Last month, the Aviators won the Pacific Coast League title for the first time since 1988. That wasn't looking so certain until Luke Mann stepped up to the plate in the bottom of the sixth with the team ahead by a narrow one run margin. He hit a home run with two runners on base.
The pace of baseball can be boring to some, but the explosive moments like this three-run homer are made all the better for it. It is the ultimate sport of tension and release. After seeing this at bat, I requested to speak with Luke Mann as soon as I could. Everybody dreams of succeeding in a big moment like this. Baseball is all about that phenomenon, so much so that "stepping up to the plate" is an extraordinarily common idiom to refer to rising to a moment like this even outside of baseball. I talked with Mann to bring to you what it takes to succeed when you get the chance to pay off hard work with a big opportunity:
"It wasn't necessarily me going up there trying to hit a homer or anything at that point. I'm not gonna tell you I was looking for a fast ball up and in at 97 and thinking I was gonna pull it. I know a lot of athletes can fall into the trap of I'm gonna try and do it all here all on my own. I need to get this done, instead of trusting the rest of the team and trusting what you can do. So instead of trying to do too much, or try and overdo anything it was just more of just trying to win the at bat, trying to tire this guy out on the mound and trying to make the at bat for the guy after me a little easier. He just kind of left something over the plate and all I was trying to do was just touch it and it found the right part of the bat and it went, man."
So there's a couple of things going on here. One, is maintaining a consistent approach.
There's this temptation we may have to approach the big moment with even more energy to make sure we do our best, but by doing so we are betraying all the preparation we've done for that big moment. Athletes that can step up like Mann did here make sure to honor that preparation.
The second thing is finding a long view. The approach to an at bat isn't all about that individual chance that you have, but the chances your teammates will have after you. if you can tire a pitcher out by fouling off a bunch of pitches, perhaps you give your teammates a better chance. We might encounter this in our own lives. Maybe at your job a pitch to your boss doesn't go quite right and an idea gets shot down, but that might wear them down for the next one they hear from your co-worker and that idea winds up maybe making things better for everybody around the office. If you can face a potential failure and figure out how to weave it into the narrative of a future success, perhaps you aren't as scared of the moment and perhaps you'll then succeed anyway.
Hitting a baseball is understood to be one of the hardest things to do in sport, if not the hardest. When faced with something that difficult that you only have one chance at, perhaps something useful to try is visualizing success.
"Whether you close your eyes or just kinda think about it. Say you've got a guy on the mound who's a sinker slider combo guy. And you know in your brain through the thousands of reps you've seen of pitchers and however many pitches you've seen in practice and game scenarios throughout your whole life. I've gotta see it out of his hand, it's gotta start here, I know it's going to break back to this position, and that's going to be the one I'm going to hammer."
Other athletes, like gymnasts do this. Pilots do this. Surgeons do this. These are the most practiced and learned people in the world, but they're people just like us. They're not omniscient, they can't see the future. They need to make sure that they are connecting all that preparation they've done to execution in the big moment. By visualizing success, we give ourselves a chance to make that connection from preparation to execution before a high pressure situation where we have to execute.
Although executing on hitting a homer to us looks like a feat accomplished in just a split second, Mann had this to say.
"You can't do it all in one game, you have a full season worth of stats that comes out to whatever your numbers are, and you've got a whole life full of days that comes out to who you are."
That incredible sporting moment that wows us, our friend who just seems so put together and thriving in that photo online. These are moments. Moments built upon the moments before them. One failure doesn't preclude future success and one success doesn't guarantee future success either. A good at bat is all about honoring everything that came before stepping in the box, the lows and the highs.
