Blog #7: Don't Look In the Stands Part 1

      It is the biggest start of my career thus far. I got the call to be the opening game starter in a one- game elimination playoff duel against L.A. Mission. Up until this point, I had obtained an advisor and scouts were telling me that I was going to be drafted between the 10^th and 15^th rounds. I pretty much had decided that I would sign if I received enough money to fall back on if I never made it. During the middle of the season, I began to completely blow off my studies because I was convinced that I wasn’t going back to school the following year.  So as I am pulling out of the parking lot of my apartment complex to go to the game, I get in an accident with the roommate of a girl I was seeing at the time. I was slowly backing out with a large van blocking my view, and this girl comes racing down and I didn’t see her. There was minimal damage to my car but I was completely rattled. She was flipping out and blaming the whole thing on me when in fact she was obviously speeding in a parking lot. This was the last thing I needed before the biggest game of my career. I later found out from a cop after witnessing the same accident that each person is responsible for his or her own damage. I told her that we would deal with it later and I got the hell out of there.  

       I was extremely nervous and had an abnormal amount of stress. Before the game started, I took a look into the stands (which I normally never did) to find almost every Major League organization represented to see our shortstop, the opponent’s star pitcher and centerfielder Eddie Baeza, and myself. There must have been almost 30 scouts there as Baeza was seeded to go in the top 2 rounds out of high school before he had Tommy John surgery. To make a long story short, we lost the game 8-2 and I didn’t make it out of the fourth inning. I ended up going 3.2 innings allowing 6 runs on 6 hits and 4 walks. My dreadful performance led my team to a critical loss ending any hopes of winning a state championship and only getting drafted in the 29^th round as a draft and follow. I received a few calls the first day of the draft asking if I would sign for $30,000, but that wasn’t enough to take me away from school as a freshman. The Texas Rangers ended up having exclusive rights to sign me for the following year and had up until a few weeks before the draft to make a deal. Most might think that I still had a very successful freshman season, but it quickly became a very disappointing one as my expectations became excessively elevated throughout the season. A little over 2 years before this time, I didn’t even think that a post high school career was possible. Now, I was disappointed that I got drafted in the 29^th round, a dream in which nearly every young ball player has growing up.

      Expectations are very powerful. They can control the way you interact and feel about nearly every situation. This especially holds true in the sport of baseball. My expectations in a period of two years went from not even expecting to play collegiate ball, to not expecting to start, let alone play as a freshman, playing only 2 games of fall ball, all the way to expecting to get drafted in the top 15 rounds. As scouts started chomping at the bit, all I heard was 10^th to 15^th round. Even my advisor fed me this crap. It got so built up in my head that it became the main focus for my season. Did I care if we won or lost…of course. But at the end of the day, it was all about my stats and getting the right amount of money. I wasn’t completely focused about getting better each day at practice (PROCESS ORIENTED). I was more worried about what round I was getting drafted in and how low my ERA was or how many wins I had (RESULTS ORIENTED). You will start to see that this is going to be one of the central themes of this blog and one of the big difference makers in having more consistent success. As a coach or player, your ultimate goal should be learning how to completely focus on the process of the game and getting better each and every day, rather than worrying so much about the end result. If the process is performed correctly, the results will come. I even remember being upset when I didn’t get the win one game where our reliever gave up the lead, but we still managed to come back and win. Because I did not get the win, it ruined what should have been a great day of baseball. Fast- forward two years to Fullerton… at the end of the day, the only thing that mattered was whether we won or lost. Even if I pitched poorly, but we still won, all that mattered is that we were one game closer to winning a National Championship. You will shortly see how my attitude transformed over a 1½ year period at Fullerton, from the selfish player I was at Cuesta, to that of being simply a competitive beast and only caring about winning.