A personal note from lesson series author, Richard Todd...

I was reading a couple of different books unrelated to baseball, more in the category of business reading, when I suddenly saw parallels in how the brain processes information and how the body responds to stimuli in game situations.

For a long time as a coach, I've known that players can be their own worst enemy. A pitcher on the mound can go from throwing the right pitch every time, to having a complete meltdown in which he simply can't find the strike zone. And hitters have it even worse - a whole sub-industry has built up around the challenges in a hitting slump. Everyone seems to have advice on how to break the cycle of bad swings and bad at-bats, or bat mound outings.

Unfortunately most advice falls into one of two broad categories...

1. mental fundamentals like visualization and positive affirmation and
2. techniques to bring focus to the problems, to assess performance in minute detail, and to use everything from meditation and breathing exercises to tapping.

All of this in an effort to create a mind-over-matter situation.

But the more I looked into this, the more reading I did, the more I took my journey into the workings of the mind, the more I realized an unmitigated truth... for some reason - at the instant we need these mental techniques the most - they help us the least.

We over-think, or fail to think at all. We make what we consider educated guesses which turn out to be completely off the mark.


Why do we fail like this? What's missing in the process that keeps us from conquering the blockages in our brain that so badly mess up our performance?

That's what we explore in this lesson series over the coming days and weeks. We'll look at the parts of the brain engaged in processing baseball events using studies done by leading neuropsychologists and sports psychologists, illustrated with material developed exclusively by WebBall plus advanced brain imagery sourced with permission from Genes to Cognition.

• Introduction
• 1 Learning Process
• 2 Losing
• 3 The Zone
• 4 Choking
• 5 Breaking Out
• 6 Balance
• 7 Balance X
• 8 Fielding
• 9 Visual Input
• 10 Visual Trickery
• 11 Live BP
• 12 Starting Early
• 13 Stimulation
• 14: Lefties