Diamond sutra: Thus he has read Shawn Green’s book.
During a difficult 2011 season that included two trips to the minors, Toronto Blue Jays outfielder Travis Snider took up reading about Zen.
It started with a book by former Blue Jay outfielder Shawn Green, The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness At 95 MPH in which he talks about how baseball taught him to be in the moment and how to find inner stillness.
“That kind of propelled me into a few other books,” said Snider, who is competing with Eric Thames for the starting job in left field. “I had read that book right before I got called up.
“I couldn’t put the book down and read it twice. It was not just an enjoyable read for me but I was able to relate to a lot of things.”
...“I don’t claim to be Buddhist or any particular religion from that sense,” he said. “But I definitely was able to take some things and put them in perspective . . . Our minds as competitors can get the best of us at times and (it’s a matter of) being able to take a step back and saying, “OK, I’ve done everything I can do to this point, just go out and play.’
“At times, it’s easier said than done but that focus that you are able to refine over the years of experience is what’s key for me moving forward in my career.”
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
1. Enrico Pallazzo Posted: March 06, 2012 at 10:06 AM (#4074853)Buddhism, at least in the various forms that have made their way to the West, is a very open religion, and really might be better described as a set of religious practices than as a set of religious beliefs. There are lots of very serious Christians who have taken a lot from Buddhism, people like Thomas Merton, and I'd be shocked if there weren't also prominent Jews who've investigated Buddhism in various ways. Judaism, like Christianity, has a long and influential history of mystical and esoteric practices (most famously Kabbalah), many of which have ideas in common with various forms of Buddhism. So a Buddhist Jew is unusual but not especially shocking.
It's interesting: on the one hand, Green says that the Zen helped him with his swing because of, I don't know, nothingness and mindlessness or whatever... but in lots of other places in the book he shows that he actually studied baseball pretty damn hard. He had a whole section on pitchers tipping their pitches; he had to be tremendously observant and diligent to take in all that information and make use of it.
Blue Jays fans will find that Carlos Delgado and Tony Fernandez come off particularly well in this book, and Cito Gaston doesn't. I've already read one guy's comment today, somewhere, that Snider and Green have a few parallels in their careers, and Gaston played a similar part for both of them.
And Green's book sounds well worth a read too. There seems to be a tendency amongst Jays fans, particular of my age and younger, to glorify the early 90s teams and ignore the subsequent teams. Which makes sense. There's only so much devotion Jacob Brumfield can inspire. But I can see Shawn Green slowly being forgotten by Jays fans, which is a shame.
That's not really contradictory. Zen isn't about not being observant or not mastering your craft through hard work. It is, as applies to sports, the skill of filtering out extraneous, non-helpful thoughts when it is time to perform.
No, I don't think it's contradictory either (I figure that thinking is what you do in practice and workouts and stuff, so that when it's time to do it for real, you know it so well that you don't need to think) but the way Green presents it in his book, there is quite a contrast there.
Leonard Cohen, also a devout Jew, has spent years of his life at Buddhist monasteries.
BTW, the book is just wonderful. If you are interested in meditation and Buddhist practices (I assume you're interested in baseball or else you wouldn't be here, unless you just dig on arguing about libertarianism), it is a great exploration of how they can transform your daily life, full of concrete examples. Green's discussion of his application of dharma to hitting, the grind of baseball season, and life is fascinating and instructive.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main