What Do You Mean by You Can't ‘Try’ To Hit?
Joe Yurko Interview 2021-09-15
Joey Myers 00:08
Hello, and welcome to the official start. This was the swing smarter monthly newsletter but now it is the Swing Smarter Hitting Training Podcast.
Joey Myers 00:16
I am your host, Joey Myers from hittingperformancelab.com and a guest with me, who has been a follower of mine for quite a long time and we've corresponded quite frequently over email and have done some phone calls, it's Joe Yurko. So first, I want to welcome you into the show, Joe.
Joe Yurko 00:32
Thank you. Appreciate you having me. It's indeed an honor.
Joey Myers 00:38
Well, I think you have a lot of cool stuff to talk about. In today's episode, we're going to be going into the sports psychology part of hitting.
Joey Myers 00:46
Before we get there, and I think this is what Joe has to say. I will also by the way, put two links to a couple articles that Joe has written on a cool website that I recommend a lot of you go check out, I will put those in the transcription notes or the show notes for those that want to click on that and read some more.
Joey Myers 01:06
I read both and we'll be talking about a lot of that info here. But first, Joe, before we get to the content part, give everybody a little bit of a background that you've told me before but not everybody knows of you, that you're a teacher-coach, what you were teaching, the psychology side, give everybody a little bit of a background.
Teacher-coach, what you were teaching, the psychology side, give everybody a little bit of a background...
Joe Yurko 01:25
How far do you want me to go back?
Joey Myers 01:28
How about the relevance to this, speaking on the sports psychology side?
Joe Yurko 01:37
I was a teacher in Northern New Jersey for 41 years. I hate to admit that. I coached baseball for 38 years, 21 as a head coach.
Joe Yurko 01:51
Since I retired, I've been doing this sort of thing. While I was teaching, I started out teaching history, World History, world cultures, American history, and wound-up teaching psychology and I had a supervisor who wanted some elective courses.
Joe Yurko 02:12
I said what the heck, you got this idea for a sport psychology course that I wanted my baseball players to take. Took it. They said it was too much work. I'm not going to mention any names, but he moved to Florida recently.
Joe Yurko 02:30
I started it and probably taught that about seven years, and I finally got it down to where I liked it and then I retired. That was the only course I took with me. I took all that sports psychology stuff with me, and I had nothing to do.
Joe Yurko 02:48
I had originally written this material for my players back in the early 90s. To help them with their hitting, that it succeeded because it took a while and I said what the heck I said, why not? Let's figure out this stuff. I had this stuff from my sports psychology course.
Joe Yurko 03:13
Things that I read and things that I heard and quotes from here and quotes from there. I started doing it. This young man from Ridgewood High School in Ridgewood, New Jersey, Brandon Shintani, he was a sophomore last year, he created this website and mind-designsports.org.
Here are the two articles Joe Yurko wrote that we mention in this chat:
• https://www.mind-designsports.org/blogs/you-cant-try-to-hit-a-baseball
• https://www.mind-designsports.org/blogs/u405wsmp89kghdks11b869wnn44ndp
Joe Yurko 03:40
It was an article in the paper in the record of northern New Jersey about him and I saw his email was there and I said, what the heck, I'll email and see what he says. I told him who I was, what I did, my background, that and the other thing and I say I got these articles.
Joe Yurko’s 10 Rules for Sports Psychology Success
Joe Yurko 03:56
He said, "Great, send them in". What I did is I wrote this series of like 10 rules, and I had to find one that could stand by itself so I could put it on his website. I think this is rule number five and rule number six. Anyway, I had to do some editing and adding and subtracting things like that.
Joey Myers 04:19
Joe, go into the 10 rules, you don't have to go into them in depth, just talk about it, just list them out, and then we'll go into depth with the five and six that you're talking about. What are those 10 rules?
Joe Yurko 04:30
The first one is know yourself. I dipped into my psychology curriculum, and I took all the personality theories and of course I applied them to hitting.
Joe Yurko 04:45
Freud, Maslow, and Skinner, and all these people, and I just picked out concepts that I thought would somehow fit and somehow make sense. I mean, the people that read them thought they made sense.
