Photo by Kavin Mistry
By Matt Weiner (@MattWeiner20) – BSB Beat Reporter
In an age where every fraction of a movement on a baseball field could be calculated and placed into a statistic, it’s refreshing when a player’s success doesn’t take a Ph.D from MIT to understand.
“I like to keep it simple, if I’m hitting the ball on the ground, then I get my bat up a little bit and if I’m hitting it in the air, then I get my bat down a little bit,” said San Jose State’s leading hitter, Charles McAdoo.
McAdoo put a lot of social media swing gurus and hitting coaches out of business with that quote.
But maybe it’s that simple? I’ll save that debate for another day.
For the time being, it’s about McAdoo, whose list of hitting accomplishments reads like the coupons at the bottom of a receipt from CVS.
He’s reached base in all 23 games this season while getting a hit in 21 of them. On Sunday, his home run in the bottom of the fifth made it his third in the past two games and in his last five games went 10 for 21 with six RBI.
McAdoo’s team-leading slashline of .389/.487/1.161 was accomplished through finding his “happy place.”
“What my roommate (Theo Hardy) tells me to do is think of a happy place, it’s like “Happy Gilmore.”
McAdoo and Happy Gilmore take the same route. They just go to two different destinations.
Gilmore’s utopia consisted of a woman in lingerie serving pitchers of beer and his instructor Chubbs in a white suit playing the piano with all 10 fingers.
A polar opposite from McAdoo’s.
“Star Wars Universe.”
What exactly does this look like? Frankly, I’m not sure. It’s such a vast answer, your guess is as good as mine.
It’s one of the final steps in a sacrosanct pregame ritual that starts with “looking at a scouting report to see how a pitcher throws and after I look at it, right before the first pitch I go to the outfield and I just breathe and visualize what’s going to happen … and making sure your heart slows down.”
Similar to his swing, there’s an emphasis on simplifying each part of the process.
The simpler things are, the more time he has to react to what’s coming his way because there’s less time spent on analyzing. It makes the task itself more feasible while allowing the necessary time to complete the action. Whether it’s adjusting to a curveball when expecting a fastball or not swinging at a heater above his head.
Keeping it simple feels more fitting as a refrigerator magnet next to one that says “Live. Laugh. Love.”, but there’s no denying the effectiveness of the philosophy.
McAdoo is on his way to an All-Mountain West First Team honor and more importantly turning the Spartans from bottom of the conference shoo-in to a team opponents don’t immediately glance over.