Can the Mets Use a Mental Coach?
If you are a Mets fan, you are all-too-familiar with:
– Mike Pelfrey’s “yips”
– Oliver Perez’s “Jekyll and Hyde” routine
– Frequent mental lapses on the bases and in the field
– Team-wide choking that led to late-season collapses in 2007 and 2008
– Finger-pointing and under-the-bus throwing by players
These issues were running through my mind while having a conversation with Jim Fannin, a “mental coach” whose client list includes MLBers such as Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, Casey Blake, Alex Cora, Carlos Delgado, Barry Zito, and many others. You can listen to the published podcast of this conversation at my baseball instruction website, OnBaseball.com. Could the Mets benefit from hiring someone to help with their mental preparation?
Download the podcast, give it a listen, and post your comments back here.
And to get that they need a GM who can find it and get it. They don’t have one of those now.
Are you saying that you don’t believe a player can improve his performance through proper mental training, or that even with the proper approach, the Mets are still light years away from having enough talent to contend? Or both?
As to the fact that the Mets are stuck with the talent they have, that’s so true. And I don’t think the free agent market is going to change much. But if you don’t want to be blogging the year after next and the year after that about the talent we’re stuck with, you get a GM who can start getting talent. They’re are a few in the major leagues who’ve shown that they can do this, particularly with smaller market clubs. At least one would want to come to NY. Go get him.
The one potential problem to your theory: Peter Gammons claims the Mets’ GM is Jeff Wilpon. If indeed Wilpon wields that much power in terms of personnel moves, can you really blame Minaya? And/or, would Minaya’s replacement make a difference if Wilpon is really the one calling the shots?