Joe Yurko 05:06
The second one was know the pitcher and the third one was know the situation. I did kind of like a takeoff on Casey at the Bat. I put the poem down and analyze Casey situation, according to these personality theories.
Joe Yurko 05:26
I think, primarily, it was like the social cognitive theory which fit, and I just expanded on that, and that was the third one.
Joe Yurko 05:39
The fourth one, I'm testing my memory, I haven't really checked them a lot, I think the fourth one was paralysis through analysis. I did a whole thing on the brain and how the brain works and different parts of the brain and how they work, the conscious part of the brain, unconscious part of the brain, and the fight, flight or freeze response, and I did something about that.
Joe Yurko 06:08
The fifth one was, you can't try to hit the baseball, which was the first article on the website.
Joe Yurko 06:22
The sixth one was the conscious brain versus the unconscious brain.
Joe Yurko 06:27
The seventh one...
Joey Myers 06:32
If you can't remember, that's okay.
Joe Yurko 06:34
No, I can, but don't beat yourself.
Joe Yurko 06:39
It was about basically, how your emotions can get the best of you and I'm still working on the part about fear. I used to do the biology of fear in my sports psychology class. Usually around Halloween time I had a good time.
Joe Yurko 06:57
I used the Batman Begins movie and Dark Knight Rises. There are things in there about fear. Liam Neeson is great explaining fear to Christian Bale.
Joe Yurko 07:11
Number eight. I'm trying to think what number eight was showing.
Joey Myers 07:19
You're doing good, Joe.
Joe Yurko 07:20
Number eight was you got to deal with the ups and downs.
Joe Yurko 07:27
Number nine, not sure what number nine was, I could check on my phone really quick.
Joe Yurko 07:33
Number 10 was about not living in the past, living in the moment. I did a big thing on rock climbers. Then Alex Honnold climbed El Capitan without any ropes or harnesses.
Joey Myers 07:50
Yeah, saw that.
Joe Yurko 07:52
It was a National Geographic thing. When I saw that I said, wow, this is like, absolutely the most amazing thing I've ever seen.
Joey Myers 08:00
That free solo?
Joe Yurko 08:02
Yes, and there were some other things. I'm trying to remember what number nine was, but yes, that sort of stuff. I mean, I haven't gotten to put any of that stuff yet on that website. I don't know how many of those articles I'm going to pull on, they're kind of long
Joey Myers 08:22
Yes, that's good. Even if you did two parters, especially the conscious versus unconscious brain that would be even better in a bite size digestible chunk, like a two or three parter. I mean, even if you did that, instead of putting it all in one, would be good.
Joe Yurko 08:38
I probably should have I didn't realize how long it worked. I saw them on this website and one of my former players say, former All-state second baseman, who is now a lawyer in Washington, DC.
Joe Yurko 08:52
He made a comment that it's rather long article. Now, I think he wished that he wrote it but that's a long story for another day, perhaps.
Joey Myers 09:03
Well, you could probably pop number nine in your head as we go into these but let's talk about the number five, which is you can't try to hit, start going into that a little bit. What do you mean by you can't try to hit?
What do you mean by you can't ‘try’ to hit?
Joe Yurko 09:19
The strange thing about it is 1980 when George Brett was going for 400, he was going to be the first player to bat 400 since Ted Williams, I followed that at the time a little bit I realize and he, on TV, or right around the time or the end of this. He made a statement, which I could not find anywhere but I remember him saying these words exactly.
Joe Yurko 09:53
He says, "I didn't hit .400 because I tried to hit .400". I couldn't find that anywhere, though I found other quotes where he kind of suggested that. He does an interview on YouTube, I found some articles on the New York Times maybe and I went digging through Google to try to find this stuff.
Joe Yurko 09:58
I know what he's talking about. I mean, you don't hit by trying to hit, just don't hit a home run when you try to hit and the strange thing about that, I put that in the article as an update.
Joe Yurko 10:34
Christian Arroyo was an infielder with the Red Sox. I know you said an up and down season with injuries and COVID and things like that, a very good hitter. Grand Slam home run, win a game against the Atlanta Braves in Atlanta, Fenway.
