Blog #2: Losing Control As A Player

           It is my sophomore year at Cuesta Junior College in San Luis Obispo, Ca. I am starting against our conference rivals at the time, Oxnard. There must have been at least 10 scouts in the stands. I started off the season only throwing 85, 86 and only topping out at 88. The year before I was sitting at 88, 89 and topping out at 91. I learned the hard way during the middle of the season that I was working out too hard and too frequently during the season. A few weeks prior to this huge start against Oxnard, the Oral Roberts head coach was watching me and observed that I looked too tight. I stopped working out for the next few weeks and on this particular day, I felt noticeably a lot looser from my first warm up pitch.  The first batter of the inning  I walked. It was a 3-2 count and I threw a 92 mph fastball on the corner called a ball. I wasn’t as flustered as I usually got after a close call because I knew I was throwing ched. All I needed was a ground ball…which I got 2 pitches later. It was fielded cleanly from what I remember, however the throw from the second baseman was a little high and our shortstop was only 5’6”.  This started to get me going as I was getting screwed left and right, and I hadn’t felt this dominating on the mound since the previous summer.  My body language began to change slowly but surely. The next batter hit a seeing- eye single through the six hole scoring a run. With runners on first and second, the next batter popped up to left. Our left fielder was sitting under it and then at the last second with the brutal sun in his eyes, he flinched and the ball hit him in the eye. There was a 10 minute delay.  My big game that was gonna make or break me for this season was spinning out of control. I felt as if there was nothing else I could do at this point. My fielders didn’t come ready to play and I felt like I could get anybody out. At this point I decided to get the first out myself. I was gunning to strike this next guy out. I got the guy 0- 2 and then ended up losing him to a walk. My season was slipping away. I didn’t even have to look as I knew what was coming. I just held out my palm with my head down. All I remember before the coach grabbed the ball from my hand, was a scruff mark from the pop fly that hit my left fielder in the eye. The previous season I was lights out for the most part and got drafted in the 29^th round by the Rangers. My sophomore year my role as the ace slowly turned into a role out of the bullpen.

        This post obviously deals with learning how to be in control of only the elements in which we have the power of controlling. For example… when I walked the first batter because of the umpire missing a close call. Whether the umpire missed it or not, nothing else mattered except for the end result, which was a base on balls. No one is in control of the umpire. After umpiring since I was 15, I still did not learn that umpires feed off player’s emotions. However, if you have no emotions to show, then they have nothing to feed off, therefore not allowing emotions to come into the equation for close calls. So, if we have no control over what decisions another human being is going to make, then why should we let it get to us. Knowing this going in is the key to being successful in this aspect of the game. If we expect the umpire to be perfect throughout the game, than naturally a person would get upset when a bad call occurs. However, if we expect the umpire to make a few bad calls throughout the game, than we cannot possibly get upset when it happens. Teach your kids that the umpire is human and not perfect and to expect to get screwed each and every game. This especially holds true the younger you are. If you have not yet noticed, the umpires get better as you move up through the various levels of the game. Explain to them that if you expect to get screwed over by the ump, there is no reason to react in a negative fashion to their mistake that you knew before the game even started was going to happen. Sadly, I didn’t fully understand this aspect until I got to Fullerton. I always heard “don’t let the umpires effect you” growing up. But nobody ever went into detail on how to really deal with this big issue. Another key to teaching this is being able to relay to your kids that they are not that crappy that they need every call to go their way. When they bitch about a call, (especially if they are one of your better kids) ask them this: “Are you that bad of a player that you need every call to succeed?” Naturally their response should be no. However, if they say yes or don’t even respond because they get so down on themselves, tell them no, of course not. Boost up their confidence and tell them that they are way too good to let one bad call effect their whole day. Expect it to happen!!!!  Because more likely than not, this scenario will happen your next game and you will now know what to do to not let your best player have a bad day because of one bad call in the first inning. Dealing with this issue properly WILL win you at least one ball game this year, I can almost guarantee it. And if a kid still responds negatively (a problem child), then bench his ass. Send a message to the entire team very early that this behavior will not be tolerated. Negative body language spreads like wildfire and should be the first thing eliminated in the equation for a winning ball club. You might have a few parents on your case, but I can guarantee they will be thankful as will the rest of the parents for producing a positive, confident, winning team. I will devote an entire blog to dealing with this issue of taking complete control of your team next week.  

