Nate Barnett

Yesterday I was grabbing a Starbucks at a Barnes & Noble in Seattle and picked up the book Mind Gym by Gary Mack.  If you’re looking for an easy to understand and highly applicable book on the mental game of baseball, you got to read this one.

Here is the link on Amazon.

He writes about how he spent time working with Japanese players on the mental side of baseball.  The term Kaizen in Japanese means constant daily learning and improvement.  It is widely used in business circles as well as sports.  It’s the authors observation that Japanese players overall tend to be more focused on the process of improving weaknesses compared to American players who focus on the outcome.

How can you apply this?

Offensively: Setting goals and placing your worth on having good quality at bats each game is much more effective than basing your success on on how many hits you got.  Get good at controlling what you can control, and let the chips fall as they may.