Arts and Athletics: Using All Your Common Senses
I went to see the home opener of a summertime inter-city league game for college players who want to make it to the majors. [Good luck. There are only 720 such jobs but, as has been said, there are 700 positions and someone’s got to fill them. And the smallest paycheck they can give you when you win the job is over half a million a year.]
“Baseball is like church.
Many attend but few understand.”
Wes Westrum
Just the other day, I was told that my grandson is gonna be a catcher. His coach told me.
His uncle was a catcher in high school. His grand-dad was a catcher for the team that won the state Class B slo-pitch championships.
His coach (his mother) was a two-time NFCA regional Division I All-Star catcher who was nationally-ranked in the top ten in three offensive categories; she earned a master’s degree in sports management while she was an assstant coach for a D-I college team while she played for a perennial national amateur championship club, played pro ball for two years and then did color commentary on TV in the third season, and then earned another master’s degree, that one in elementary education.
The Catcher
“His legs are buckled into clumsy shin guards; his face is hidden by the metal grille of a heavy mask…. His chest is covered with a corrugated protective pad, and his big mitt is thrust out as if to fend off destruction…. his field of vision gives him his own special view of the vast ballpark. In a sense, the game belongs to him. He is the catcher.”
Time, August 8th, 1955
“Catching is much like managing. Managers don’t really win games, but they can lose plenty of them. The same way with catching. If you’re doing a quality job, you should be almost anonymous.”
— Bob Boone, Kansas City catcher, in the 1989 season opener issue of AstroSports
“A good catcher is the quarterback, the carburetor, the lead dog, the pulse taker, the traffic cop and sometimes a lot of unprintable things, but no teams gets very far without one.”
– – Miller Huggins,
in The Complete Baseball Handbook by Walter Alston
“Consider the catcher. Bulky, thought-burdened, unclean, he retrieves his cap and mask from the ground (where he flung them, moments ago, in mid-crisis) and moves slowly again to his workplace. He whacks the cap against his leg, producing a puff of dust, and settles it in place, its bill astern, and then, reversing the movement, pulls on the mask and firms it with a soldierly downward tug. Armored, he sinks into his squat, punches his mitt, and becomes wary, balanced, and ominous; his bare right hand rests casually on his thigh while he regards, through the porticullis, the field and deployed fielders, the batter, the base runner, his pitcher, and the state of the world, which he now, for a waiting instant, holds in sway.”
— from “In the Fire”, by Roger Angell
Quotes from Baseball’s Greatest Quotations, ed. by Paul Dickson, HarperPerennial, New York, New York 1991.
“Coaches of tee-ball kids and the like are usually wholechild centered. As the youngsters get older and more skillful, coaches become learner-centered. After a couple of more years, the coaches are sport-centered, teaching strategies as well as more sophisticated techniques….”
Find out more (and read about the trap into which most coaches fall) in this very short series of excerpts from Coaching the Mental Game: Leadership Philosophies and Strategies for Peak Performance in Sports – and Everyday Life, by Harvey A. Dorfman, Taylor Trade Press (Rowman & Littlefield), New York 2003.
Harvey Dorfman, now deceased, lectured at major universities and for corporations on psychology, self-enhancement, management strategies, and leadership training.
To know baseball
is to continue to aspire
to the condition of freedom,
individually and as a people.
A. Bartlett Giamatti, Take Time for Paradise
http://miselu.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/c24-image-2-1000x970_c.jpg
The book “The Well of Creativity”, based on a series of interviews of Julia Cameron, Natalie Goldberg, Keith Jarrett, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi et alia by Michael Toms, arrived yesterday. I tore into it like a kid opening presents at his birthday party.
I have studied or read for years most of these people for years. Cameron’s “The Vein of Gold” arrived a few weeks ago. Jarrett’s music takes up a lot of space on my iTunes files, and links to his YouTube videos on improvsation are tucked away for regular enjoyment.
While Cameron is a source for those with writing block, she is also a source for those interested in writing or composing music.
Echoing what John Temple said about being the dream, Julia says simply “be the music”, and I’ve set up my keyboard synthesizer and begun a file for this kind of stuff:
http://www.freejazzlessons.com
http://miselu.com/?gclid=CJLXvrSs9cUCFQgXHwodjiQAmg
Tab G is the next chapter due out in the e-book series entitled Summon The Magic: How To Use Your Mind to be a better athlete (or anything else you want to be).
My athletic days are over, unless you count the in-pool therapeutic walking, stretching and swimming I’ll be doing just as soon as the summer warmth returns to the pool.
But a review of this sixth chapter (“The Arts and Athletics: Using All Your Common Senses”) will help my musical inquiries as I seek to develop and train the small muscle groups in my upper distal extremities. Will that make me a phalangist?
And this feverishly-paced ditty.
Whatever gets your temperature rising is likely to be aided by 90 pages of excerpts drawn from educators, neuroscientists, performance psychologists, experts in movement disciplines, and two of the people you met earlier in the Je Ne Sais Quoi symposium.
The sections on developing and using kinesthetic imagery, brainwave entrainment, resonance, improvisation, vocal toning, proprioception, mindfulness, perception, sensory experience, rehearsal, concentration, attention, observation, and awareness skills will slowly get you en fuego.
Turn up the heat on your internal burners and get cooking.
And remember: you decide what’s on your menu.
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