by Richard Todd, Head Coach, WebBall

This article was inspired by something I read that was not at all baseball related, but it got me thinking back to a question asked by a young ball player early in the 2009 season. The question posed:

"Do you think I'm good enough for college ball or the pros?"

At the time, the response was what you would expect: "Do you put in training time every day of the year? Do you track your performance in training, not just stats from games? Do you have 100% focus when you are in games, make every play, have a good at-bat every time up, and so on."

All valid questions, and a convincing "yes" to each would be part and parcel of the dedication and determination required to succeed in baseball.

But let's be honest; those questions were stalling tactics. After all, and this may have happened to you, when/if a player comes to you with a question about his prospects, most times you know the answer - and maybe he knows the answer - but neither of you wants to say it out loud: "You have about the same chance to win the lottery."

That's neither fair nor accurate: success in baseball is not about luck. Well, not totally true. Bad luck has a role to play - an athlete on track for college or a pro career can have it all disappear in an instant of injury. But while success is maybe based on avoiding bad luck, it is not based on dumb luck.

Of course, other coaches and instructors when asked the "good enough" question might just as readily - and tritely - respond with: " If you have to ask, kid, then you already know the answer."

The point is we all understand deep down that to succeed you must be exceptional. But that's such a vague term. Surely there is some way to quantify what it takes to be the exception to the rule of "almost good enough"?

As it turns out, there is. Seth Godin in a recent blog cited a comment by investor Bill Gross: "in order to win with a new product, you need to be on one axis or another, and ten times better than what you're aiming to replace." The "one axis or another" which Gross refers to are convenience and fidelity.

Godin, no baseball expert, went on to cite everyday life examples: "A refrigerator is ten times more convenient than an icebox. A cell phone is ten times more convenient than a pay phone." (If he says so, the 10 times seems arbitrary, but expresses a principal.)

The "fidelity" aspect is a bit trickier, but for our purposes let's extrapolate that to be both clarity and faith or trust. Clarity in the sense that the skill set is clearly and obviously better than the norm... exceptional. Trust in the sense that the ballplayer can repeat it consistently and we as coaches have faith that he will get the job done: his fielding percentage is high 90s, his eye at the plate produces a high average and high OB% with few or no backwards Ks (caught-looking).


But the real measure here is the "ten times better". So let's return to the original question: "Do you think I'm good enough for college ball or the pros?"  And let's turn the question back on the player: "Do you think you're 10 times better than the player in that position now?"  Or... "Do you think you're 10 times better than all the other players or in your league?"  Or, at the very least... "Are you that much better than every other player on your current team?"

That's a huge leap up from "good enough". And perhaps you think it's unfair ...excessive. Well, take another look at one of our pages on getting to the next level: 455,414 high school players and 48,408 for all post secondary. In other words 0.106 or about 1 in 10 make it to the next level.  "One in ten" vs "ten times better". Not exactly a mathematical equivalent, but the principal is the same: good enough is not good enough.


Unfortunately, this is the part in the story where readers expect the "ta-da!" moment. The great revelation that will make you 10 times better overnight. Same sort of thing that comes with an offer for some magic potion, or brilliant training shortcut. As if.

The truth - the very hard truth - is that 10 times better is at the very least 10 times more effort, and you are also confronted with the law of diminishing returns. What I mean is that if you work 10 times harder that the pitcher who goes from 80 to 83 mph (a 3 mph velocity gain), you will not get a 30 mph improvement. But if you look at it on a percentile basis, that 3 mph bump might represent a move up from the 89th to the 90th percentile of all pitchers. Whereas you could go from the 90th percentile of pitchers to the 99th percentile, and that is definitely 10 times better.

So think in terms of percentile improvements, in rising above your competition. How many notches up in fielding percentage moves you to the next higher percentile or the tenth higher? How many points better in batting average does it take to be among the 95th percentile of H.S. hitters vs the 85th percentile.

Now you have a fresh perspective and a defined goal, with benchmarks. And "better than" replaces "good enough" in your training lexicon.