Joe Yurko 10:50
They interviewed him after the game, and I saw it on MLB central in the morning. I said, there it is, and he basically said, you don't hit homeruns when you're trying to, you hit them when you're not trying to.
Joey Myers 11:06
Was that at the statcast one where they said, hey, did you know that you hit this statcast I got this homerun at 462 feet, you try and hit it 462 feet?
Joe Yurko 11:16
Yeah, that was the one 467 and he said what?
Joey Myers 11:23
Did you try to do that?
Joe Yurko 11:27
It's very funny with these players today. They must take a seminar on how to give interviews like Bill Belichick, Aaron Judge. You must watch film of Derek Jeter or something because they really don't say anything.
Joe Yurko 11:46
Arroyo was amazingly honest. He just didn't conceal any of his feelings, or what he thought. He just let it all out there. I added that to that article. It's under update. I found that very interesting, because you don't really hear somebody saying that.
Joey Myers 12:11
You had a couple examples too, of that scene in Star Wars with Yoda and the Legend of Bagger Vance, too. Talk about those.
Joe Yurko 12:17
I'm a Star Wars fan, matter of fact, this probably only Star Wars I really paid attention to. My sons and my wife are into the Star Wars stuff, but Yoda's telling Luke Skywalker, those flying jets, one of those things.
Joe Yurko 12:39
Through some narrow passage and overall society depended on him, and he says, well, I'll try. Yoda said to him, try not do or do not, there is no try. I said somebody like read my mind here.
Joe Yurko 13:01
It was amazing, the people who were into this same notion, Robert Redford, he did it in The Natural. There were scenes in the natural where he was trying, he just failed miserably.
Joe Yurko 13:20
When his mind was taken off what he was doing, he succeeded, he hit the bomb that knocked the light tower down.
Joe Yurko 13:28
In the movie The Legend of Bagger Vance, in the beginning, a young man named Hardy Greaves, I forget who the actor was, he's hanging out with Will Smith, who was playing a Caddie and they were walking the course, see what it was all about.
Joe Yurko 13:46
A kid was putting, and Will Smith said to him, you can't make the ball go in that hole, you got to let it. Well, the same thing applies to hitting. How many people go in there?
Joe Yurko 14:04
I gave examples of George Brett when he was going for .400 and he was trying to hit .400 and Alex Rodriguez when he was going for number 500 home run. I think it was 2007.
Joe Yurko 14:17
He was like in a slump for weeks before that, between his 499th and his 500th, and he said, something that is the fact that I admit that you can't hit a home run by trying where you can't by the force of your own will.
Joe Yurko 14:37
I hear these quotes on TV and I'm going to write them down and I go looking for them and I found them. They're very interesting article, which I use in my sports psychology class, and it was written by a journalist named Lawrence Shainberg from 1989 and I saved it, hardcopy, and I still have it.
Joe Yurko 15:05
I included the link. I don't know if everybody can get it from that article because you got to pay money but, I could get it.
“The more you forget, the better you are at doing it, and the better you are doing it, the more you can forget.” - Lawrence Shainberg
Joe Yurko 15:13
Anyway, Lawrence Shainberg basically said the same thing. He had a kind of cute little phrase where he said, the more you forget, the better you are at doing it, and the better you are doing it, the more you can forget.
Joe Yurko 15:37
He talked about the so-called paradox of thinking that you can kind of just do this by the force of your own will, and you can't, he quoted Tim McCarver.
Joe Yurko 15:55
Tim McCarver said, the mind is a great thing unless you must use it. All these things like stuck. I say God, it all fits into a nice little unit plan for sports psychology class.
Joe Yurko 16:14
That's basically what I did. The more I dug into it, the more I found more interesting quotes.
Joe Yurko 16:23
It goes all the way back to college. It was a book out. You may have heard of this book; it was called Psycho Cybernetics by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. I think he was a plastic surgeon.
Joe Yurko 16:38
I got into it because my cousin bought it, told me to read it because I didn't read it when he told me to read like I should have. But there was a pitcher for the Montreal Expos named Carl Morton and he was reading the book.
Joe Yurko 16:50
I guess he got into the book, and he got obsessed with it. He drove Gene Mauch who was like the old school of old school managers. Then, Joe Torre got into it, too, I think. If Joe's listening out there, and you can confirm, but I remember the two of those guys were reading this book.
