Box of Hammers

If your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.

The baseball coaching world can sound like an echo chamber. We repeat the same ideas back and forth, louder and louder, as if the complex, individualized puzzles of skill acquisition and player development can be solved with nothing more than a box of hammers. Some might be bigger or shinier than others, but at the end of the day… they’re still just hammers.

If you want a real toolbox, you’ll need more than that.

The best coaches I’ve learned from weren’t all from baseball. Martial artists, data analysts, tennis coaches, dancers, archers, rugby players, acrobats — each of them showed me something about our game that I had never noticed. Their perspective helped me break through the plateaus that happen when you learn inside a tight, confident, and very loud circle of “experts.”

An open mind challenges the orthodoxy. It unlocks doors you’ll never find by blindly following accepted beliefs. Some coaches insist their way is the only way — but that’s just selling people a bag of hammers and calling it a complete toolbox.

If you’re ready to expand your own toolbox, look beyond baseball. Read widely. Watch something new. Study another discipline. The tool you need to unlock your next level might be sitting somewhere you never thought to look.