"I’m way more proud of the things I’ve been able to accomplish mentally this off-season than what I’ve done physically.”
--Nick Swisher, New York Yankees, who spent the off-season working out physically with other professional athletes, and mentally, with a sports psychologist.
Swisher was concerned about a slow start that morphed into a terrible slump last season. He did not hit a home run until the end of April, and as June approached his batting average was barely above .200.
“You want to do so well, and in this game, I think, you get caught up in the numbers,” said Swisher, who finished the season with a .260 average, 23 homers and 85 runs batted in. “When I got out of the gate slow, it just ate me up. I wanted to pop out of the gate like a sprinter, and when it didn’t happen I started getting frustrated.
“Those are things I worked on. How do you deal with failure? How do you set your expectations to where you feel they’re obtainable and not a billion miles away? Because that’s where I’ve always kind of kept my goals. I do a lot of things now that are a lot more non-outcome-related — you know, the process of getting to a point.”
Excerpts from the nytimes.com (March 18, 2012).
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