Joe Yurko 17:01
Joe Torre, I don't know if he was on Cardinals at the time or the Braves. I don't know where he was. But Carl Morton drove Gene Mauch nuts with this book, because he walked around with it all the time.
Joe Yurko 17:26
It reminded me of my college coach. I majored in history, but I was always reading. We went down south and some bookstores somewhere in one of the small schools we played, and I bought a book on existentialism.
Joe Yurko 17:48
I guess the word got out and Yurko bought his books on existential, is he some kind of nerd, they use the word nerd back then.
Joe Yurko 17:58
We were practicing in the rain one day after losing streak, or we were just horrible in practice, or in a combination of the two. Our coaches had us run from foul line to foul line. Carrying a ball, we throw coach a ball, centerfield, and we'd run to the left field line and back and forth, back, and forth, back and forth in the rain, and back and forth. We're doing this for an hour.
Joe Yurko 18:29
My head coach yells to me says, hey, Yurko, what is your psychology? What did your psychology books say about this? I said, nothing coach, nothing at all.
Joe Yurko 18:42
I was afraid that if I gave him some lecture on behaviorism and punishment, and all this other stuff, we'd be out there till midnight.
Joe Yurko 18:55
That book got me started and I wrote a term paper on it for psychology class my sophomore year in college, and I related the game of handball we used to play a lot.
Joe Yurko 19:06
Our college coach got us into playing 4-wall handball, which was the greatest game for baseball other than playing baseball.
Joey Myers 19:13
I agree.
Joe Yurko 19:14
It's a ball moves all over the place and you got to react, you got to use your left hand and your left hand and totally uncoordinated, I mean you got to learn to use it, but I got pretty good at it.
Joe Yurko 19:26
It drove me nuts that whenever I tried to make a kill shot off the bottom of the front wall from like a ball that bounces off the back wall. I always either skip it or hit it too high, I would miss, and then I'd be running around like a crazy person chasing balls around and I just let one fly and boom right off the bottom of the wall and that would drive me crazy.
Joe Yurko 19:50
I said, how does this happen? I tried to do it; I can't do it if I don't try to do it. There it is. It would drive me nuts. I'm running around, hitting a ball out of desperation, and there's my kill shot.
Joe Yurko 20:05
So, I wrote paper on it for a psychology class, I got an A on it. I don't know where it is though, I lost it somewhere.
Joey Myers 20:14
What's interesting is you shared a story with me, when you're coaching, you are going to go out to the mound, there was a situation, tell that story a little bit, because some people are wondering out there, if they're a parent, or an instructor, or even a team coach, how do we apply this to somebody to coach them not to try?
Joey Myers 20:36
I think that story will help. That one where you went out to the mound, or you decided not to go out to the mound for a certain reason?
Joe Yurko 20:42
I'm going to be honest with you, I don't have an answer to that. How did you do it? How did you get out of your head and just react when you play?
How did you get out of your head and just react when you play?
Joey Myers 20:54
I still want you to tell that story, though, because that's a good one for team coaches, especially. Reading your stuff got me thinking, most of the times, when I got super frustrated, it got to a point where it was a boiling point.
Joey Myers 21:08
You can see it for those out there that work with kids, when they get really frustrated with something you're trying to get them to do when you start seeing the tears coming to their eyes.
Joey Myers 21:16
It's not because, hopefully, you're not degrading them or anything like that, they're not tears of hatred, they're getting bad negative energy from you. It's that they can't, they feel like they can't do it.
Joey Myers 21:29
It was during those times in my playing time that the pot started boiling over and I finally just said, you know what I'm done. I'm done thinking about it, I'm done putting a ton of energy on it, and I would let it rest for a day.
Joey Myers 21:44
Then the next day, you'd start to get these ideas bubble to the top of your head and then I would start working on those ideas. Like you said, until you let go and you don't try, is when those ideas start coming to you. That's what I did. It was just trial and error.
Joe Yurko 22:00
I'll tell you, not to jump around here, but what you just said, my senior year in college, my coach benched all the senior, he just lost it. They put me in a pinch hit in critical situation.
