the next pitch

My husband, an avid baseball fan, recently took me to a White Sox-Orioles matchup and introduced me to the finer points of baseball strategy. Since then, I’ve been reading more about the game and recently came across an old interview with Greg Maddux. For those even less familiar with baseball than I am, Maddux spent a large segment of his career as a starting pitcher for the Chicago Cubs. Now the Cubs –- to put it rather delicately –- are possibly the most pennant-challenged team in the history of the sport. But Maddux, now retired, is largely regarded as one of the greatest masters of control and precision ever to grace the mound.

It sure didn’t start out that way. In his first full season with the Cubs, he compiled a pretty disappointing 6-14 record. But then in 1988 Maddux rebounded, winning 18 games. He went on to win his first of four Cy Young Awards in 1992, before leaving the (still-yearning-for-a-break) Cubs and signing with the Atlanta Braves.

So anyway, back to this interview I was reading. In it, Maddux was asked how he’d been able to improve his game so dramatically during his time with the Cubs. And you know what he said? He said that whenever he stepped up to the mound, he’d trained himself to focus exclusively on the next pitch. He blocked out the scoreboard. He blocked out the runners on base. He blocked out the weather conditions. He blocked out the legendary curse of the goat; the cheering, heckling, face-painted fans; his aches and pains and troubles … and just poured all he had into that very next pitch. Because that, according to Maddux, was the only part of the game he could really hope to control.

So did he reverse the team’s exasperating record? No. Did he keep Harry Caray even remotely on key during the seventh-inning stretch? No. Did he lift the relentless and weirdly-prophetic goat curse? Certainly not to date. But after adopting this approach, Maddux did manage to log one heck of a lot more good games than bad.

An interesting lesson on life. Because when you really think about it, how many of us have the on-demand mental discipline to block out everything but our next pitch? How many of us can stop worrying about tomorrow and the next day and the one after that, so we can give the very best of ourselves to the moment we've been given? We obsess over how the inning will end, how the game will end, how the season will end. When in reality, we were never in control of the series to begin with.

The next pitch. More than once I have encountered a related observation, attributed to another very well-respected source: “Do not worry about tomorrow, for each day has enough troubles of its own.” Another favorite of my husband’s. And, come to think of it, part of another, greater, and more thought-provoking read.