MPM Podcast

PODCAST: Augie Garrido – 5x NCAA National Champion – All-Time NCAA Wins Leader – Life Is Yours to Win

by Brian Cain, MPM

Coach Auggie Garrido is the NCAA’s all-time wins leader in any sport, with 1975 games won!

Augie won 5 NCAA National Championships over 4 decades (1979, 1984, 1995, 2002, 2005) and is the #1 best-selling author of Life Is Yours to Win.

In this podcast, recorded on April 28, 2013, in the middle of a challenging season, Coach Garrido shares his insight into the mental game and his development as a coach.

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Cain: This is Brian Cain here with Coach Augie Garrido; baseball coach at the University of Texas and winner of the 1979, ‘84, ‘95 College Baseball National Championships at the Cal-State Fullerton University; in 2002 and ‘05 at the University of Texas. Coach Garrido, I appreciate you taking the time to sit down and talk a little bit with us today about the mental game and just coaching success. He is the all-time leader in NCAA wins at over 1,800 wins.

Coach Garrido, the first question for you is what’s at the foundation of your success? You’ve been able to have extreme longevity, five national champions spanning four decades. What would you say is at the foundation of your success and your philosophy?

Garrido: Well I think the foundation of my success is obviously based on other people. You’re in the mental game side of it and good at it. We both know Dr. Ravizza. He and I started with the mental game when he was at Cal-State Fullerton. I noticed that the players would have problems managing specifically the difficulties connected to hitting, how hitting affected their overall play, how difficult hitting really is, and the reward and penalty system that goes along.

On a personal level with hitting the baseball and being a productive offensive player brought to light a need for the mental game to be able to deal with it more accurately, realistically, truthfully, to create better communications not only between a person in your world and a receiver of the information but also the player-to-player relationship in recognizing what he could control and what he could not control and staying focused on the things that he could control.

Players who are tied up in hitting will stay with that for the moment to a level at which it drives the whole self esteem bus. When you ask a player “how did you do today,” “well I didn’t advance,” they don’t talk about advancing a run from second with a productive out to the right side or up the middle or “I scored the runner from third with a fly ball to the outfield, I took a walk in a critical situation rather than over-swinging and striking myself out.” I took what you know as a quality at bat and quality at bat has a lot more legs to success than just getting the hit. In fact you can’t even get a hit. You can hit the ball but it’s not necessarily a hit. You can hit four line drives and go 0-4 and feel lousy, and you hit one ball off the handle and it breaks the bat and goes over the first baseman’s head and you feel great.

I think it’s because of our capitalistic society. That is not a criticism. It’s because we respect winning and in the batter’s case winning is directly connected on a personal level (and to the people around the player) with success, winning. You won the at-bat but it’s much more than that, as you know. There are a lot more efficient ways and accurate ways for a player to measure his own success and develop a reward system around that success. It’s about confidence versus fear.

Cain: You talk about the rewarding the success is part of the process of a quality at-bat. Is there anything else you emphasize to get the player to focus more directly on things that they have control over instead of the outcomes that they never have control over?

Garrido: I think trying to be realistic about – I talk a lot about the inner child and how you find that 10 or 12 year old. When a player is starting to struggle and mentally becomes stressed out about his performance it’s almost always about offense. It appears to be on defense too but it’s not. As you know. The player is in the batter’s box when he’s playing short, when he’s not hitting well, and therein lies the core decisions, the bobbled balls, the errant throws. So it’s still connected subconsciously and consciously most of the time to a big inning.

I talked about the inner child when a player starts to get down on themselves and say “where is that 10 year old that loved to play baseball?” You have a 12:00 game on Saturday morning, you are sitting on the edge of your bed in your uniform at 5:00 AM, putting on that glove, can’t wait to get there. Where is that player? That player is still there. So there are really a couple of personalities that you can choose from when you go to the ball park. You can either take that little boy who loves to play and can’t wait to get there and is excited about the opportunities despite what has gone on in the past, or you can take the person that is frustrated with their performances and relating to the approval of others rather than being focused on the process and connected to being the ball player.

I think the hardest thing for a young player to recognize is what a ball player really is. I don’t need to describe him. You can describe him better. But it’s about a process. You have to stay within the framework of that process to be consistent, to be productive.

