Rawlings Tigers

I’m big into podcasts. My wife is too.

My favorite group right now is Gimlet Media. They have shows ranging from history, business, crime, and fictional stories.

One show I love is called Start-Up, it’s the story and documentation of how the CEO started and built Gimlet Media. He actually has audio recordings from his early days of pitching investors to family conversations around launching the idea.

The reason I love the show is that it’s very relatable. The pain, struggles, and small wins are something we all experience when we are pursuing a vision with conviction and purpose.

In one episode he was struggling with delivering his pitch. He was stumbling over his words trying to explain his concept. At one point the investor actually started coaching him on how to deliver his pitch…..rough, right?

The investor asked the CEO a question that he didn’t know how to answer until a later episode. The investor asked him, what is your unfair advantage over other podcast shows?

At this point it made me go from a passive listener to an active one. I stopped the episode, thought for a moment and asked myself the same question.

“What are the Tigers unfair advantage amongst all the baseball clubs?”

Here is where my mind raced too:

1. dedicated facility
2. development plan
3. training that is forward thinking
4. using technology for player development
5. partnerships amongst the biggest brands in baseball
6. support system for coaches
7. expert instructors
8. online training
9. app communication tool
10. plug-in-and-go fundraising opportunities
11. VIP site
12. product discounts
13. full-time staff
14. strength of schedule
15. networked extremely well in the baseball community
16. advanced college recruiting advice

…and then hit me. How do you say all of this without saying any of it?

The Tigers are different because we are more than just teams. We are a program with tools and resources that gives our players an unfair advantage over other teams which ultimately provides opportunities that they otherwise would not have been given if they were outside the program.

In short, we have a stable system which provides the opportunity to grow if the right choices are made by the player throughout the year.

The CEO of Gimlet had an interesting answer for this section of his pitch, he said, “The unfair advantage we have over other podcast shows is that we understand listeners from our experience at NPR and have made successful shows from “This American Life” to “Planet Money”. We know our listeners and we know their behavior.”

I feel like we take a similar approach. We know our players and we do our very best to give them the resources that will make them successful not just in their athletic careers, but when they decide to leave the uniform for good.

The last the thing I failed to mention…we are constantly learning, re-evaluating, and thinking about how we can make our program better.

So, I want to leave you with this…if you’re a parent or a player, what is your unfair advantage?

Spiker Helms |Rawlings Tigers

www.rawlingstigers.com

PS

We had Tony Vitello at our college night in 2018. He had a monumental anwser on players who are under 6ft tall.

Can they play and start at the division 1 level?

Baseball is a game of failure. Baseball takes great skill but it also takes a strong mentality to be great. The best baseball player in the world, Mike Trout, has a career batting average of .305. This means that he fails about 69% of the time at the plate. Mike Trout is a successful baseball player because he doesn’t dwell on the past. To be a great baseball player you have to be mentally tough and have a great mindset. This is going to be a blog to teach you to develop this mindset.

Develop Confidence:

Confidence is something you want to have in life no matter what you are doing, this is even true in baseball. If you want to accomplish something in life but you don’t believe that you can do then odds are you can’t. If your ho up the plate thinking “I won’t get a hit” then you might as well go back to the dugout. You need to have the mindset that says “I am going to get a hit.” There are several ways that you can go about developing confidence on the baseball field. One way to do this is to perform what you are trying to do. For example, going to the cages builds confidence because you are seeing yourself hit the baseball and this builds confidence. Another way is to visualize your success. This is important because you see yourself hitting the baseball and this gives you a boost of confidence before your at-bat.

Learn to Let Go:

In a game of failure, you can’t dwell on the past. You have to move forward and not let previous mistakes haunt your future play. You only get a few at-bats in a game don’t let one ruin the rest of them. This is a part of being mentally tough, it’s hard to forget about previous at-bats or errors but you have to be.

Confidence is key in everything you do. Like Yogi Berra said “Baseball is 99% mental” and this is true. In a game where the best of the best fails about 70% of the time, you need to be mentally tough and have a solid mindset. Every player needs to instill an “I will get a hit” mentality into their game. The key to success is to do what you want to achieve and to visualize yourself being successful. You must also not dwell in the past; you can’t let one mistake snowball into more mistakes that will hurt your team.