Joe Yurko 22:17
Of course, I was not too happy. He puts me in a pinch hit in a critical situation, then on first and second, I think two hours, something crazy like that, suddenly sitting around for two hours and expect me to do miracles here.
Joe Yurko 22:31
I go up there, I think the first swing I'm trying to hit the ball over the moon. Then a couple pitches, and then another one. Finally, I hit a fly ball, the deep left field foul. But I squared it up.
Joe Yurko 22:47
I said to myself, there it is just like an accident but there it was, and I stepped out in a box. I remember saying that this is true. I remember saying to myself, screw it. I said screw this, it doesn't matter. Next pitch I hit out of the park.
Joe Yurko 23:05
I think the coach on the other team yelled to his pitcher, keep it in the ballpark. Whether subconsciously that gave me confidence was after I hit that long foul ball or something, I hit a three-run home run.
Joe Yurko 23:20
Then, he just lines up and puts me back in like I said, it would drive me nuts. Anyway, so we're playing in a county Tournament game in Bergen County, New Jersey and we're winning.
Joe Yurko 23:38
Suddenly, of course, you get to the goal line, you kind of get a little nervous or anxious or whatever. I sense this with my team and my first baseman drops of routine throw to first base and I had a first-year assistant coach at the time.
Joe Yurko 24:03
I'm thinking, Do I go out there and if I go out there and I'm going to lose it with these guys. How do you get nervous at this point? But they were, or at least they sensed they were.
Joe Yurko 24:18
What do I do? I said to my assistant coach first year with me, you go out there. He calls timeout and walks to the mound. Everybody in the infield are laying their pitches there and they're like, What the hell's he doing out here? He never went out there. He was his first year. He never went up to the mound and talk to the team.
Joe Yurko 24:39
He walks out there and now they're all like saying, what’s he doing here? Like they're talking to him, What the hell is he doing here? Like they're going back to the position like what the hell is he doing like still thinking about him coming to the mound. They forgot that they were screwing up and getting anxious and nervous and we won the game.
Joey Myers 24:55
Yes, pattern interrupt is what we call it.
The ‘Pattern Interrupt’
Joe Yurko 24:57
Yes. Well, in the movie The Legend of Bagger Vance, Will Smith do that with Matt Damon. First rounder walking the course and he senses Matt Damon is self-conscious, everybody's watching him, he's the local hero, he's playing these two professional players who are famous.
Joe Yurko 25:16
He starts talking about the color of one of the guys' socks and the price of tobacco. Anything but why are you self-conscious? What are you nervous about? That sort of stuff, that never worked. That never works.
Joe Yurko 25:32
Have you been nervous in a moment like that? He didn't call attention to it. He diverted Matt Damon's attention from his self-consciousness, and it worked. I've seen that happen numerous times.
Joe Yurko 25:54
I had a third baseman once; we were playing Catholic school powerhouse in the rain, and somebody hits a bullet down the line. One hop line drive, he snares it, throws the first, he comes in and says, I didn't even see that. I said good because if you did you would have missed it.
Joe Yurko 26:15
The thing was, he said he was just reacting, he wasn't thinking in no time. I don't have an answer for people out there, a guideline to follow. There's a lot of stuff out there, Ken Ravizza did stuff with Evan Longoria.
Joe Yurko 26:36
Tom Hanson, yes. There's a thing on YouTube with Ravizza and Longoria, and Ken Ravizza had Longoria stare at the flagpole, on the left field flagpole, not the flag.
Joey Myers 26:36
Tom Hanson.
Joe Yurko 26:58
He would stare at the left field flagpole, hypnotize himself. He said, that's what he would do. I mean, everybody's different. It's happened to me a few times, how many times it's the umpire call bad pitch on you, and you go nuts with him to an extent.
Joe Yurko 27:23
Or you're in a slump, you're hitting terribly, and somebody like buzzes your head and next pitch to hit a bomb, that happened to one of my players too, we were playing a game, he wasn't hitting well, he was temperamental to say the least at times, buzzes his head.
Joe Yurko 27:43
The next pitch hit over centerfield fence, which was like about 382, landed in the track. It had to be another 50-75 feet over that fence. I said, throw another one at his head and it completely got him out.
