Best of SI: Mental-Skill Coaches More Prominent In MLB

For nearly three months, MLB has been stuck in a previously unthinkable calendar limbo, a time that is neither season nor offseason. It's forced teams to answer a question that they’d never asked before: How do you prepare players when you don’t know when they’ll be playing again? Or how they’ll be playing again?

The answers are, like so much of baseball, proving to be mental as much as technical or physical. Teams are now figuring it out on the fly, but all are aware that readying their players to once again take the field will involve more than just making up for lost time on the mound or in the cage. And that’s shifted a new focus to one particular brand of coach: the mental skills coordinator.

Over the last decade, mental skills coaches have become common across baseball, part of almost every staff and a standard resource for both major and minor leaguers. They instruct players on everything from meditation to goal-setting to managing anxiety. In a normal season, that usually means regularly scheduled group sessions to cover specific subjects (like, say, confidence one week, and focus the next) paired with additional one-on-one work. But since baseball shut down in March, coaches have translated these efforts to a different context—navigating life in a pandemic while preparing for the uncertainties of an unconventional season.

“We’ve never experienced this before. This isn’t like coming back from the offseason,” says Rays mental performance coach Justin Su’a. “I think it comes down to communication—being able to talk to players and coaches and everyone throwing their heads together and saying, O.K., what are potential obstacles?”

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