Build Your Bookshelf

In modern amateur baseball, if you’re thirsty for knowledge you’re not sipping from a fountain — you’re chugging from a firehose. Influencers. Analysts. Perfect Game. Prospect Select. Driveline. Tread. Trackman. Hawkeye. StatCast. Catapult. FanGraphs. Instagram. TikTok. YouTubers with nine million swing breakdowns. The Hitting Guy. The Catching Guy. The Throwing Guy. The Pitching Guy. All of it blasting straight into your skull. Some of that knowledge is excellent. Some of it’s just okay. Some of it you’ll never use.

And on top of all that, the longer you play this game, the more experience you stack up on your own — lessons, adjustments, reps, cues from coaches, innings pitched, at-bats, wins, losses, tournaments, PG, high school, college. All of this knowledge is yours. You earned it the hard way. No coach, trainer, or multi-million-dollar lesson factory can teach you what actual competition teaches you. Playing the game is still the best teacher in baseball.

But little by little, every lesson you learn and every experience you earn starts piling up like a heap of books on the floor. From the outside, that mini-mountain can look impressive. But what happens when you need one critical piece of information right now, under pressure? What happens when that knowledge is buried somewhere in the mess?

When everything is mixed together — upside down, out of order, covered by something else — finding what you need feels like digging through a haystack and hoping the needle decides to poke you in the finger. Suddenly, all the work you did to gain the knowledge has created even more work when you try to retrieve it.

And this is exactly what happens on the field. What do you do when panic hits? How do you reset after a big error? Where does the ball go if it’s hit to you right now? You know the answers. You’ve played this game your whole life. The problem isn’t knowledge — it’s access. Are your thoughts organized? Are they reachable in the moment? Or are they lost in the pile on the floor?

Build a bookshelf.

Create structure for your experiences.

Know where, when, and why the knowledge you’ve gained applies.

This is where mental skills come in. Sometimes it feels like eyewash to write in a journal, or take five minutes to breathe and visualize, or build a simple routine that you actually follow. But without practicing these skills, you’re letting your hard-earned experiences collect dust in a hoarder’s library.

And yeah — I get it. The world doesn’t flip many paper pages anymore. Even Google feels old-school now that AI is doing the searching for us. But really, what is AI except a lightning-fast way of retrieving, organizing, and synthesizing information from the massive digital bookshelf we call the internet?

Learning new skills matters. But the ability to access, apply, and trust what you know — quickly and accurately, in the pressure of the moment — that’s what separates the mediocre from the great.