Joe Yurko 28:00
Whatever mindset he was in which was negative, it got him into it. I could still remember saying.
Joey Myers 28:14
That's interesting. What I remember my last year in high school, we were in a playoff game. It was tight, hot, and heavy. Our pitcher at the time was struggling a little bit. He's doing well and then all of a sudden, he went in, and he started struggling about fourth fifth inning or whatever.
Joey Myers 28:31
We had our pitching coach come out almost like he would come out sometimes but as mostly our head coach. It's like what you were talking about with your first-year coach assistant, right?
Joey Myers 28:39
Our pitching coach comes out, he bends down right before getting to the mound and he picks up a rock, and he starts staring at it. He's not saying anything, he's just staring at it, and I was in centerfield, and I'm watching this.
Joey Myers 28:55
My pitching guys got his hands on his hips. Our pitcher had his hands on his hips and he's just like watching this happen, he's watching him. He's staring at it and then finally he looks up from the rock, and he tells him Hey, I just saw this out here, I just wanted to move it from being in your way. Then he turned around and walked away.
Joey Myers 29:16
Same kind of thing, right? Where he's coming out, he's thinking okay, all right, now I'm in trouble. What is he going to tell me, what kind of mechanical thing, he's probably thinking.
Joey Myers 29:24
The longer the silence happens almost to the point of where the umpire must come out and say, hey, guys, break it up. You're not saying anything, you're not doing anything, and he waited until that moment to finally say something, and it had nothing to do with what he was saying.
Joey Myers 29:37
We ended up winning that game, not saying that that was the exact thing but what you're talking about is like a pattern interruption where if you have an enemy, what did Napoleon say? If your enemies destroying themselves, just let them destroy themselves.
Joe Yurko 29:55
If your enemies making a mistake, don't interrupt.
Joey Myers 29:57
Don't interrupt them. It's like with the buzz in the head thing, that's probably the worst thing you could have done because your enemy was in trouble, was making mistakes. You just keep feeding the same stimuli, feed them the same stimuli, and let them end up hanging themselves versus giving them a pattern interrupt, breaking them out of that fog and now they're fully focused on what they're doing.
“The mind is a great thing unless you must use it.” – Tim McCarver
Joe Yurko 30:25
Sure. It's strange. It's like what Tim McCarver said, the mind is a great thing unless you must use it.
Joey Myers 30:32
Very cool, brother.
Joey Myers 30:33
Well, Joe, it was great. I think we're going to have to do a part two, as you start adding more of your 10 you got one more we didn't get to go over today, the conscious unconscious brain so we'll have to do that on a part two.
Joey Myers 30:45
As you're putting these things together, I would love to have you on where you're working your way through it because there's a lot of depth here.
Joe Yurko 30:55
Probably too much. We got to talk about the kid, the champion cup stacker.
Joey Myers 31:02
Yes, I was just thinking about that.
Joe Yurko 31:04
The neuroscientists.
Joey Myers 31:06
That's a good one. I think the conscious unconscious brain is going to be a good one but that's going to be a whole `nother show.
Joe Yurko 31:12
I don't forget, this is a great story. My sports psychology class, I had some of my baseball players and they were doing a little group work, some kind of assignment. I was sitting next to guys who were my baseball players, like two or three of them sitting in a circle.
Joe Yurko 31:27
I was sitting right next to them, and I take out a pack of Warby gum, and I take out a couple pieces of gum and roll the wrapper up into a ball.
Joe Yurko 31:39
One of my baseball players gives me this like dirty look. I don't know, he just gives me a dirty look. I said to him, oh, yeah, I'll take this wrapper, and I'll stick it in your ear.
Joe Yurko 31:56
He just like looked at me, we're just joking around. Threw the wrapper at him, it went right in his ear, and everybody who was sitting there within his group were stunned. I called it.
Joe Yurko 32:16
He looked at me and the look on his face was like, you got to be kidding. You know what I did for the rest of the period? I got that rolled up wrapper, gum wrapper and I kept trying to stick it in his ear again.
Joe Yurko 32:34
I hit his head, anywhere, I don't think I even hit his ear. I tried for 15 minutes, I kept throwing this thing on his head and I couldn't get it in his ear.
