarily split up twice that summer, once in late-May and once at the end of July. At those times, I found myself sitting alone in my new house, just as I used to sit alone in my Toronto apartment during my early career struggles. Sure, I was now in a fancy, five-thousand-square-foot palace in a neighborhood filled with celebrities, instead of huddled inside my old eight-hundred-square-foot apartment, but it felt even worse! The decor was great (my sister Lisa and friend Armida had decorated the house while I was away at spring training), the television was huge, and the pool beautiful. But I never stepped in the pool and I rarely made it down the stairs to watch the big television. I was having trouble getting out of bed, dreading the drive to the ballpark. Huddled in my big house, I could only think about what a mess everything was with Lindsay and with baseball.
The truth is that I resented the huge contract, which was all about my past and future and, along with the hoopla surrounding my move to the Dodgers, had tempted me out of living my life and playing the game in the present moment. Still, the big numbers on the contract weren’t, in themselves, the problem. Nor were the disappointing stats displayed on the scoreboard every at-bat. 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.
As my season spiraled downward, I fell further away from what I truly had come to love best about hitting, which was that I could lose all sense of myself in its practice. In Toronto, it hadn’t mattered if I was hitting off the tee, playing the BP home run game, or hitting in an actual game; I loved to swing the bat because my ego was left behind. Now, swinging the bat had become a joyless activity because I had gotten lost in my ego’s needs.
Of course, it’s not uncommon to make the mistake of comparing where we are in our lives to where we should be. The truth is that there is no such thing as where we should be; we are where we are, period. Nonetheless, our culture provides limitless illusory images of what our lives shoul
d be. We are objectified and trained from an early age to drive toward the future to achieve and acquire more. We’re told that’s where the happiness lies. This only distances us from happiness. Consider the workaholic, who tells himself he’ll be satisfied with the next promotion, conquest, or raise. He dreams about acquiring a bigger house, fancier car, golf membership, trophy wife.
However, should he reach these goals, he will not be satisfied because new ones immediately arise. His life will feel empty because he continues to believe that only the next acquisition or achievement can fulfill him, but it never does. Ironically, if that same hard-driving man ever discovered how to live in the moment, rather than in the past and the future, his work would likely produce even better results than his obsessive drive ever did.
Of course, when you’re that man it’s hard to understand.
For the 2000 season, I was that man.
I’d fallen into the trap of wanting only to reach the next goal, to become all that others expected me to be. Then, when it was obvious I wasn’t having that kind of season, I avoided reality by focusing on the past, regretting every decision that had brought me to this unhappiness. (The ego lives only in the past and future, never in the present.) I’d sit in my huge home and think, “I wish I weren’t making all this money. I should have never left Toronto and taken on all of this pressure.” 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 …”
With the Jays, I’d arrived at a place within myself where I could play the games, then leave them behind to continue experiencing whatever came next in my life, the new present. Sure, a tough loss or a key error might eat at me for a while, but most of the games only lasted three hours and I was done with them. In Los Angeles, a game could last twenty-four hours, as I’d think about past mistakes and future opportunities all night long and well into the next day. I was like a nervous stock investor who is miserable when the market is down and remains uneasy even when the market is up. My obsessive need to hit home runs brought impatience into my life. I didn’t enjoy time away from the park, because I was anxious to get back in the batter’s box to hit balls over the fence so that I could finally rest easy. When I actually stepped up to the plate, I’d be overanxious, always in a hurry to get those missing home runs. The more impatient I got, the more focused on the future, the worse the results. I was in a rush at the plate, I was impatient in my relationship with Lindsay, I rushed into my decision to buy a big house, and I was rushed with fans who were excited to meet me. On that last day of the season coming home from San Diego, I’d even been driving like a maniac up the I-5 freeway, rushing to get home to leave the season behind!
• • •
Maybe it was a good thing for me that heavy traffic forced me to stop for a while and be still. After the long crawl through the checkpoint near Camp Pendleton, the traffic gradually thinned and the freeway began moving again. As I pressed on the accelerator, I wondered, “Where do I go from here?” Forty, fifty, sixty miles per hour … it felt good to get up to speed. After a moment, I realized that what I actually needed to do with my life was just the opposite: to go from moving faster to finding stillness again.
PRESENCE
The 2000 season was over, but I wasn’t in for any long hiatus from baseball after that final, disappointing game against the Padres. I’d accepted an invitation in the middle of the year to participate in a United States versus Japan All-Star series to be played in November in the land of the rising sun. I looked forward to getting away from Los Angeles with Lindsay, hoping to solidify what had become an on-again, off-again relationship the previous summer. Also, I looked forward to experiencing the Japanese style of professional baseball and their devoted fans, who’d followed American baseball for years, and whose interest in our game became almost obsessive after Hideo Nomo led a contingent of MLB All-Star caliber Japanese players to the United States in the nineties. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t worry about being on top of my game for a mere exhibition series, but I couldn’t help feeling that I had something to prove (the little man kept whispering to me that I’d never have been chosen for the USA squad back in May if they’d known how disappointing the last months of my 2000 season would be).
