GLUE GUYS

By DARREN EVERSON
There are aces, closers, sluggers and Gold Glovers. And then there are the really important people in a ballclub: the glue guys.

“Glue” guys, in baseball parlance, are the players whose oft-overlooked performance quietly holds winning teams together—and without which, presumably, the team would fall apart. Statisticians don’t buy that they exist, but psychologists do. And players and managers swear by them.

“He’s the scrapper,” says Charlie Manuel, manager of the defending World Series-champion Philadelphia Phillies. “The guy who plays every day. Who gets big hits. Hustles. He’s the guy who, in his own way, whether it’s quiet or spoken or whatever, he leads.”

Jason Bartlett is a glue guy. Before he joined the Rays last season, Tampa Bay had baseball’s worst record in 2007, due greatly to having the majors’ worst defense. Then Mr. Bartlett came over from the Twins and took over the shortstop position. The Rays’ defense became the best in baseball last season and they reached the World Series.

Tim Wakefield, the Red Sox’s knuckleball pitcher, is a glue guy. As Boston’s pitching staff has evolved over the past 15 years—with youngsters coming, veterans going and pricey additions like Daisuke Matsuzaka not always delivering—the dependable constant has been Mr. Wakefield, a first-time All-Star this year at 42 who has made at least 15 starts each season.

As baseball enters the second half of the season Thursday, the top contenders all have a glue guy or two whom they attribute part of their success to. With the Tigers, it’s All-Star third baseman Brandon Inge, who not only has a surprising 21 home runs but is also hitting .348 in close, late-game situations. With the Yankees, as usual, it’s shortstop Derek Jeter, who owns the highest on-base percentage among the American League’s starting shortstops despite being its oldest (35). And the Phillies insist slugger Ryan Howard is a glue guy—despite not fitting the tag’s small, scrappy stereotype—because he quietly never takes a day off.

“They’re the reliable guys,” says Braves president John Schuerholz, “who, in the toughest of circumstances, in the biggest of moments, deliver the goods.”

The legend of the glue guy is an extension of the age-old question in sports over whether natural “winners” exist—players who are greater than their statistics indicate, who win in part because of their force of will or ability to perform under pressure. Whether it’s with superstars who make clutch plays or unknowns who have a knack for being in the right place at the right time, fans and observers ascribe special talents to these players—often exaggerating their actual contributions.

Michael Jordan famously said in a 1997 Nike commercial that he’d missed 26 potential game-winning shots. “He’s probably been successful about 50 times,” then-Bulls coach Phil Jackson said at the time. But when Mr. Jordan retired from the Bulls in 1999—seven months after making his iconic shot to beat the Jazz for the championship—the total number of game-winning shots he’d hit was 25.

Skeptical about whether winners exist, statistician Scott Berry of Berry Consultants studied the matter in 2005. Taking the statistics of more than 14,000 players who had played in Major League Baseball, he created a formula to find the ultimate winner: the player whose teams exceeded their win-loss expectations the most when he happened to be on them.

The winners’ winner? Dennis Cook, a journeyman lefty reliever in the 1990s. Several players whom fans widely regard as winners and glue guys did fare well: Mr. Jeter, the Yankees shortstop, was in the 97th percentile, and David Wells, a noted big-game pitcher in the 1990s and 2000s, was in the 99th. But the presence of the relatively unknown Mr. Cook at the top, Mr. Berry says, proves his point. “Announcers refer to players who just have the will to win,” he says. “The fact that he comes out on top pokes fun at that notion.”
But Mr. Cook does believe in glue. Although he admits he was lucky to bounce from one winner to the next—including the 1996 division-winning Rangers, the 1997 world-champion Marlins and the 2000 National League-winning Mets—Mr. Cook says his teams won in part because they invested in overlooked roles like middle relievers.

“A long man who eats up 100 innings a year, he saves the rest of your pitching staff,” he says. “Those guys don’t get recognized, but they’re every bit as important. Baseball people see that, but number-crunchers don’t.”