Joe Yurko 32:45
It's like you're coming off a basketball court, you're playing basketball somewhere with somebody and there's a ball at like three quarter court and you just grab it and throw hook shot from three quarter court and it goes nothing but net.
Joe Yurko 32:56
How many times have you done that? Then you try to do it again and you're in there for another hour, throwing hook shots from three quarter court and you can't make one, even hit the rim.
Joe Yurko 33:06
It's really a strange thing. It's a fascinating thing. I think there's lessons for people to learn from stuff like that. That's why I did this stuff. Worse comes to worse, I said, it'll be there for my grandchildren.
Joey Myers 33:26
Right. I think that was a great story to wrap the bow on this conversation with the whole idea of returning to try, you can't try to hit, right?
Joe Yurko 33:36
No, not at all.
Joey Myers 33:37
Joe, I appreciate your time, brother.
Joey Myers 33:41
I'll put those links in, but because I know you got the link, you got the website, and then you got the .com forward slash and then there's a bunch of words after that it's going to be hard for people to remember all those, but I'll put those links in but anywhere people can find you on the social medias or anything.
Here are the two articles Joe Yurko wrote that we mention in this chat:
• https://www.mind-designsports.org/blogs/you-cant-try-to-hit-a-baseball
• https://www.mind-designsports.org/blogs/u405wsmp89kghdks11b869wnn44ndp
Joe, where can people find you?
Joe Yurko 33:59
I'm not on social media.
Joey Myers 34:01
It's probably a good thing.
Joe Yurko 34:03
Don't ask me why, I probably learned from your experience. My wife's on Facebook, drives her completely nuts, all the political stuff
Joey Myers 34:18
I know.
Joe Yurko 34:19
Being on social media, it's like having another child or a pet. Or worse.
Joe Yurko 34:26
I haven't done that, I was going to do it, my son Steven, who's a cartoonist in California, said I will only get myself in trouble.
Joe Yurko 34:37
He said you'll say something stupid. Use words which weren't repeatable here. But I say well, I'm still thinking about it, but I don't know, we'll see. Let's see the kind of response we get from all this stuff that we said today, if people are interested in.
Joey Myers 35:01
If anything, maybe a simple website would be good to be able to post that stuff on or even eventually, when you get all ten, you could put in a book.
Joe Yurko 35:11
I'd like to do that. When I started doing it,I said, this isn't half bad. Of course, I wrote it.
Joe Yurko 35:22
I would give it to people, I would give it to my former players. So let me know how good is this as well, is it terrible, is it good?
Joe Yurko 35:32
One former player who reads all my stuff and every book I told him to read he has read. I'd give him a whole list of books to read, and he's read them all. He's kind of into the stuff.
Joe Yurko 35:48
He said, I wish I had this in high school. So yeah, me too.
Joe Yurko 35:50
I was my own worst enemy. It took me a while to understand this stuff, but I don't know. I guess that's in the offing. I guess I'll have to work on something. They could put comments now and I could get back to them.
Joey Myers 36:11
Or maybe an email, do you have maybe an email they can reach out to you if you want to do that.
Joe Yurko 36:15
Yes, you have my email.
Joey Myers 36:16
Okay. Do you want to say it here for those that are just listening?
Joe Yurko 36:19
Oh, yeah, sure, [email protected]
Joey Myers 36:27
There you go. Cool.
Joey Myers 36:30
Go ahead.
Joe Yurko 36:31
That's it. Listen, thank you very much. I appreciate this.
Joey Myers 36:34
Yes, Joe. I appreciate it, too. Like I said, I think this is something that's good for some people out there to be thinking about, especially when it gets to the mental side of the game. I appreciate your time here today, brother.
Joe Yurko 36:46
Oh, I found number nine by the way.
Joey Myers 36:48
Oh what's number nine?
Joe Yurko 36:49
Good hitting could lead to failure.
Joey Myers 36:52
There you go. Awesome.
Joe Yurko 36:55
Something like that. It's been a while since I wrote that one.
Joey Myers 36:58
Well, thanks, Joe. Stick around. I'm going to stop the recording but stick around really quick.
