Mental Performance with Andy Bass

This is the Transforming Basketball Podcast hosted by Alex Sarama. This is the podcast helping coaches and practitioners change the way we think about basketball performance. Our goal is to provide the ultimate resource for making sense of applying contemporary skill acquisition ideas within basketball.

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Hi and hello. Welcome to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. I'm Adam Omiecinski, and I'm here with Andy Bass. Andy, if you could do the honor of introducing yourself, giving us a little background of who you are and what got you here today.

I'll be as succinct as possible. So Andy Bass, I'm the Major League Mental Skills Coordinator for the Pittsburgh Pirates. I received my master's and PhD in sports psychology and motor behavior at the University of Tennessee. I played college baseball at Davidson. This is a basketball podcast, so yes, I was there with Steph Curry.

He was a year ahead of me, so I got to kind of see his coming out party. Psychology and philosophy there at Davidson. Was drafted by the Tampa Bay Rays in 2011. I got the yips, somehow just couldn't throw a strike. That got me really interested in the mental game, but I didn't want to let it beat me.

So I signed on with Chicago White Sox as a free agent. I was kind of able to overcome it then, but they released me. And that old adage of psychologists become psychologists to figure their own shit out. I wanted to figure out, hey, what— why couldn't I throw a strike?

What happened there? So that's what really got me interested in the mental game. And I've been with the Pirates since 2018, and I've been in the big leagues since 2021.

Awesome. For those, I would suggest listening to Andy's been— and he's done a few podcasts and he's talked about how he had the yips. I'm curious, Andy, before we even get into mental skills, like, I guess this would be a way to actually get into mental skills, would be what kind of techniques and what strategies did you use in order to attempt to overcome the yips?

A lot of them, looking back kind of retroactively, not good strategies. Some of the ones that didn't help: shutting down, isolating myself, really creating an identity that I— all I am is a baseball player, not looking at things outside of that. My coaches, for all of their good intentions, from a motor behavior standpoint, not great.

They would have me do towel drills. And your listeners are very up on motor learning and ecological dynamics. You all will see how ludicrous this is. A towel drill is basically where I get on the mound and I'm holding a towel in my hand And my coach is standing out down the mound, probably 8 feet from me, and he's just holding a glove out.

And my role is to go through my pitching motion and just snap the towel onto his glove. I'm not throwing a baseball. I am not doing any kind of object manipulation, but he would have me do that for 15 minutes a day. So a lot of things that didn't help.

Some things looking back that I wish I had done would be errorless learning, which is a really good way to kind of negate the hypothesis testing. So instead of throwing to a mitt to get on the mound and put a large net about 8 feet down or 10 feet in front of the mound and just go through my normal pitching mechanics and just throw it straight into the net where I legitimately can't fail.

There is no error that can occur, just to kind of try to find more of the fluidity. And I know automaticity is using that in quotes, but to just get out of my own head and to stop thinking about my mechanics and just let it flow freely and just throw into a net.

Those are— that's at least one thing I wish I had done.

Speaking of getting out of your own head, I'm curious. I actually had this conversation with a friend of mine recently, and then I happened to hear you talk about it on a podcast no more than a week later. And that is, I'm just curious, what is your theory on differential learning having similar effects on the brain as mindfulness practices?

Sure. And this is 100% from Dr. Wolfgang Schollhorn. This is not my original idea. And, you know, please hop in if I'm overspeaking too. Obviously, you have a very in-depth knowledge of this. What Dr. Schoellhorn has found out from his research is that differential learning engages something called the hypofrontality hypothesis— hypo, lessening frontality, related to the prefrontal cortex.

And so it kind of gets you out of your own head by dimming your prefrontal cortex because we're so out of whack using this variation. Our vestibular system is just kicking into high gear. And throughout this process, the 2 waves of alpha and theta are emitted.

And these are the same 2 waves that are also associated with mindfulness and neuroplasticity. And so, differential learning can actually help us reach this flow state and this mindfulness state while also kind of lessening our conscious cognitive thought.

Yeah. The reason I was curious about it was because I started seeing the benefits of using differential learning, especially when it comes to shooting with players. Yeah, essentially getting out of their heads. And because when the missed shots didn't seem to bother them as much, they became more curious.

Obviously the smiles became much more present on their face. And I don't know, like, I'm trying to think of the rationale behind that, I guess, is more or less my question. If you have any idea of why that may emerge.