A mutual friend of ours, Dr. Ravizza, likes to tell the story about Longoria when he strikes off 4-5 times in a game – in an extra inning game in the 12th inning or so (excuse my inaccuracy but it’s something like that) and he hits the homerun to win the game. That is believing in yourself and then having the tools, recognizing the symbols that are meaningful to you, your go-to stuff that gets you focused and gets you to continue to stay within the process.

Being aware of what are you working on in batting practice. You are working on when you feel good, when things are slowed down, what the ball looks like. That isn’t what young players work on – how far does the ball go, how many times do I hit it hard, am I going to have a good day. That isn’t what professional players work on. They work on recognizing the feeling when they’re right, what they see. They are aware of when they are pulling off the ball or not sticking to their plan or rushing a little bit and that awareness. Now they work on the tools that they have to bring themselves back within the framework of slowing things down, getting back to that good feeling, and trusting that feeling to be productive once the game starts rather than playing the game at 2:00 in the afternoon when it’s a 5:00 game.

I’m not trying to be right I’m just trying to answer your questions from my point of view the best I can.

Cain: You talk about the inner child and I’ve heard the story of – I can’t remember what year it was. Maybe 2002 or 2005 at Omaha. You guys got Game One in the World Series play kind of tight. You don’t play Texas Baseball. I heard you brought a team to go watch a couple innings at a Little League game in Omaha. Is that true?

Garrido: Actually it was Fullerton. The story is true but it was with Fullerton and Ruble and all those guys. We were out on one of these Omaha batting practice fields. In those days (I don’t remember what year it was) we were just awful. Nobody was really working on anything that mattered. We probably should have sent them a check for the batting cage we tore down. At least in the net, that is where most of the balls went.

Next to it were some Little League fields and there was a game going on. So I told them “we are not getting anything done here so I want this half to go root for that side, go over there and pick out the player that plays your position and root for that side, and I want this half to go on this half on the third base side and I want you to root for this half and get into the game.” They really did. They had a lot of fun with it and they reconnected (in my opinion) to something real. That was a wide form of what people in your business call visualization. They were reconnecting with the inner child and they were having fun playing ball.

Did we go right back to batting practice? No. That wasn’t the objective. The objective was to realize that this is a game and games are supposed to be fun, but it is the most difficult game (in relationship to self esteem) ever created. I say that over golf (which is a close second) because you can’t win a game but then again you can’t lose a game. Whoever decided there are going to be eight other people involved with this process really threw a wrench in it.  It’s not only that you give the defense the ball. What is up with that? Now they give you eight guys that you have to depend on to be able to win the game. Who wins a game and who loses the game is so subtle that even an expert like yourself has a hard time truly identifying the nuance that created the momentum shift (because everyone matters) and the pitch that changed the game.

Cain: You never know when that pitch is going to come so you’ve got to try to win them all.

Garrido: That’s right. And you can’t. I shouldn’t say you can’t – you don’t.

Cain: In your book Life Is Yours To Win you talk so beautifully about how baseball kind of mirrors life, could you talk a little bit about in your career just how you’ve seen the game of baseball mirror life so that the coaches that are listening to this may have a better idea of how they can make that connection for their players that they are really learning about life through the game?

Garrido: I think that each coach has to decide that for themselves – where their priorities are. For me we’re going through a crisis of sorts this season and it reconnects me with the challenges.

In my life (this is the only example that is fair for me to use) the biggest changes that have had the most powerful impact and positive impact have come from the most difficult moments that I did not even know if I was going to make it through it or not in a number of those. When you started in the housing projects and you don’t start out with a solid foundation and respect for knowledge, you step in a lot of holes before you figure out how to avoid them. So a lot of mistakes were made before I had to make life changing decisions and choices. Then I had to reinvent myself to be able to do it. I think that the blessings that I had were significantly strong, talented, wise, brilliant people around me.

Once I (on a personal level) actually found my purpose in life – to be a coach in the United States Army while I was there (if you’ve read Life is Yours you know that) – it was just some sort of a miracle because in the housing projects it’s basically about survival. It’s not about who is the smartest. It’s who has the money. So accidentally I was assigned – in the United States Army – to a true information and education office as a clerk. I was only in the Army for six months. They really didn’t know what to do with me. And that is what they did is I started filing the testees to go on for the soldiers.

I started to see the difference between the ones that were educated, the ones with higher IQs, the ones that tested out better and where they went in their placement within the framework and what their opportunities were in life. There is life in the Army but they translate it into something. They actually have to make a choice here. This is about knowledge. That is the way out of the projects. That is the way into a world that I want to be in. That is where that happened and why it happened.