          Next order of business… how to deal with your fielders that make errors behind you as a pitcher. This again is a similar concept as you need to express to your pitchers to expect your fielders to make errors. If they can accept the fact that it is going to happen, it is easier to deal with it when it actually does happen.  Another thing to add to this is that the fielders feed off their pitcher. The pitcher is in command of the team on defense. They are leading their troops into battle so if the pitcher shows negative body language after a fielder boots a ball, it will make that fielder feel that much worse.  But if he tells the fielder “hey this next one’s coming to you, be ready” or says something positive to that extent, that fielder will feel a lot more confident for the next play. I have witnessed this scenario hundreds of times including experiencing it myself as I too have been the perpetrator. Negative body language after a booted ball or condescending comments like “come on” and “lets go” can snowball from one error to an entire inning of chaos. Your pitchers must understand that the way they react to an error can gravely affect the outcome of the rest of the inning. The pitcher is in control, therefore can make or break your team.  Every player you pitch must learn to be the leader on defense. Teach them to take control and command the defense. And if you find that a kid is incapable of being a leader, then I would think twice about pitching them.

         The last topic of discussion for this blog is how to deal with outside influences, like the other team, fans and especially parents!!!!  Let’s start with parents. After you have taken control of your team, your players understand that you are the only person (including your staff) they listen to during a game. Now, you obviously can’t control what is said between their parents and children off the field, but on the field, you get paid the big bucks to be THE COACH!!! So lets say you have a dad who loves to coach from the sidelines and distracts little Johnny while your trying to give him a sign, because little Johnny looks for approval from his father and will listen to everything yelled out by his dad.... politely during or after the game, go up to him off to the side and tell him that you “can always use some extra help coaching practices (the more dads you have during your practices, the more drills you can run so not to waste precious field time), but if not, then please don’t try to coach little Johnny from the sidelines because you are distracting him while I am coaching. Evidently, if your team isn’t doing so hot then he has a case against you for trying to coach his kid from the sidelines. Naturally every father wants their kid to be the best, so make sure you comfort their concern if their kid isn’t getting any noticeably better. Tell him that their kid is your personal project for the season to ease their mind.  If for some reason you have a real problem, then we can just deal with it on a case- by- case scenario.  Fans are pretty easy to deal with. Listening to fans or listening to the other dugout is a lot different than listening to you father. It is a lot easier to train your players to block out the other team or crazy loud fans than it is to block out your dad. As I said previously, children are always seeking their parent’s approval (for the most part) at an early age.  So I see this all the time when umpiring… a pitcher will come up to me and say “ isn’t the other team not suppose to yell when I’m in my windup?” Or hearing middle infielders laughing at what funny stuff is coming out of the other teams’ mouths. This behavior must be eliminated immediately!! Here is a secret to locking your player into every play!!! During practice, while your players are just sitting in the dugout, line them up and perform the following drill. “6 seconds of focus”.  From the time the pitcher starts his delivery to the time each play is over takes about 6 seconds. That is all the time needed to succeed in this complicated game. If you can train your players to be able to devote their entire focus for six seconds, well then I’d say you have one of the most competitive and focused teams out there. The drill is to have your players practicing devoting all their focus for six seconds of important words that are coming out of your mouth, and then space out. Have them mess around, yell, laugh, whatever. And then lock it back in. 6 more seconds of something important that you are teaching them, and then space out. You can do this drill for 10 minutes and get a lot of reps in. To progress it even further, do 10 to 30 seconds of complete focus, but make sure you build up to 30 seconds, especially with younger players. This drill can be done at the beginning and end of every practice. Make this drill fun, particularly for younger players. They should respond to this very positively, especially if they get to goof around in between the 6 second periods of focus.  Just wait for the amazing results of how locked in your players will be every play. Another piece to this puzzle is “stepping into your circle”. Explain to your players an imaginary circle, which is where they should be playing when the pitcher delivers, and that your prep step is actually stepping into your circle. There is no more “prep step”. Eliminate it!! It is now “ step into your circle”. The magical world of stepping into your circle is amazing. Your players are now stepping into the sacred circle before each pitch in which they only step in when they are ready. IF they are not ready for whatever reason, they alert the pitcher not to pitch yet. When, and only when you step into your circle means that you are ready!!! You are ready for anything coming your way. When you step into that circle you are expecting the ball to be a laser at you every single play. And when the pitch is over, “SPACE OUT”.  They do not get to goof around in between pitches, but they can kick the dirt, chew some seeds, you get the picture.

