10 Minute Toughness

A Triple in the Bottom of the Eighth

It's September 30, 2006, at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. The Cardinals are down two to nothing against the Milwaukee Brewers in the bottom of the eighth. Earlier in the year they led their division by eight and a half games. By tonight that lead has shrunk to one. Lose this game and the wild card opens up, the season starts to wobble, and a roster that was supposed to coast into October starts asking ugly questions of itself.

The man at the plate is Scott Spiezio. He's thirty-four, a switch-hitter, mostly a pinch hitter at this point, and the year before he had three hits in forty-seven at-bats and a batting average of point zero-six-four. The Seattle Mariners released him. He nearly retired. Now here he is, with the count one and two against Francisco Cordero, with the season hanging by a thread, and what he does next is a bases-clearing triple off the right-field wall. Cardinals win three to two. They make the playoffs, they beat the Mets in seven, they beat the Tigers in the World Series, and Spiezio finishes the year with a batting average more than two hundred points higher than it was twelve months earlier.

What changed in those twelve months wasn't his swing. He worked on his swing, sure. But the thing he and his sport psychologist Jason Selk built in spring training was a short list of mental routines that fit on a notecard. A breath he could control. A sentence to repeat. A short film he replayed inside his own head. Another sentence about who he was. Another breath. About ten minutes a day, total, and Selk's claim is that those ten minutes are what turned a man who had nearly retired into the player who delivered the at-bat that saved a championship season.