Cain: So how much of your success do you think is a choice and making a decision that you’re going to be successful?

Garrido: I was driven by one basic thought. If you’re the best at anything you do you’ll have a job, get paid for it, and you’ll be happy. Pick out something you’re passionate about. Pick out something you have confidence in yourself in.

Cain: Great advice. Find what you love to do and have confidence.

Garrido: It’s what you have confidence in in my opinion. In this story it’s true. When I was a kid my dad in Dade County worked in the shipyard during the war and at nights he worked in the community building. It was like a YMCA.  At that community building I was in his hip pocket. I was with him all the time.

They had everything. They had ping pong. They had pool. They had contests like football. Everybody played basketball. That was the whole world we lived in. It didn’t get bigger than that little project – the projects. But one of the things they had was yo-yo contest, a high stakes contest, and I won all the yo-yos. I could walk the dog, rock the baby, round the world at both ends, inside out.

When I was making this decision to go to college – and I did it in the Army – when I told my dad “I’d better go to college” he said “no I have a job for you at the shipyard.” Remember, they came out of the Depression. My dad came out of the Depression. He came out of Spain when Franco had taken over. My mom came out of Texas. Two foreign countries. They came out of the Dust Bowl. They came out of the Depression. It was about having a job. It was about having money, being able to survive, being able to provide for your family. That was their intent.

I told them “I’m not going to work for this, once I’m a little older I’ll do whatever it takes, save as long as I need to, and I’m going to be a coach” versus passion for boats. He says “a coach?  You can’t get a job being a coach, that is not a job, that is not work son.” I said to him “you know dad, I saw a guy on our 10-inch Philco black and white TV on the Ed Sullivan Show and he was spinning a yo-yo. He was on national television. He got paid for it. I can too.” I may not. I still think I could have. He gave me the confidence to think that I was the best at whatever I did, I could do it.

I think somewhere in there that is a part of this along the way. Baseball takes no prisoners, gives no gifts, always provides us with opportunity, and always provides us with challenges. It continues to reshape us into who we are on a day-by-day basis, year-by-year basis. It’s never the same. There will be changes made as a result of the difficulties and the challenges that we faced this year. I don’t really embrace them but I recognize them. I think that any coach that is going through any problems should separate himself and who he is from the W’s and the L’s of anybody else.

Whether we win or whether we lose – because of the way baseball is structured and the way the game is played – it never reveals the individuality and the true identity of who we really are as complete people. That is still up to us. It reveals who we are as a coach, in the moment, and then there will be another movement. It’s a series of falls and recoveries that test. No matter what your age is, no matter what your record is you are only as good in these elite environments and Fullerton is that. In any elite job you’re only as good as your production.

I have the same responsibility to win. The past isn’t something you can fall back on to ask other people to understand what you know. This is a great year for you and I to talk about it. In 20 games (two weeks prior to this conversation) they have been decided by two runs or less. We were 10-10. The total number of runs in the 10 losses was 13. You watched a game last night, 1-0. One pitch, maybe a ball, maybe a strike or a ball. When it gets down to that, that creates either fight or flight. Your basic instincts, if you are really connected to the relationships that you are involved with and at this point are widespread, the only ones you really have any kind of – the ones that really matter the most in being in the environment would be the relationship with staff, coaching, and players. To continue to find based on the reality of how those things have happened – well let me ask you a question. You saw the game. I think this is very kind of fun for coaches.

Cain: Absolutely. What was your response to the team after the game yesterday?

Garrido: What direction do you think I would have? Was I angry? Was I – and don’t think that I wouldn’t tell you the truth if I was angry.

Cain: Yeah. My guess would be that you take the approach of – like you’ve been saying – it’s a cool game, it’s a vicious game, it doesn’t always give you what you want, it sometimes gives you what you need, but today is another opportunity of the slight difference between success and failure – which could be miniscule. It may be one pitch. If we keep progressing 1% every day what is the difference between Baylor and Texas? Not big. What is the difference between Oklahoma and Texas? Not big. If you play just a little bit better, everyone plays just 1% better, who is to say we’d get in the Big 12 tournament and make a run? It’s that close. But it’s every pitch that adds up to the result. You never know which pitch it’s going to be so we’ve got to compete as hard as we can and we pitch and come back ready to go tomorrow.

Garrido: I’m not going to try to respond to that. I’m just going to tell you what I said. Were you at the Friday game?