This concept is also used for pitchers and hitters. Do not step onto the rubber or into the box unless you are ready.  Once they step in, it is their trigger to being ready.  These are very simple drills that will ultimately prepare your players for every single pitch. I will be talking a lot about “One pitch at a time”. This was probably the biggest motto we lived and died by at Cal St. Fullerton.  Playing the game one pitch at a time. I am sure you have heard this term or even use it without really understanding its true meaning. One pitch at a time means that you as a player and as a coach are locked in with complete focus for every single pitch of the entire game. Now this might not seem that difficult but I assure you it is.  Even watching games on the bench, especially playoff games, I would get exhausted just by living every single pitch of the game as if I were somehow involved. This might seem a little extreme, but I learned at Fullerton how to be out there with my teammates, living each play of the game with my fellow players. Physically I would never be out there, but mentally I was a part of each play. When the players on the field were stepping into their circle, I was stepping into my circle. We would play games (especially big games) standing side by side in the dugout, each Titan shoulder to shoulder, battling with our fellow Titans on the field. We always sent out a powerful message to the other team that when things got tough, we battled together as a team. Even if we were down, we were trying to win each pitch, each inning. We were trained not to think about the end result. Be process oriented, not result oriented. Stick with the process of battling with the entire team to win each pitch, not worrying about the end result when starting off the game down by a lot.  I have witnessed some unthinkable comebacks at Fullerton all by just battling our asses off no matter what the scoreboard said. Once you can truly live one pitch at a time, you will then have produced a team of warriors who are ready for the toughest of battles. One last thing… if you as a coach know that your players battled every pitch of every inning and still lose the game, then you can just tip your caps to the other team because there is no shame in losing if your players played balls out. Our coaches would only get pissed after a loss if we as a team did not follow the process. This so- called “process” gets a lot more complicated, but these are some of the key components to playing a “process” oriented game as opposed to a “result oriented game”. I guess your all just gonna have to wait for all the pieces of the puzzle to fit into place…

 

Justin Klipp's First Blog

June 4^th 2007

Game 3 of Regional at San Diego St.

Cal St Fullerton (Unranked) 2-0 in tournament

Fresno St. (Unranked) 1-1 in tournament

Starters:

Cal St Fullerton: Justin Klipp (First Start of the year… 4^th start of Fullerton career)

Fresno St.:  Brandon Burke (Had 13 saves the next year on the National Championship Team as a senior.)

 

Health Status:

Brandon Burke: Fairly Healthy (No known injuries)

Justin Klipp: Stress Fracture in left shin for the past 1½ months

 

 

      My name is Justin Klipp. I was a recruited walk on at Cal St. Fullerton. I am here to share with you my rollercoaster ride of playing D1 college baseball and eventually  my professional career. I arrived at San Diego St. that day the most nervous I had ever been for any reason in my entire life. I was only told that morning that I was starting!!! Before we even warmed up as a team, we sat in the stands watching the Fresno St./ Minnesota game to see whom we would be playing. Fresno St. had a promising young freshman on the mound who topped out at 96. A few batters into the inning, I witnessed one of the most terrifying and devastating incidents for a pitcher. I saw a pitcher’s worst nightmare before the most important start of my career.  On a hanging slider… the guy at the plate smashed LITERALLY A LASER right back off the pitcher’s forehead.  Everyone around me, including myself, just froze in shock at what had just happened. It was as if time had paused for ten seconds and once that ten seconds of shock wore off, it was then that my mind started racing like the Daytona 500. The ball must have flown off his head about 40 feet in the air before it landed. As I was listening to my I pod to pump me up before my game and to keep my mind at ease, my heart instantly fell to the bottom of my stomach. The pitcher was out for about ten minutes before they took him off the field. He ended up being ok suffering just a slight concussion and returned later that evening from the hospital to watch the rest of our game. However, if he had thrown a 95 mph fastball, he most likely would have been in a coma. Up until that very moment I had not one ounce of fear within me. Up until that moment…

