The Pecan Park Eagle

World Series Photo from Rangers Park by Lance Carter.

Even at my age, there are days in which I still wake up with more ambition than others. I guess this is one of those times because today I woke up wanting to writing about stirs momentum, for better or worse, in baseball. It has occurred to me that I have been working with “Old Man Mo” for years as a mental health professional and that I long ago stumbled upon this universal truth: People don’t always change for the better, but when they do, they generate old different flow of human energy in a positive directions when it happens. Writer/thinker/guru types from Norman Vincent Peale and Napoleon Hill in the 1930s to Tony Roberts in the 1990s have been feasting upon that phenomenon through their lectures and books for at least the past eighty years. Countless others have portrayed that momentum-building character in movies and literature forever too. Rember Robin WIlliams as the inspirational teacher in that movies of the late 1980z, “The Dead Poets Society?”

So what is this thing we call the Mojo? And what makes its presence so transparent on baseball’s biggest stage at the World Series? For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to describe it this way, even though that neurologically, psychologically, and spiritually, there’s so much else going on whenever it is present in positive form on the field. In baseball, momentum represents the presence of either confidence or doubt in one’s ability to perform well in a given situation that drives what happens next, even to the point of generating a similar reaction in other members of the same team.

In Saturday’s Game Three, Albert Pujols had the ability to ride the Mojo of confidence to a record night at the plate, infecting several other hitters  on  the Cardinal team with the same self-belief, if only for the night, that they too were bound for the Hall of Fame someday. Sunday’s Game Four found the Rangers riding the Mojo-pitching-confidence of their young Mr. Holland to a 4-0 shutout of the Cardinals. The new Cardinal doubt apparently carried over into Game Five on Monday. The Cards had their ace, Mr. Carpenter, going for them, but doubt kept them from scoring runs from numerous opportunities. Cardinal doubt just seemed to feed Ranger confidence in the home team idea that they could come back and win the game late.

Now it’s back to St. Louis, where the teeter-totter balance of confidence and doubt can easily swing either way agin. Both of these teams have the ability to win this World Series. WHich one will have the confidence to do so when the umpire cries “Play Ball” tonight?

In a way, baseball is tailor-made for shifts in momentum because there’s so much time to observe and analyze what is going on between plays. Just look at the exercise that launched from Craig’s abortive steal of second in the seventh inning of Game Five. – All it could do was add to the doubt card that already had fallen upon the Cardinals that night. And it did. Look at the negative momentum that unfolded simply from the first bonehead steal attempt by Craig in the seventh. If you favored St. Louis, you could almost see the Rangers’ winning hit coming before it ever  happened.

In a way, last place clubs are those who seldom if ever recover from doubt. Pennant winners are clubs whose confidence in their abilities seldom wanes.

Superstitions are not so crazy either when we view momentum in this light. You see, baseball players intuitively understand what “Mr. Mojo” is all about. If a guy doesn’t want to change his underwear after throwing a two-hit complete game shutout, it’s probably just because he’s trying to hold in place anything that seemed to precede and kick into motion the self-confidence that guided him through his remarkable achievement.

We can’t get very far without ability in baseball, but we can’t even harvest the fruit of our ability if we have no confidence in ourselves. That’s where Old Man Mo needs to show up on the positive side, more often than not.

Have a great day, everybody. Believe it so. And make it so.

Tags: momentum, World Series 2011

This entry was posted on October 26, 2011 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.