Slumps are like a soft bed, easy to get into and hard to get out of.
—JOHNNY BENCH
A full mind is an empty bat.
—BRANCH RICKEY
Several years ago the Cubs selected Rick Wilkins in the first round of the draft. The young catcher was labeled a can’t-miss prospect. To use a sports cliché, his future was all ahead of him, which is where the future should be. While playing for Peoria in the Class A Midwest League, Wilkins began struggling at the plate. Forget hitting a baseball. “I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with an oar,” the youngster said, voicing his growing frustration after a loss.
The next day I went to Peoria, Illinois, at the Cubs’ request, to work with the farm club. That afternoon I gave an inspired talk to the Chiefs team about the mental aspects of performance. The players and coaches really got into it.
That night Wilkins looked like a different player. The kid belted a first-inning home run. In the third inning he doubled. Later, he added a sacrifice fly. “What a difference a day makes,” Wilkins said, beaming after the game. “I just saw the ball well and let the bat go.” Next morning, the headline in the local newspaper read something like “Cubs Shrink Helps Phenom Out of Slump.”
I felt gratified and proud until I spoke with Wilkins the next day. He told me he had missed my talk because of a dental appointment.
Sports is a roller-coaster. It’s a series of performance peaks and valleys, ups and downs, twists and turns. If an athlete’s best day is a “zone” experience then the worst day is one in which he or she is muddled in a slump—a natural cycle in sports. While we associate the word slump with baseball, athletes in all sports experience times when they feel as if they can’t do anything right.
The University of Tennessee football team once beat Alabama 24-0. It was the first time an Alabama team coached by Bear Bryant had failed to score in 115 games. The Crimson Tide attempted fifty-one passes, but the Volunteers picked off eight of them. In the huddle, an Alabama wide receiver who hadn’t lost his sense of humor suggested to his quarterback that he try throwing one to a Tennessee linebacker, “and I’ll see if I can intercept it.”
Golfer Ian Baker-Finch won the 1991 British Open and then went into an extended slump. His game just left him without a note of good-bye. At times, other athletes have felt as helpless and perplexed as the major league rookie who stopped hitting and went to a veteran teammate for advice. The old pro suggested that the youngster switch to a twenty-nine-ounce bat.
“Will it help?” the kid asked hopefully.
“No,” the veteran said. “But it’ll be lighter carrying back to the dugout.” The old joke is that there are many theories on conquering slumps. Unfortunately not one of them works.
Some athletes deal with slumps by denying their existence. After he broke a 0-for-20 drought, Dave Henderson claimed, “I wasn’t in a slump. I just wasn’t getting any hits.” Yogi Berra didn’t blame himself when he wasn’t hitting. He blamed his bat. If his woes continued, he changed lumber. “I know it sounds silly,” Berra said, “but it keeps me from getting down in the dumps. … It keeps my confidence up.”
Billy Williams, a hitting instructor with the Cubs, likened a slump to a traveling illness. “A slump starts in your head and winds up in your stomach. You know that eventually it will happen, and you begin to worry about it. Then you know you’re in one. And it makes you sick.”
Sometimes slumps can be traced to physical problems or mechanical glitches. But oftentimes the problem is all in the mind. Athletes who begin to struggle start overanalyzing. They hear that monkey Richie Zisk talked about, chattering in their head. They start thinking too much. In a Peanuts cartoon, Snoopy commends Woodstock on making a perfect landing on the roof of his doghouse. Then he begins quizzing the tiny yellow bird about aerodynamics. “Now when you take off again, do you push with your feet? Or do you flap your wings first? Do you flap your wings and sort of lean into it, or do you …” In the next panel, Woodstock has disappeared, having dropped straight to the ground with a “Klunk!” after takeoff. Snoopy put the lesson learned into words: “If you think about it, you can’t do it.”
A former ballplayer didn’t mean to sound funny when he said of a slump he was in, “I’ve been doing my best not to think about it, but by trying so hard not to think about it, I can’t stop thinking about it.”
Overthinking often leads to over-trying. “When you’re in a slump you start going up to the plate trying to hit a home run,” major league outfielder Cory Snyder said. “You start pressing instead of just letting things happen. You let all the negatives come floating through your mind.”
Not long ago an NBA player came to me during a low point in his career. Nagging injuries had affected his long-range shooting. His field-goal percentage dropped dramatically. Media scrutiny added to the pressure and frustration he felt. His answer for combating his slump had been to work longer and harder in practice. I urged him to relax, rest his body, and get his mind off the game for a couple of days. Get away from basketball. Take his wife and children on a picnic. In an attempt to regain his form, he was digging himself deeper into a hole and needed to put the shovel down.
Years ago, when I was a director at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Phoenix, I met Karl Kuehl, who was then head of player development with the Oakland A’s. Kuehl had spent a lifetime in the game, as a player, scout, coach, and manager. He shared with me his views about the mental game of baseball, which became the title for a book he coauthored.
Kuehl once asked a major leaguer what he would be concentrating on in the game that night. The player was hitting an anemic .226 at the time.
“I want to get a couple of hits and drive in a couple of runs,” the player said.
Kuehl reminded him that a hitter doesn’t have control over whether he gets hits or drives in runs. Karl is right. Instead of being outcome oriented, a hitter should concentrate on what he can control. Focus on having quality at-bats. What is a quality at-bat? It means relaxing, seeing the ball well, and being patient. The difference between a .250 hitter and a .300 hitter in the major leagues is only one hit a week.
The key to overcoming a slump is finding a difference that will make a difference. Usually this means doing less rather than more.
Sports is filled with ups and downs. Remember the first rule of holes is to stop digging. Go back to basics and keep things simple.