“Edgar Martinez is, hands down, the best hitter that I’ve ever seen.” --Randy Johnson, major league baseball Hall of Fame pitcher.
“The toughest guy I faced, I think, with all due respect to all the players in the league, was Edgar Martinez.”--Pedro Martinez, another major league Hall of Fame pitcher.
“Martinez would have a Ph.D. in hitting, if there was such a thing,” --Alex Rodriguez, retired major league baseball player and ESPN announcer.
In an 18-year career, Edgar Martinez, a newly inducted Hall of Fame major league baseball player, had these numbers: a .312 batting average and a .418 on-base percentage. His batting stance was unusual, with his bat horizontal to the ground, but it worked well.
However, Martinez once made four errors in a game against the Baltimore Orioles in 1990. Playing third base for the Mariners, he was at a critical point in his career. He seemed to have an opportunity to finally have a chance to stick with the Mariners for good that year.
Martinez was successful by learning how to harness the power of his mind. That was crucial to his success in baseball. Before that game in 1990, Martinez had that kind of basic, generic confidence most players have. But after that game, his confidence tanked. The errors plagued him and began to mess with his mind. He began to see himself making an error before the ball was hit to him. That would be the first thought that came into his head. It affected his fielding, and his hitting. You can’t play baseball that way — it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Fortunately, Martinez went to a bookstore and found a pamphlet in the self-help section that dealt with the mind. He no longer remembers the name of the book, or the author. Yet this little book had a profound effect on his career. It changed the way he approached baseball, changed his preparation, and ultimately, elevated his career.
Martinez learned how to replace a negative image with a positive one. With specific mental exercises, such as repeating the desired result over and over again, he eventually eliminated the negative outcome images in his mind.
All these exercises helped, incrementally, to bring his confidence back slowly. Before he went to bed, and when he got up in the morning, in his mind, he would see himself getting hits. He took that book with him on road trips, and he studied it on the airplane or in the hotel room, until he had it down.
The exercises helped him immensely, particularly on days he struggled. It helped get him out of slumps sooner. It helped him handle the stress and pressure of big moments in games. Very quickly, it became a part of his routine. From that point on in his career, Martinez worked on his mind just as much as he worked on his hitting.
He became a student of the mind. Martinez got interested in reading and searching for more. When he found topics he thought were helpful, he’d store them away. Eventually, he didn’t need the pamphlet anymore. But he kept studying the subject, kept searching for any books he could find that dealt with mental preparation.
He had many talks with Gary Mack, author of “Mind Gym” and the Mariners’ sports psychology consultant. When the internet came along, Martinez stepped up his search for topics like goal-setting, self-talk, resiliency, awareness, affirmations and visualizations.
Eventually, he noticed that when he failed, he didn’t feel the same level of frustration and doubt as when he struggled during that earlier period. It was a different feeling. He felt confident he was going to get out of it. That in and of itself gave him confidence. Even if he struggled, he said, “I’m going to get out of it. I know how to come out of it.”
“It’s amazing how powerful the mind is. I’ve always believed if players practiced this kind of mental training, it would be extremely beneficial. I’ve seen some quotes about it from Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, two of the best basketball players in history. Kobe is mostly in tune with mindfulness, which is a way of focusing on how to use your senses to stay in the present. So there are some players, great players, who are aware of the importance. But there are still so many players who are not maximizing their mental potential.”
Looking back, Martinez realized now that he actually started using visualization when he was 10 or 11 years old back in Puerto Rico. He would go in the backyard after watching Roberto Clemente play in the World Series in 1971. He would get a broomstick and just hit rocks. He imagined that he was in a stadium full of people, and he was coming up in a big situation, and he would get the winning hit — a double or a home run.
All this visualization he was doing for years as a kid, had many benefits. For one, it developed his hand-eye coordination, so when he started playing Little League, he already had that ability. It made it easier for him to adapt to the game very quickly. But the other thing it did, it developed in his mind that he saw himself doing well. When he was hitting rocks, he was always successful. Unconsciously, it built his confidence. He was seeing himself as one day being a successful major-league ballplayer.