Psychologists say there is indeed a spill-over effect with glue guys that helps their teams win, one which goes beyond quantifiable contributions. John F. Murray, a sports psychologist in Palm Beach, Fla., says that teams are much like fraternities or high schools in that players spend a massive amount of time in close proximity to each other. Because of this, “they’re constantly influencing one another,” he says. “One of the keys to confidence is social support and modeling. If you have some outstanding role models who deal with pressure effectively, that glue is going to spill out of the bottle and help everyone.”

A huge hole in the reasoning of glue believers is that it’s impossible to know in retrospect how teams would have fared without their glue players. For example, the Rays won 58% of their games (11 of 19) earlier this season when Mr. Bartlett, their slick-fielding shortstop, was out with an injured ankle. They’ve won 54% overall. But the first-place Phillies’ abundance of glue, according to both them and their opponents, appears to be what’s put that franchise over the top—just a few years after it had a reputation for underachieving. “It’s not about just one guy,” says All-Star second baseman Chase Utley.

The Phillies’ most-talented players also happen to be their glue guys, including Mr. Utley, who has led the majors the past two years in times hit by pitch, and Mr. Howard, who has played in 362 of Philadelphia’s last 363 games. Unlike many left-handed hitters over the years, he even refused to take a day off against Randy Johnson once last season.

“He’s definitely a leader, just by keeping his mouth shut,” Mr. Manuel says. “I call him the Big Piece. As in the big piece of the puzzle.”

Forward Thinking

previously posted by Coach Cooley

Florida coach Billy Donovan is big on bringing in other players and coaches to talk to his team. A couple of years ago Bill Belicheck met with the team shortly before the SEC tournament. Florida was #1 in the country and Donovan wanted to make sure the team did not get full of themselves.

Belicheck showed them a video of the Breeders' Cup (which is a horse race) and paused the tape halfway through the race with the outcome still up in the air. He asked the team "Who will win? The horse with the most experienced jockey? The horse who has won the most money? The horse with the best odds prior to the race?" The team was puzzled, "No, it's the horse that runs the best race from here on out. You can't focus on prior accomplishments/failures, you must only foucs on the present and doing your best the next play."

Being Perfect

Great motivational clip from Friday Night Lights

Attitude and Upsets

"I think the final outcome of most football games is affected more by attitude then by talent. I once heard someone say that an upset is really in the mind of the favorite. If the favored team plays to the best of their ability, the underdog probably isn’t going to win. But if there’s an upset, it’s probably because the favorite didn’t have the right attitude. A team that has the right attitude and happens to be blessed with the greater talent and ability is not likely to be upset. As a football team, we have to understand that our thinking affects everything we do."

-From Jim Tressel's "Winners Manual"

More thoughts from Paul Mainieri- LSU Baseball

-Baseball is a humbling game- you must concentrate and focus

-As soon as you think you have this game figured out it will jump up and beat you down

- Be loose but not lackadazical
Be confident but not arrogant
Be intense but not tight

- Hitting will always be up and down. Pitching and defense must be consistent

-In the first inning it is not that important to score runs, it is more important to make the pitcher throw pitches and show him that you mean business and he is going to have to work hard to get us out

-To win championships you have to have everyone 'locked in'

The Pitching Rubber- RESET BUTTON

To me the pitching rubber is a giant Reset Button. Think about the last time you played video games, especially by yourself and against the computer. If you were playing a football game against the computer and it returns the opening kickoff for a touchdown, what are you most likely to do? If you’re honest, you’d probably push the Reset Button and start over…right?

Why can’t you take that same approach into pitching?Every time a pitcher toes the rubber it doesn’t matter how good or bad his last pitch was. It only matters what he does from this point forward. Essentially, when he toes the rubber he has reset the game and is playing from the beginning all over again. Another way of saying it is that the next pitch is always the beginning of the rest of the game.

Pitchers control ALL action on the baseball field. No other person on the field acts independently. Only the pitcher has the ability to control what every other person on the field does. The pitcher controls whether the umpire yells “Strike”, he controls, to a great degree, if the batter hits the ball and where that ball goes (should he be lucky enough to make contact). Therefore the movement of the defense is predicated on where the ball is hit which is ultimately controlled by where the pitcher locates the pitch. On a basic level the pitcher is in control. Hitters, catchers, centerfielders, umpires, coaches, fans and announcers all react to the pitcher’s action. Once a pitcher understands his ability to control a game he can use a device, such as the Reset Button, to help him focus on the task at hand.

from insidepitching.com

Profile of a winning team

#1 THEY PLAY TO WIN
The difference between playing to win and playing not to lose is often the difference between success and mediocrity.