So, in mid-October, to prepare for the series, I threw my bat, batting gloves, tee, and a bag of balls into the trunk of my car and headed to the local batting cages, which were owned by my parents, Ira and Judy (together, they ran the hitting school, with my outgoing mother working the front desk and my father giving lessons to kids). I had keys to the place and liked to sneak in before opening hours, hoping the quiet would help me to rediscover the meditative aspects of my practice. Even with the pressure of performance behind me, I still couldn’t get it right. My swing still felt long and cumbersome rather than effortlessly powerful. The meditative, no-mind qualities of the work I’d savored as a Blue Jay remained out of my reach. Even at the tee, with the ball sitting idly, I couldn’t get rid of my jumpy, overanxious stride, the troublesome emblem of the previous summer.
Then one day I got to the cages a little later than planned and the place had already opened.
I was going through the motions of my tee work: Place the ball on the tee, take a breath, swing, take another breath, place another ball on the tee, swing again, and so on. I couldn’t find what I was looking for. My mind spun with ideas on how to make everything right. (The irony being that it was my mind’s obsessive searching for pathways to stillness and presence that kept me from finding any stillness and presence!) After yet another disappointing swing, I stopped in disgust and looked around, hoping to break the negative cycle. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a little boy hitting off one of the token-fed pitching machines. No more than eight years old, he had a fluid swing; He stroked pitch after pitch. On his face was the most peaceful look, the expression of being utterly awake to the present moment. Absorbed in the act of hitting the balls, he only came out of his meditation when the light went off and the machine called for another token. I knew he wasn’t thinking about his swing, about expectations, or about missing pitches.
He wasn’t thinking about anything; he was just hitting.
After using his last token, he returned his borrowed helmet to my mother at the front desk and, after a moment, he turned toward me. Meekly, he made his way in my direction with one of my baseball cards in hand (I suspect my mom gave him one from the stack she kept at the front desk). He held out the card and a Sharpie and politely asked, “Mr. Green, would you please sign my card? I’m a huge Dodger fan.”
“Of course,” I said, taking the card and the pen. “I saw you hitting over there. I think you’re gonna make it to the big leagues someday with that swing of yours. Can you teach me how to hit like that?”
He chuckled at my compliment, assuming I was joking.
I wasn’t joking. I was hoping to regain the presence that he took for granted. As he walked away with his father, I laughed to myself. There I was, signing my baseball card for a young fan even as I was envying his ability to hit in presence. I brought years of knowledge with me when I came to the cage; he brought only his bat and his innocence, no aims, no worries, no goals.
So, who was the real Zen master?
This reminded me of an old Zen saying, “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.
Goals only came into the picture in 2000, when I felt the need to live up to my new identity. These goals made it impossible for me to “chop wood, carry water” during my tee work. Over the next couple of weeks as I prepared for my trip to Japan, I looked hard for the eight-year-old boy inside me, but he was still nowhere to be found.
The habit of being lost in goals and desires was not easy to break.
The USA team roster included many of the top players in the game, such as Barry Bonds, Randy Johnson, and Gary Sheffield. It came as no surprise that my good friend and hitting partner Carlos Delgado was included in the group as well. Another presence from my past was my first manager in the big leagues, Cito Gaston. Being reunited with Cito felt strange, considering that the last time I’d seen him I was far from his favorite player. Since then, I’d accomplished all he either said or implied I’d never do: steal bases, win a Gold Glove, hit well against lefties, and hit 40-plus home runs (to all fields). When I allowed my ego to focus on all that, I couldn’t help feeling proud of having proven him wrong. However, after a few days in Japan those feelings dissipated.
Maybe it was the example of humility that the Japanese players demonstrated by bowing when they touched home plate after a home run.
Maybe it was the wisdom inherent in so many of the customs and values of their beautiful country.
Maybe it was the separation and space from my real life back in the states.
In any case, I began to see my past difficulties with Cito in a different light, and an unexpected sense of gratitude came over me. Those first years in Toronto I’d needed a push to learn the nuances of hitting. It took a trip halfway around the world for me to realize that obstacles often bring the opportunity for growth and change. Without them, we have no reason to veer from the status quo. So, I approached Cito on the field prior to a game (having avoided him at the outset). At first it was just small talk, but eventually I brought up our contentious years together.
