Towson’s coach, Matt Tyner, often talks about “the process”. Playing every play, every pitch, every at bat with the same focus, backed by preparation. Playing with awareness, with confidence, that you know what to do and are ready to do it. It’s not just a matter of cliche’d fundamentals, but really being totally committed to every single moment of the game. A matter of mindfulness, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Nearly all coaches, of course, say things like this, but it is a subtle shift in priorities. You look at things top-down or bottom-up. The top-down perspective says, “Do everything possible to win the game (even if it’s outside of your abilities). Play with 110% effort (even if it means doing something you’ve never tried). Leave it all on the field (if you lost you must not have tried hard enough).” The bottom-up perspective says, “Make the right play, every single play (because you don’t want mistakes to snowball). Practice with 100% exact effort (because then you will play that way by default). Visualize every play before it happens (so you don’t leave any opportunities on the field).
As this season has gone on, you can see the process taking hold of the Towson baseball team. Though they dropped two of three games this weekend, the Tigers pushed one of the best teams in their conference to the brink in both losses. One could argue that they lost two innings this entire series. The mistakes that defined the first month of the season are becoming more and more rare.
University of North Carolina Wilmington used fourteen pitchers this weekend. Towson used six, two in each game, and not one threw a wild pitch. Tigers’ pitchers hit a single batter; UNCW hit five. The Seahawks, one of the best offenses in the Colonial Athletic Association, scored 13 runs this series. Towson scored 14 in one game. The Tigers are not one of the big boys, not yet, but this weekend proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that they can hang with them. The process is working. It’s a beautiful thing to see.
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For the second time this season, Towson got over a bad loss by putting it on Delaware State, using a pair of long balls to power their way to a 6-2 victory. But this game was highlighted by a couple of fantastic pitching performances.