 

      Fear… fear is a major component of the game of baseball, even life. It is a natural instinct within us all, however, can be easily controlled with the right tools. I was fortunate enough to learn those tools at Cal St. Fullerton. Without those tools, I would not in a million years have been able to accomplish what I accomplished in my baseball career. I will share with you the secrets that have managed to bring the Titans to College World Series 15 out of the last 31 years. If you think the program is just plain lucky then you are sadly mistaken.  There is a reason Cal St. Fullerton was ranked the 2^nd best college baseball program since 2000 by Baseball America, only behind Oregon St. Over the course of this blog, you will learn the secrets of why I, Justin Klipp, pitched 4 2/3 innings allowing just 1 run, 4 hits and 1 BB striking out 4, against the future National Championship Fresno St Bulldogs in a Regional playoff game… ALL WITH A BROKEN SHIN!!!!!... not to mention witnessing a devastating comebacker just hours before my first start of the year. We won that game 13-2 and after the game, Coach Horton ( 2 time National Coach of the Year) personally apologized to me in front of the team for not letting me finishing the fifth inning to get my first career playoff win. (The reason I got pulled was because at the time it was a close game and I struck out the first 2 batters of the 5^th inning however gave up back to back singles. I was noticeably getting tired and my pitch count had reached 80, which was the highest by 30 pitches I had thrown all year.) We went on to win our Super Regional at home against UCLA in 2 games to make our 15^th appearance at Omaha in 31 years.  I am excited to share with you the secrets that transformed my game and allowed me to perform even with a broken shin.  I am excited to hear the results of you as coaches having great success with what I am about to share with you, as you teach the secrets that guarantee success to your kids. Get ready to hear crazy baseball stories that very few have the privilege to know.  Get ready to coach championship teams!! Here is one last food for thought…

 

      The day of the Nick Adenhart tragedy, I was at a Santa Ana junior college game watching this kid pitch and I happened to stumble upon my teammate and buddy Jon Wilhite. He was there with his buddy Henry Pearson who were there watching their buddy pitch before they were going to the Angels game that night. After the game, they were both passengers in the car of the tragic accident. Henry and two others, including Adenhart, perished in the crash, but fortunately Jon Wilhite survived with an internal decapitation. He is one of 6 people ever to survive his condition. My condolences go out to all the families of the victims of this horrific tragedy. You can donate to the Jon Wilhite Recovery Fund by going to any Wells Fargo Bank using the account 3980643658. What I was getting at before reflecting on this horrendous incident was that while at the Santa Ana game, Jon was telling me about his coaching a youth travel ball team. He told me that he took over a team whose previous season had a losing record of something like 8- 23. Jon was able to bring that team to start off the following season with an 11-2 record. Now, these were the same kids as the previous year…so logically one would think of the possible reasoning behind this sudden 180 degree turnaround. Did the kids work that hard in the offseason and get better physically? Doubtful… Did they all decide to get together and shoot steroids?? Haha… Or did they possibly just learn the correct way of how to play the game that very few have attained the knowledge of learning?  Indeed… My buddy Jon was able to transform his players in just a short time to turn they into a winning team. My god…if it was just that easy!!! But it is… I will be posting one blog a week every Sunday until my story is told (which should take a few years). As you will be teaching these skills to your team, I will respond to your questions and concerns throughout the week. All of these posts will be a captivating story about my career followed by a tutorial on the mental aspects of the game that will enhance your experience as a coach and a father more than you will ever know…