Cain: Yes.

Garrido: Okay good. There is a huge difference – not a small difference, a huge difference – between Friday night and tonight. Friday night we were losers. Tonight we lost a baseball game. We brought the boy to the ballpark tonight who loves to play. We didn’t bring the boy to the ballpark on Friday. We brought the grumpy, disgruntled, non-confident ball player who hopes he gets a hit and hopes he gets an out and hopes they don’t hit the ball to him.

Do you see how much control you have? Do you recognize by comparing how you felt on Friday to how you felt tonight? Now from the game’s point of view we still lost. But we didn’t lose the most important thing – respect for ourselves, respect for our team. We didn’t lose the joy of playing. We didn’t lose the thrill of the game. We got so much out of tonight and we gave away our soul Friday. Just think how powerful we are.

Cain: The difference of Friday, you beat yourself.

Garrido: Well we didn’t show up.

Cain: How many times in baseball do you beat yourself versus really get beat by the other team live?

Garrido: A lot. That is because in my opinion this guy is present, this guy isn’t, this guy is present, this guy isn’t, this guy is present, this guy isn’t, this guy is present. And if the pitcher isn’t present you’re done.

Cain: The championship teams that you have had, how have they been different than other teams that you’ve had?

Garrido: They take on a chemistry. Some people don’t like that word, don’t think it exists. They take on a chemistry where they become invincible. George and Orton and a lot of guys know about that. I don’t know if you believe that or not but I do. I think there is a point at where the team is so connected that it’s almost like a spiritual journey in which the intangibles, the unpredictable, in a positive way occur.

Cain: Do you as a coach create that or is that created by the players?

Garrido: It is created by everyone. It’s created by things we don’t even know about. Sometimes you refer to it when you’re in it – we got in it in 2002 and in 2005, George recaptured it in 2004. That was one of the hardest ones ever because of the way they started but they turned it around. The hardest one – and probably the most significant one ever in college baseball – was Fresno State. That impossible. That is where we are now. That is where we are right now.

Cain: I think when you look at teams like Fresno State it has got to give you hope. I think once you lose hope you are finished.

Garrido: I’m not sure about the word “hope.” I know what it means. Believe. Yeah, I get that part. But I think somehow you get connected to – I watched the last four games from Fresno State because I went to school there so I went to watch this miracle when it took place. They were invincible. They had a right fielder with a broken hand. He hits a three run Home Run. They had this guy do this, they had that guy – nothing mattered when George came from behind. We beat Fullerton three times that year at Texas in 2004. They battled their way in. They’ve got two pitchers, that’s it. They come in, we’re the ‘29 Yankees according to our media.  Fullerton can thank our media for a while with what happened. But George – not taking away from what team accomplished – but they overcame all obstacles.

How do you do that? You don’t talk someone into that. It’s a spirit. It’s you know that. There is no real recipe. You can talk about that but how do you get it? How do you catch it? We know the game is contagious. We know we have a strong connection with each other. Quite frankly (for all the coaches that read this or hear this) I think we have not been able to get connected because we don’t consistently bring the same personality man-for-man to the ballpark. So how can you connect when Joe is “little Joe” one day – his inner child – and “Joseph the old man that doesn’t want to play anymore” the next day? How do you get connected when you don’t know who is standing next to you? It’s just an observation but you have to be connected.

We haven’t been able to make anything stick for long periods of time. We’ve tried different things. But why doesn’t it take with some and why does it take with others? Look at Fullerton this year. They went through last year something similar to what we are going through right now. What has happened right now at Texas? There is an environmental change. How much emphasis do you put on environment? I don’t know. But it’s powerful. We know that. Everything grows according to – evolution takes place as a result of the environment.

Cain: Sure.

Garrido: If you scale that down just a little bit, environment plays a big part. I’m not just talking Home and Away. I’m talking about every day. How big a role does environment play in the performance of the team? It plays a big role in the performance of the team. We – you and I – want to minimize it and get control over it.

They say we can’t control the things around us but we can control our response to it. How do you control your emotions? I tell an 18, 19, 20 year old that and they’ve never heard it in their life before. How do they apply it? How do they trust it? How do we teach it? That is the challenge. Each coach from his own personality has to teach it in his own way. You know the power in that.

Cain: You talk about teaching that response to adversity, teaching that keeping your focus in the moment, the things that you do from a mental conditioning standpoint – just as you go to the weight room to lift or the things that you maybe do through the Fall, through January, February, through the season, to try to create that mental toughness or that mindset of being in the moment, finding your inner child, controlling what you can control and minimizing the distractions and that sort of thing.

