“The myth has to be dispelled that you are mad to go to a psychologist. You have to get the best out of your mind to get the best out of your body.” – David James, former English Premier League goalkeeper
As he walked into a Toronto waterfront hotel in October 2018, John Lannan was pumped. He was a grad student attending his first big conference. It offered a unique opportunity to learn, mingle with professionals and boost his job prospects as he embarked on a new career.
If you’re a baseball fan, John Lannan’s name might ring a bell. From 2008 through 2011, he pitched to a 4.00 ERA in the Washington Nationals rotation. Twice the tall left-hander started on Opening Day. In 2012, he was the man assigned to fill in after the Nationals’ controversial shutdown of Stephen Strasburg.
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But on that warm autumn day in 2018, a year after he retired as a player, Lannan was a student in the crowd of 1,100 listening to the keynote speaker at the Association for Applied Sport Psychology conference in Toronto.
The speaker was Mark Shapiro, president of the Toronto Blue Jays. His message struck a chord.
“I was blown away by the way Mark talked about his past with the Indians and what he’s creating with the Blue Jays,” Lannan said in a phone interview. “It just felt like an organization that I wanted to be part of. Little did I know that I would actually be part of it.”
I did not attend the conference, but I watched the hour-long keynote session online. Having covered the Blue Jays since Shapiro arrived late in 2015, I have rarely heard him speak publicly in such plain and passionate terms about what he’s trying to do to build a winner – not only in terms of drafting and developing players, but in fostering what he calls a “values-based organization” with the player at the centre.
Shapiro’s presentation was informal, in an interview format. Angus Mugford, the sports psychologist who is the Jays’ vice-president of high performance, sat across from him on the stage and asked open-ended questions. Mostly, Mugford just listened. Shapiro does go on. But that’s what he was there for.
Early on, he cast his objective in the form of a question – a long question.
“What if we build an entire organization that puts the player at the centre, that tries to be truly empathetic and compassionate to that player, truly culturally sensitive to that player, truly aware of that player’s needs – that gets past the rhetoric of saying ‘he needs to focus’ and thinks more acutely about, first and most importantly … how do we connect to that player?”
Shapiro acknowledged that those words might sound like an ode to naked altruism.
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“It is altruistic with me,” he said. “But I want to frickin’ win too.
“But that’s the beauty of everything, is that the altruism (and) the values intersect with the competitive nature. … We just have to figure out a way to get the players to understand that we’re here to help them.”
Out in the audience, Shapiro’s theme hit home to a former pitcher looking to get back into baseball in a new role.
“That really resonated with me,” Lannan recalled.
He was there because he was training to become a mental performance coach, blending his playing experience with his nascent skills in sports psychology.
Shapiro talked a lot about sports psychology too. The Blue Jays, he said, are heavily invested in making mental-performance practice as important as batting practice.
But when the new boss arrived in 2015 after 24 years in Cleveland, he discovered that he had a selling job to do when it came to organizational culture.
He described the experience as a “cold plunge.”
And that, he said, was not a bad thing.
These days, Blue Jays staffers constantly tout their player-centric approach. And while the work is ongoing, the practice of mental-performance skills has gained a strong foothold in the club’s player-development philosophy.
“Sports psychology or mental training has been viewed as a weakness, and I think that’s a pretty silly way to look at it.” – MLB pitcher Jake Arrieta
Over the past 25 years or so, sports psychology has often been linked to athletes experiencing mental health problems. As the new century dawned, stories began to appear about athletes seeking help for anxiety disorders. Zack Greinke, Joey Votto, Rick Ankiel and Dontrelle Willis were among the baseball players needing time away to deal with anxiety-related issues.
But in recent years, sports psychology has taken a different turn. It is now widely regarded as an essential element in player development, not just an emergency response.
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The nomenclature accentuates the positive. It’s still sports psychology, but the prevailing label is “mental performance.” Put simply, strong mental skills make a better ballplayer.
“I think many people think of sports psychology and still think of someone sitting down in a room or on a couch and saying, ‘Let’s fix your problem,’” general manager Ross Atkins said in a phone interview. “That’s just not how we view it. We view it as education and building a resource, a foundation for people to rely on across our entire organization.”
When Atkins mentions education, he’s talking about mental performance as a course in a curriculum – helping players learn how to defeat everyday stressors common in high-level competition. As many a rookie has discovered, those stressors intensify when a player reaches the big leagues.
