Tewksbury - Ninety Percent Mental: an All-Star Player Turned Mental Skills Coach Reveals the Hidden Game of Baseball

SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA

March 1, 2017

I am standing atop a desert mountain, I am starting a brand-new job and I am bleeding profusely.

At this moment, there is only one thing I am thinking with any reasonable degree of certainty, and that one thing is a bit of a problem:

I am about to die.

Well, as we say in the game, the great thing about baseball is that every single day, you have a chance to see something youve never seen before.

Oh, sure, hundreds of people safely hike Camelback Mountain near Phoenix, Arizona, every year. Many of them even make it all the way up and then all the way down again without even lugging back a patch of souvenir cactus needles sticking out of their skin.

Today, I am not one of those people. I am stuck, things are getting dicey and I already can close my eyes and visualize one of tonights lead stories on MLB Network television: New San Francisco Giants mental skills coach and former major league pitcher Bob Tewksbury met his demise today when

And to think, this all started innocently enough, with a phone call from San Francisco Giants general manager Bobby Evans three months earlier. Over the next several days we talked, questions were asked, philosophies were discussed, arrangements were made, a contract was signed. Now, here we were in the spring of 2017, and talk about a change in altitude. For the first time since 1999, I was employed by a major league baseball club other than the Boston Red Sox.

The finality of the big move really hit when I boarded the plane on that mid-February day headed west to Arizona instead of south to Florida. I was eager for the change in scenery, both literal and metaphorical, especially because I could see so many similarities between San Francisco and Boston, the place where I had become so comfortable over most of these past two decades.

There, we won World Series titles in 2004, 2007 and 2013 with a great core group of homegrown players like Dustin Pedroia, Jacoby Ellsbury, Kevin Youkilis, Xander Bogaerts, Jon Lester, Jonathan Papelbon and Clay Buchholz.

Here, they won three World Series in five years with a great core group of homegrown players like Buster Posey, Madison Bumgarner, Matt Cain, Brandon Crawford, Brandon Belt and Joe Panik. Leading this band of brothers was Bruce Bochy, surely a Hall of Fame manager one day and a skipper I knew well after pitching for him in San Diego in 1996.

It took a few days to get settled into a new routine, and the strange sensation of wearing the orange and black of the Giants instead of the red and blue of the Red Sox was the least of it. But each day got better and, daily, driving to my apartment in Scottsdale, I had a clear view of Camelback Mountain to the west. It is the most prominent landmark in the area, 2,707 feet in altitude and about five miles from the Giants minor league complex, appropriately named due to a profile that resembles the hump and head of a kneeling camel.

Admiring that beautiful sight daily, I was intrigued enough to ask Dave Groeschner, the Giants longtime head trainer, about the mountain. He gave me the lowdown: popular hiking spot, and occasionally both major and minor league players run the mountain for conditioning. Is it difficult? I asked. Not so much, Groesch told me. Its okay as long as you stay on the trail. But every year, a lot of people wind up getting airlifted off the mountain because of dehydration or injury.

If you go up there, Tewks, make sure you stay on the path, Groesch reiterated.

Now, Im not really a hiker, although I do like to walk. Maybe the former is evident from the fact that I laced up my new Nike turf shoes that day after our short, early spring workout, pulled on my Giants spring trainingissued shorts and conditioning T-shirt, failed to tell anyone I was going on a hike and proceeded to take on a mountain, alone, that I knew nothing about. It couldnt be that difficult, could it? People of all ages hike Camelback. I parked, grabbed my phone in the unlikely event I would need it, snagged a bottle of water and breathed in the arid desert air. There are two different entry points to Camelback Mountain: Cholla and Echo. The easier hike, I was told, was the Cholla Trail. So off I went.

En route, I stopped to read the information posted on the big sign at the trailhead: no pets (check), bring water (check), get off the mountain before dark (check, it was only 3 P.M. ) and stay on the path (got it). Maybe here is where I should mention I dont like heights. Flying, Ive become accustomed to. But even driving on tall bridges gives me the shakes. Put me in a glass elevator standing next to the back panel and I stop breathing and must look the other way. Nevertheless Stay on the trail and all will be good. It wasnt long before I got some elevation, which provided some fabulous views of the valley, my new spring home. As I hiked higher, I got a little anxious but simply kept my head down and kept going, looking up just to take in the view here and there. The sights were amazing. The trail wasnt crowded, and a couple ahead of me finally stopped to turn back and head down the mountain. Hmmm, was this the summit? Nah, cant be, can it? I decided to keep going until I came to a point in the trail that left me unsure of which way to go. Nobody was around to ask, or to follow. As I scanned the area, it looked like the path was straight ahead. I think now that perhaps thats another key rule of hiking. If youre unsure whether you should be going in a particular direction, you probably shouldnt.