Garrido: When I say “we” – the whole coaching staff – we are very aware of the importance of all of that. And yes we pay attention to all of that but I feel each group is different because of age, experience, response. I think that ball players are different than prospects and ball players are different than good athletes. Ball players make instinctive decisions related to the game and their mind works in relationship to the game instinctively.

You know by working with all these different personalities that is true. You can see good athletes be taken out, put them through drills, put them in a game, and their choices aren’t consistent. They don’t run the bases well. The public has no idea how quickly a player has to think in a game that appears to be extremely slow to make a baserunning decision or to make a throwing decision or to make a hitting decision.

I think that, yes, we are aware of all of these things and sometimes we get lost in the fundamentals of you have to be able to play catcher. There is no defense. You have to be able to run the four facets of offense. Hitting is one of them, but it’s not everything. Offense is about run shorts. That is the thing we haven’t been able to bring to this team. Baylor is hitting .265 going into this series. We are hitting .264. They’ve outscored us by 50-something runs.

Cain: Timing.

Garrido: Quality outs. It’s quality at-bats. We keep a scorebook that solves the problem. We’ve got a scorebook. All it is is quality it bats. In that scorebook it gives the seven different things what we call “quality at-bats.” Productive outs? Hitting a line drive that gets caught, taking a walk instead of striking yourself out. Advancing runners. Etc. etc. etc.

Everybody make up their own. I’m not trying to dictate. This is what we say. And now we keep a – I’m not much of a statistics person anyway. I think the game is about opportunity and should be made about opportunity and statistics about the facts. But I have to look at statistics because I have to answer the questions from the media and from people about these things. But I am not a stats person, stat-head. I am about personnel.

You asked several minutes ago “how do you stay in this game.” I’ve been asked that for as long as I have. It’s because I’m fascinated by it. But I’m not in love with it. I’m not passionate about the game. I am passionate about the experiences the players encounter and the role that I have in the relationship. I do embrace the difficulties of this year because it is – when it’s easy – I’m not even sure that you need a coach. When it’s sailing along it sails along.

Right now every day we as coaches – every one of us – are challenged by the way we walk in the room, to the way we say “good morning,” to the look in our eye. Everything is being evaluated from a point of fear because the players fear being rejected.

Cain: Your role as a teacher is to go in every day and manage that. I remember in the ’04 series I was at Fullerton ‘02-3 and Washington U and George and Texas and Fullerton go at it in 2004. I remember ESPN made a deal about you being the mentor of George being the student. I know one of the things that you mentioned there was that it’s about relationships and the roles of teachers involved in these relationships. Can you talk about the roles of relationships from a coaching standpoint and with your staff?

Garrido: Well in my mind it’s very personal to me. I think that is one of the rewards. I had to make a big shift from the ’79 national championship. I saw a picture of myself after that and I had the trophy. I thought the world was going to change because of that National Championship. Now all the things I had hoped for would take place maybe a groundskeeper instead of doing it myself. Something. But the point was there are the players standing next to me. I’m clutching this trophy like it is the symbol of my success.

To me it’s mine. I saw that really is wrong and I knew it wasn’t true. A lot of other things were going on in my life at that point in time too, however that was one of the real impressive things (symbols) that came out of that for me. “You’re wrong about that, it doesn’t belong to you, and maybe that is why other things in your life are going so sideways, you think it does and you think that this is what matters when in fact maybe it’s the people around you that matter the most.” That was a huge realization for me and a wakeup call for me. That is when I shifted. I had many things to straighten out. But that became a time of reckoning and I reinvented myself and shifted from the trophy orientated, ring orientated, win orientated, all of those kinds of things.

Now at the same time it’s mandatory that we win in our job. But that is when I really started seeking out Ken to get whatever information I could to make the changes that I thought needed to be made. It took by ’84 – let’s just go all the way up to that. The second National from ’79 to ’84 I spent a lot of time, a lot of energy with people like yourself (other people that were much smarter than I was about personality development) but I actively sought out information that made sense to me that I could apply it to myself. I wasn’t satisfied that I knew and I didn’t like where I was. I started living life differently.

By ’84 the difference of the championship was the players had the trophy and they had me up on their shoulders and I had a big smile on my face waving to everybody. That was the difference. It makes me cry right now.

