Three years ago I wrote a very popular post called The game is your toughest opponent. It’s worth reading if you haven’t already because it’s a good message to players about what they should be focussing on during games.
But I have to confess that I think I was wrong. The game is not your toughest opponent. You are.
Every game we play there are three opponents we deal with. The other team, the game itself, and ourselves. Many players mistakenly think that the other team is their toughest opponent. In reality, the other team is third on the list behind the game and yourself.
If it was put into a visual it would look like this …
The foundation for any success is your own mindset. If you don’t think you can win then any team and especially the game itself will grind you up and spit you out. The other team may show you mercy but the game will certainly not. You have to want it. You have to be willing to sacrifice, scrape, claw, and fight for every inch in this game and if you are not willing to have the killer instinct to do so than you might as well give up and just go hide in a soccer game. Playing the game and the other team is hard enough. Fighting yourself on top of that makes it pretty much impossible for you to be successful.
Quite often over the course of a long season your body will tell you to give up. A strong mindset will shrug that off and take you to levels you didn’t think were possible.
This offseason, lift those weights, run those sprints, and improve your baseball skills but more importantly, develop your mindset and train it to keep that strong as well.