The goal of mental-skills coaching: to help bridge the gap between a player’s performance and his potential.
The Blue Jays have a six-man mental-performance team headed by Ben Freakley, a former performance psychology coach for the elite U.S. Army Rangers regiment based in Georgia. Lannan is the newest member of Freakley’s team.
By now, Lannan expected to be working with Triple-A and Advanced-A players in Buffalo and Dunedin. The novel coronavirus pandemic has upended those plans, as it has everything else.
But work has not stopped. Atkins outlined a series of mental-performance initiatives the Jays are using to support players during this crisis.
“We’re sending out daily blasts to players and staff, (urging them) to think about not only continuing to develop their ability to perform but also thinking about coping and problem-solving as it relates to social distancing,” he said.
Among the mental performance team’s initiatives:
- a weekly mental performance video sent to all players and staff;
- a separate video with a slightly different focus for rehabbing players;
- life skills sessions via video conferencing.
“Resilience is trainable!” Thanks @MusSarkar for your presentation to @BlueJays yesterday on developing “challenge mindsets” during uncertain times. Loved the reminder…”you can’t pour from an empty cup!” pic.twitter.com/P9ZxhugQ6f
— Ben Freakley (@BCfreakley) April 2, 2020
Meanwhile, the Jays’ mental performance coaches talk to players by phone every day.
On a recent Leaders in Sport podcast, Shapiro said the mental health of players and staff is the club’s top priority during the current crisis. The wide variety of living arrangements and workout resources for major- and minor-league players make it important to support them with individualized strategies, he said.
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“I don’t think anyone, whether it’s staff or a uniformed player, can make any progress or focus on what it means to return (to normal) unless they first develop a systematic approach to, ‘How do you stay mentally healthy in what is a totally unfamiliar circumstance in which you have very little control?”
The mental performance team has been crucial in helping players deal with that question, Atkins said. And for Lannan, it has been a baptism of fire in a new job.
“Adjusting to this time has been a challenge,” he said. “But those in the Blue Jays organization have been so supportive of one another. We may be apart from each other, but I believe that through this experience we’ll be closer than ever.”
“Mental skills needed for maximum performance can be acquired in the same manner as physical skills. Both kinds of skills should be worked on at the same time.” – from “The Mental Game of Baseball,” by Harvey Dorfman and Karl Kuehl, 1989
John Lannan’s dad gave him “The Mental Game of Baseball” and another Harvey Dorfman book, “The Mental ABCs of Pitching,” early in his career, sparking an interest in sports psychology.
“I read his books,” Lannan said. “I never met Harvey but I used his work when I was playing.”
Dorfman rose to prominence as a sports psychologist in the 1980s. Karl Kuehl, a renowned scout with a special interest in mental performance, hired Dorfman to work for the Oakland A’s in 1984, before Dorfman moved on to work with the Florida Marlins, Tampa Bay Devil Rays and uber-agent Scott Boras.
They were pioneers well before Lannan’s time, before the Nationals made him an 11th-round pick in 2005, their first draft after leaving the Expos behind in Montreal. He made it to the majors two years later.
By 2017, injuries and ineffectiveness led him to start thinking about going back to school. After a final hurrah with the independent Long Island Ducks that summer, he retired in August and started post-graduate studies in September at John F. Kennedy University in California. He majored in sport psychology.
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“I really wanted to get into a field where I can serve,” he said. “I know baseball. I’ve played, and I felt like a way to get back into the game and help others was to get my master’s degree in sports psychology.”
It was a non-traditional approach for a former player seeking to return to the game he loves. But the more courses he took, the more he knew he’d made the right decision. If only he’d known then what he was learning now, he thought.
A course called The Psychology of Injury took him back to a knee problem he’d battled for several years. The pain forced him to alter his lower-body mechanics, which in turn tamped down his fastball velocity. Finally, in August 2013, he underwent major knee surgery. He appeared in only five big-league games after that.
“The courses I was taking, whether it be the Psychology of Injury or Performance Enhancement Skills, it made me think, ‘Man, I wish I’d known more about this when I was playing,’” he said. “The Psychology of Injury especially – when I had surgery, I knew a lot about the physical toll it took on me, but I really didn’t understand the mental toll that an injury can take.