Cain: It’s the shift from it being about you to being about them.

Garrido: Yeah.

Cain: And I applaud you for in ’79 being a student who learns about himself and tries to find ways to make himself better – which I think as a head coach when you take that approach of making yourself better that transcends (like we talked about) energy both good and bad, transcends the whole team. If you’re working at it yourself that is going to transcend into your team as well.

Garrido: I think that. And I think about it today as we sit here and talk about it. I think I have a knack. I am often asked (because of my age and how long I have been in it) “when are you going to retire?” You get older when you lose. You get fatter when you lose. You get dumber when you lose. You get uglier when you lose. Everything from a different point of view about you becomes worse in some people’s minds.

I was asked recently “what is the difference.” Yesterday the TV guys asked “what is different about today’s athlete, how much have they changed?” I don’t know. I really don’t look at it that way. But here is what I do know. The player still desperately wants the adults involved to help them help themselves be successful. Therein lies the strength of the relationship. Therein lies the connection. That is what I look for. That is what I care about. That is what motivates me. How can I relate to 32 personalities who have probably 29 different learning patterns? How can I relate to them? How can I get this confidence and keep it going? How can I do it today?

We are going to see the game today (assuming you can be there). This will be a tough one.  Lost two. This is where you throw your hands up. We’re trashed. We trashed ourselves on Friday, came back and put everything into it. How remarkable was Dylan Peterson’s pitching? How would you like to pitch on a team that doesn’t show up? Made four errors, three in the same inning the night before? How about that? I’ve seen a lot of major league pitchers – this is what I told him in front of his team. I’ve seen a lot of major league pitchers not be able to do what he did.

Cain: They cave.

Garrido: Absolutely.

I think because – and I heard that. Does it make me sad? Yeah. Does it make me angry about things? Yeah, it does. I get all those ranges of emotions. I feel good about that because I‘m connected. If I didn’t care it’s over. I’m connected, I’m realistic, and I’m truthful because I feel like the cornerstone to all of these relationships is trust. So if it’s the bad news we present it in a realistic form.

Cain: For the coaches listening to this, if you were to go back to before ’79 and if you could look at how the National Championship changed you – because it sounds like you went from “for me” into “for the players.” I’m speaking about relationships. I see a lot of the coaches never get the chance to know who their number one goal is to win the National Championship – the outcome versus the process and the trust that we are talking about, the relationships, the communication, working on yourself, helping the players help themselves. Is that the process that you now–

Garrido: I do agree that you have to the goal of winning the National Championship because the process is guided by that. One of the harder things about winning a National Championship is you have to know before you even practice the first day how to win it. If you don’t know the process and haven’t been down the road it becomes difficult to have confidence in what you are doing with your team at the right time. But there are miracles in this business; there is the unexpected, which creates a lot of excitement. The unexpected wins championships. That is the thrill. That is the intangible. That is the opportunity. It’s all within the framework of what is unexpected.

College baseball games aren’t won by the expected. They are won by the unexpected. College baseball games aren’t won by perfection. They are won by imperfection. How do you deal with the imperfections? How do you deal with the unexpected, what’s negative, the issue? That is where you win. That is where you win.

Cain: Last question for you, Coach. I appreciate you taking the time. I know you’ve got a game to go prepare for. If you could remove the skullcap of all the coaches that are listening to this and plant one seed of success inside of their head that would germinate and make a difference (from your experience, from your perspective) what would that one seed of success be that you would want to share with the coaches listening to this?

Garrido: Winning in our business is mandatory. But it’s something you can’t control. But you can control the process. Spend as much time or more time integrating the mental game with your physical so when you are taking infield and outfield you put the mental game into process. When you are taking batting practice work with the players to take batting practice and practice the mental game in addition to the physical game. Try to look at a balance between your teaching of the mental game and the physical game. They are far different. Far different. Avoid result orientated thoughts.

Cain: It’s been an honor. I want to thank you for all of the influence that you’ve had on my life (even though this is the first time I’ve got the chance to meet you) having been a product of the system we’ve worked in and through going through two years with Ken. I just want to say thank you for taking the time to talk with us.

Garrido: Well you’re welcome. I think one of the commonalities of baseball coaches is none of us got into it in the beginning over the paycheck. Everybody got into it over passion. The passions were different and the passions may change along the way, but it’s still about being a schoolteacher and having an effect, one student at a time, in the development of a better society. There is always a bigger picture in a baseball game.