#2 THEY HAVE A WINNING ATTITUDE
Team members believe in themselves, their teammates, and their dream. And they don’t allow negative thinking to derail them.

#3 THEY KEEP IMPROVING
The highest reward for their efforts isn’t what they get from it, but who they become because of it. Team members know intuitively that if they’re through improving, they’re through.

#4 THEY MAKE THEIR TEAMMATES MORE SUCCESSFUL
Winners are empowers. As Charlie Brower says, “Few people are successful unless a lot of other people want them to be.”

From “Teamwork Makes The Dream Work”
by John C. Maxwell

Staying Relaxed at the Plate

Ripken's Rules

Cal Ripken's Rules:
Love The Game
Love Your Team
Play At The Highest Level

The competior to be feared the most..........

"The competitor to be feared the most is one who never worries about others at all, but goes on making himself better all the time."

-That is a quote that Blake Griffin has used to stay motivated. In an interview with ESPN, Griffin spoke of how he tries to control only what he can. He is set to become the #1 pick in the upcoming NBA draft.

Hitting with Confidence- LSU Baseball

Great stuff from Coach Paul Maineri on hitting with confidence.

POISE

by Steve Pivovar

OMAHA, Neb. – Texas' latest postseason dramatics reinforced the teachings of two of baseball's great philosophers – Augie Garrido and Yogi Berra.

The Longhorns moved into Friday's Bracket Two championship game by pulling off another great escape in beating Arizona State on Tuesday night. Texas fell behind by six runs three innings into the game. The Sun Devils had the pitcher that Garrido considers the best in America on the mound.

But the Longhorns scored 10 straight runs and got a shut-down effort by freshman reliever Taylor Jungmann to snatch the win.

At a point when some coaches might have gone ballistic after watching their teams boot balls and squander opportunities, Garrido gathered his team around him in the dugout before the fourth inning and calmly preached a message of hope.

"How you perceive yourself has more to do in what you become than your skill or your talent," said Garrido, whose team plays today's North Carolina-Arizona State winner at 6 p.m. Friday.

"So if you perceive yourself as a loser, you're going to lose. We had just finished three innings as the Bad News Bears. I reminded them that even the Bad News Bears were good by the end of the movie."

The Longhorns are 7-1 since the tournament started and 48-14-1 overall. They've won games in NCAA play in 25 innings, on a walk-off grand slam and a walk-off walk. They've won on nights when they've had great pitching and meager hitting and when the hitters rescued faltering pitchers.

They beat Arizona State by scoring six runs in the fourth inning against Sun Devils ace Mike Leake, the No. 8 pick in last week's Major League draft and the owner of a 16-1 record and a 1.36 ERA. Catcher Cameron Rupp ignited the rally with a three-run homer, then put Texas ahead with his second homer of the game to lead off the seventh. The Longhorns tacked on three runs in the eighth.

Garrido has coached five national championship teams – three at Cal State Fullerton, two at Texas. He declined to compare the run Texas finds itself on to any of the championship drives his other clubs have made. After all, each team has its own identity, its own soul, its own karma.

He would say this is a team that is learning its lessons.

"We have not had an easy game in our eight games in the tournament," Garrido said. "Each one has demanded different things of this team. What we've done proves to me that there is a certain spirituality, and it's all about attitude and what you have to give to each other and that sense of responsibility you have to each other."

Asked what he and his teammates have learned in their wild ride through the postseason, Texas second baseman Travis Tucker borrowed from Berra's baseball philosophy: It ain't over 'til it's over.

"You can't give up in this game," Tucker said. "No matter how far you're down, there's always a chance to win if we really trust each other and have confidence in each other. That's all you can ask for."

Tucker and Rupp praised Garrido's restraint when Tuesday's game sank to its darkest moment. They've seen that from their coach before, but his reaction on college baseball's grandest stage kept the players from panicking, Rupp said.

"I'm sure coach was upset after the way we had played for the first three innings," he said. "But he stayed calm and he stayed with us."