“Once I was going into all these deep dives into sports psychology, it just brought to mind a lot of situations throughout my career, where it started to make sense why I might have felt the way I felt and what I could have probably done about it if I’d known more about the subject.”
His JFK University program is applied rather than strictly academic and therefore required an applied project rather than a master’s thesis. His project was titled Creating a high performing sport organization: a values-based strategy.
His inspiration?
“Hearing Mark and Angus talk at the AASP conference in 2018,” Lannan said. “As I began to research the topic, the more passionate I became about values-driving behaviour, and finding ways to let our values guide our actions on a daily basis.”
“I believe that anything you want to get better at, you should be able to train.” – John Baker, mental skills co-ordinator, Chicago Cubs, speaking on IvyEnvy.com podcast, July 2019
About that “cold plunge” Shapiro mentioned …
After 24 years in Cleveland, where he took over as club president in 2010, he says he had built universal buy-in for an organizational structure that put players at the centre and made sports psychology an essential component of player development.
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Shapiro had worked with Kuehl and Dorfman, among others, and especially with Dr. Charles Maher, Cleveland’s senior advisor on sports performance and psychology since 1995. Maher helped him tune in to the need for specific plans to help players learn “how to focus better, how to separate their self-esteem from their performance on the field, how to think about fear, worry and doubt differently, how to keep their mind in the moment,” Shapiro told the conference audience.
All those skills seemed intrinsic to elite players. With practice, Maher told him, elite players could improve and other players could learn those skills and get better too.
On arriving in Toronto late in 2015, Shapiro said, he found he needed to sell the concept to the Blue Jays’ senior executives.
“All of a sudden, I’m dropped in and have to be respectful of the path other people had taken,” he said, likening the experience to “a cold plunge.”
Shapiro, general manager Ross Atkins, and other senior executives worked through exercises that led to a values-based mission statement. It was long-winded, Shapiro said. When he asked his new GM what he thought of the mission statement, Atkins replied: “Can’t we just say: Get better every day?”
Shapiro said yes. Get better every day became the slogan for the new regime.
After Shapiro finished his conference presentation, Lannan waited in line to talk to Mugford. Lannan was wrapping up his studies and was looking for work. Mugford connected him with Freakley, the Blue Jays’ head of mental performance.
“I really look for mentors and people to bounce ideas off of, and Ben and I kept in touch,” Lannan said. “That’s how it started.”
Lannan landed an internship with the Cincinnati Reds last season. The Blue Jays hired him in January.
“Mental will is a muscle that needs exercise, just like muscles of the body.” – Lynn Jennings, long-distance runner
Mental performance proficiency is no substitute for talent, of course. A team still needs to draft, develop, trade and sign good players. But the Blue Jays, and most other clubs, believe good players can get better with tailor-made routines that focus on mental skills as well as traditional baseball skills. Doing that well will ultimately make healthier people of their players and give the Blue Jays a competitive edge, they believe.
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In an ideal world, Shapiro told the conference, he envisions a development culture where it’s second nature for every coach to treat baseball skills and mental performance skills with equal importance. For example, coaches and players alike should regard sleep habits, meditation, and breathing exercises on an equal par with pitching and swing mechanics, he said.
“I think there are a lot of enlightened uniformed personnel who understand the value of it, but we haven’t gotten to a model yet … where there is complete and total integration and a sole focus on just how do we help players truly achieve their potential, mentally, physically, and fundamentally.”
As Lannan juxtaposes his playing career with his new job, he can certainly relate to that goal of total integration. He has experienced what many current players are going through. For his own sake, he might wish he’d known back then what he knows now, but he’s focusing on helping Blue Jays players reach their potential by keeping their individuality front of mind.
“I understand that my journey is different than those of the players I work with,” he said. “Yes, my experience is valuable, but I always make sure to value the player’s journey more.”
He could not have imagined their journeys converging in a pandemic. But Lannan and his new teammates are proving their mettle in unprecedented circumstances, Atkins said.
“Their backgrounds, their experiences, their education, and ultimately their ability to problem-solve have been powerful for us through this crisis,” he said.
(Top Photo: Patrick McDermott / Getty Images)
(Mark Shapiro photo: Lucas Oleniuk / Toronto Star via Getty Images)
(Ross Atkins photo: Nick Turchiaro / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)