He grew to feel very comfortable in pressure situations. Rather than imagining and obsessing about what could go wrong, Martinez simply focused on what he wanted to do in that situation. That is something really hard to master. The mind has a tendency to go back and forth. For example, if there's a man on third base and it’s a big run, it was very easy for him to say, “I don’t want to hit a ground ball to third base.” If you do that, you are concentrating on the negative. And more often than not, that’s what happens — hit a grounder to third, and the run doesn’t score. If you eliminate those thoughts, and concentrate only on, “I’m going to hit this ball up the middle,” and focus on that, you have a higher percentage chance of achieving that goal. The key in that situation is to not focus on what you don’t want to do, but on what you want to do. The more you master that, the more consistent you’re going to be.
All that mental preparation came together in the biggest at-bat of his career, in Game 5 of the American League Division Series against the New York Yankees in 1995.
The Mariners were down 5–4 in the 11th inning, with runners on first and third, and Jack McDowell on the mound for the Yankees. If the Mariners lost, their season would be over. In his previous at-bat in the ninth inning, when a hit could have won the game, Martinez struck out on a split-fingered fastball against McDowell.
After he struck out he came to the dugout, knowing that he would likely be up again in a big situation. He prepared himself for that moment. As a designated hitter, he had plenty of time to do that, because he wouldn’t have to go out on the field to play defense. He went through a series of mental visualization exercises, and stayed very positive.
Martinez knew McDowell was going to try to get him out with the split-fingered pitch again. He had struck Martinez out with that pitch in the 9th. He wasn’t throwing hard, like he used to in his prime. His fastball wasn’t that fast anymore. The splitter was his go-to pitch.
When Martinez came up in the 11th, he felt calm. He took a fastball for a strike, but he didn’t care. He knew he was going to get a splitter. He knew it. That’s what those mental exercises did — eliminated the doubt. Once he saw the fastball on the first pitch, he knew McDowell was going to throw the split. It gave him that confidence.
That was his mental process. He did the visualization, and he saw himself hitting the ball hard. He envisioned the shape and texture of the pitch. What he actually wanted to think at that moment was hitting the ball solidly. It wasn’t “hit the ball hard.” That’s different. When you say, “hit the ball hard,” you swing harder. You overswing. But when you say, “hit the ball solid,” you actually quiet everything down in your mind so you can make solid contact. That’s what he was trying to keep in his mind: just hit the ball solid somewhere. He was able to not overswing. He tried to make it simple.
And, of course, he got the pitch he was looking for, just as he envisioned. He hit a double into the left-field corner that scored both runs. The Mariners won the game and won the series. It’s the at-bat that defined his career, but in a weird way, he felt like he had already experienced it. Because in my mind, he had.
“When I came up in the 11th, the crowd at the Kingdome was going crazy. It was bedlam, but I felt calm. I believe my mental preparation, dating back to that little pamphlet I picked up at the bookstore, dating back even farther to hitting rocks in the backyard when I was 10 or 11 and pretending I was Roberto Clemente in the World Series, had led me directly to that moment. It’s a very powerful feeling to be clear headed and positive in the tensest situations. As an athlete, we practice mechanics, we practice training our bodies, all these things that require a lot of discipline. But the mental side is hugely important, too. There are tools and exercises we can use to train the mind, and they all came together for me in the 11th inning that day. I honestly believe that the epiphany I had, that I needed to train my mind, was a major part of my success. Because the game is confidence. We as players have the talent. That’s why we made it to the big leagues. But how we use those skills, it’s all in the head. When you have the image in your mind that you see yourself succeeding, the game becomes easy, like you’re a kid playing in the backyard. When you see yourself not performing and making mistakes and striking out, it becomes the toughest game in the world to play. It’s how you switch from those negative images to the positive ones that makes all the difference in the world. That takes work and practice. But it’s what makes great players great.”