Diamond Vision : Jaeger’s Training Gives Ballplayers a Thinking Man’s Advantage

The centipede was happy, quite

Until a toad in fun

Said, “Pray, which leg goes after which?”

This worked his mind to such a pitch

He lay distracted in a ditch

Considering how to run

-- Zen saying

*

Alan Jaeger, Valley born and bred, fills the heads of baseball prospects with nuggets of wisdom mined from the mystical minds of the Far East.

The centipede walks easily until it begins to think about walking. The same goes for pitching and batting, clients of the Jaeger Baseball Academy are told.

Stop thinking, start reacting.

Release tension with deep breathing.

Meditate and visualize a game plan.

Get focused, stay focused.

These ideas are central to a book Jaeger wrote on mental training. And along with flexibility exercises and long-toss throwing, the same ideas are imparted to a clientele that is something of a Who’s Who of area minor league players.

“I use techniques Alan taught me every day to prepare for games,” said Mike Lieberthal, the Phillies’ triple-A catcher. “It’s made a big difference.”

Who else is buying Jaeger’s brand of brain food? Colorado Rockies reliever Steve Reed and minor leaguers Jim Vatcher, David Lamb, Eric Hiljus, Matt Whisenant, John Snyder, Nate Dishington, Gary Mathews, Bryan Corey, Kirk Hagge, Brendan Cowsill and Mitch Root, to name a handful of his 30 clients. Several college and high school teams also train with Jaeger.

They swear by the unique blend of Eastern philosophy and boyish enthusiasm offered by this 31-year-old former Cal State Northridge pitching failure who has been in business for only a year.

Jaeger and his assistant, former Cal Lutheran pitcher Louis Birdt, spread the word from a small office on Topanga Canyon Blvd.

“Most Western athletes take the necessary steps to prepare physically,” Jaeger said, “but few have learned to harness the greatest resource of all: their mind.”

Jaeger learned the hard way. As a Northridge junior in 1986, he went from being the team’s No. 1 relief pitcher to a basket case in the time it takes a home run to leave the park. Every time he pitched, he felt distorted, fuzzy, and once even thought he would fall off the mound.

“I was given a perfect scenario and I didn’t know what to do with it,” he said. “I was not able to deal with anxiety at all.”

Jaeger enjoyed great pitching success at Pierce College and played third base at Granada Hills High, but he finished the ’86 season buried in the Northridge bullpen. There was nothing wrong with his arm, but he was washed up and he knew it, not even bothering to try out his senior year.

Seeking a major change, he changed majors--from economics to psychology. It began as a means of conquering his own demons, but Jaeger quickly became intrigued with the Eastern philosophy espoused by one of his professors.

“I saw right away how the principles could apply to sports,” he said.

While working as pitching coach at Mission College in 1991, Jaeger studied Eastern philosophy on bus rides. One day, he came home and began writing his book, “Getting Focused, Staying Focused.”

Excited about his ideas, he called three former teammates who were in the minor leagues--Reed, Vatcher and Steve Wapnick--and convinced them he could help their careers. “I want to use you as Guinea pigs,” Jaeger told them. “Give me four weeks.”

All three readily went along.

“Alan called me out of the blue and what he said made a lot of sense,” Vatcher said. “Anywhere you can get a mental edge, you’ve got to give it a chance.”

Injuries ended Wapnick’s career prematurely, but Reed and Vatcher both became major leaguers.

“I felt like a whole world could be opened up,” Jaeger said. “Like I was sitting on an untapped secret.”

In the spring of 1992 Jaeger found an entire team of Guinea pigs when he took a couple of Mission players to Cal Lutheran on a recruiting trip. Jaeger and Kingsmen Coach Rich Hill, both young, confident and energetic, immediately hit it off.

Jaeger accompanied Cal Lutheran during a 43-6 season that ended in the final game of the Division III World Series.

“Guys were giving me outrageous feedback,” he said. “My ideas were substantiated right before my eyes.”

Hill, now the coach at the University of San Francisco, was impressed with how receptive his players were to Jaeger. “Al was a huge part of our success,” he said.

After the ’92 season, Jaeger accompanied Hill to the Cape Cod League, where top amateur players from around the nation play during the summer. Hill coached the Chatham A’s. Jaeger had players lying on their backs with their eyes closed an hour before batting practice, talking them through visualization exercises.

“It kind of amazed me,” Hill said. “Some guys I never thought would buy into it were out there.”

Even today, Hill’s players perform the “Al Drill” 10 minutes before game time. Bats in hand, they visualize taking pitches, swinging at pitches at various parts of the strike zone and thinking through every ball-strike count.

And, like all Jaeger disciples, they breath deeply. In fact, Jaeger’s first lesson consists of nothing more than what mom yelled from the stands when the pressure was on in Little League: “Take a deep breath, honey.”

Next he introduces classic meditation training. Once the mind is calm, quiet and relaxed, “erasing the blackboard,” in Jaeger’s words, deep breathing can be combined with baseball imagery. Jaeger calls it mental muscle memory.

“It didn’t click right away with me,” said Vatcher, an outfielder with the triple-A Las Vegas Stars. “Everything Al said made sense but you have to do it on your own. I’ve seen the benefits of what deep breathing can do and now it helps me get into the right frame of mind.”

All summer long, Jaeger is on the phone with his far-flung clients, many of whom count him as a personal friend.

“He’s like a second father, I can unload what’s on my chest,” said John Snyder, a double-A pitcher in the Angels’ organization who attended Westlake High. “If I’m down in the dumps, he picks me up. He has been a savior for me.”

Jaeger also uses the phone to cold-call prospective clients. Fewer and fewer players give him the brush-off.

After becoming a certified yoga instructor and taking classes in Zen philosophy, Jaeger began charging fees about a year ago. He tailors his services in several ways. An off-season program that combines mental training with arm strengthening is the most popular.

Randy Wolfe of Pepperdine, Rich Igou of San Francisco, Gabe Alvarez of USC and A.J. Hinch of Stanford are among Jaeger’s most recent clients.

The players lie on their backs in the outfield, close their eyes and spend 20 minutes following Jaeger’s commands. After deep breathing, he encourages them to visualize “lanes” that the ball travels through, and tells them to use vivid imagery, “seeing the ball snow white with bright red seams.”

Loud crowds, stands full of scouts and close games in the late innings are imagined. Then Jaeger tells players to narrow their focus by mentally “blackening in the distractions” until nothing is left in the mind’s eye but the stark imagery of the ball and the lane.

He implores players to trust their instincts during competition, to let their minds go blank and simply react. Thinking only leads to the centipede’s quandary.

“I go through the routine in my hotel room before leaving for the park,” Lieberthal said. “And when the game is on the line, I step back, take a couple of deep breaths, and I’m right there.”

Had Jaeger known as a pitcher what he knows now, his own career might have turned out differently. But he considers those depths a source of strength.

“My mind was my own worst enemy,” he said. “But that experience caused me to examine myself to the point that all these ideas came together.

“I want to keep proving that mental training is essential to getting the most out of yourself.”