Yeah, I'll— some of this will be more supposition, more just assumptions on my part. I think part of that is that hypofrontality where you're just not as concerned consciously with what is going on. And I think, and you know, the mindfulness aspect where we're more present in the moment because of those 2 waves of alpha and theta.

And I think also part of it psychologically is sometimes when we get so ingrained in like repetition, like I need to perform the same thing over and over again that we start looking at little things and our expectation becomes, okay, I just shot 5 in a row, I should hit the 6th because I'm trying to do the same thing.

Well, when we're engaged in variation via differential learning, I think our expectation changes. We're like, oh, well, I just tried to shoot it off one foot with my hands way over here. Yeah, I missed it. Okay, like that was weird. Like I think it also just changes our expectations of perfection.

That old idea of perfection is the enemy of good.

All right, shifting gears a little bit. What are the pillars for sports psychology? Like, I walk into your office one day and I'm looking for consulting for sports psychology. What, what are you referencing for every single client that walks in?

With the Pirates, we do have some pillars: concentration, composure, resilience. We use those as pillars, but we don't cast a broad brush on everybody. So I think for me personally, particularly in baseball, a big thing that I fall into for my personal pillars, along with Concentration, composure, resilience, are self-talk, acceptance, and commitment.

Particularly in baseball, because you have so much time in your own head versus in basketball or hockey, these more free-flowing open sports where it's, I just made a mistake, bang, I got to get back on defense. In baseball, you struck out, now you're not going to get back to the plate for 3 innings.

You're just in your own head. So for me personally, it's self-talk and ACT. I used to be heavy into the cognitive behavioral route, which there's nothing wrong with that. I just think it has a time and a place and a sport. But yes, we talk heavily at the lower levels about concentration, composure, and resilience.

For the audience, I'm laughing right now because me and Andy caught up before and we were talking about our backgrounds and how similar they were. And they just got even more similar because I actually was trained in ACT as well after I graduated.

So originally was trained in the heavy CBT, didn't see the effect of it. I didn't— it wasn't personally working for me nor any of the people I was working with. And then I discovered ACT, as it's known. And that it's something I've been aligned with for probably like 6 or 7 years now.

It's very effective. And I suggest anyone look up, probably put it in the link. There's a World Health book that goes through a very, like a cartoon version of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy that the World Health Organization uses for mental health.

That's awesome. This is a podcast, but I could see you laughing. I was like, oh, what did I say something wrong? But I'm really glad that that's just something else we can connect on. The same with me. I came across ACT about 6 or 7 years ago as well.

Okay. So when it comes to self-talk, seeing how that's very important in baseball and we see it in all sports, self-talk, how would you differentiate between beneficial self-talk versus detrimental? Because I want to kind of steer away from positive versus negative because that could be misconstrued.

What's detrimental versus beneficial self-talk?

Absolutely love the delineation between beneficial, detrimental versus positive, negative, because everybody has a different definition of what positive and negative is. And I think when we hear positive, we think sunshine and rainbows, just be happy and smile, everything's fine, which we know is ludicrous.

That's just never going to happen. Beneficial and detrimental. Something that's kind of helped me is the idea of speak to myself the way I would speak to others. So, you know, the golden rule is do unto others as you'd have them do unto you.

Well, if you're my teammate and I'm okay after you messed up coming up to you and saying, hey man, get your head out of your rear end. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Focus on the game. We need you. Like, if you're that kind of teammate, you're that kind of motivator, then that's the way you should speak to yourself.

However, if I would never be comfortable going up to you and saying that, if you were struggling and I was to go up to you at the end of the bench and say, look, yeah, that was a tough play. I get that you're upset, but you've got this.

You'll find a way through this. Keep your head up and stay with us. Then how I would speak to others, that's the beneficial self-talk. For me, anything else is either going to be not helpful or detrimental.

That's good clarification. And that's exactly what I was thinking of, is just everyone responds to interactions differently. They all have different comfort zones, and it makes sense to kind of scale it based off the individual and what they're receptive to.

Absolutely. And when I say the way you would speak to somebody else, the way you would speak to somebody that you're close to, because obviously the closer the relationship, the more candid we can be. So I used to say this and people would say, well, I talk to teammates differently.

Think about the teammate that you are closest to. How would you speak to them? Because if I'm a freshman, I'm not going to go up and talk to a senior the same way I would go up and talk to one of my freshman teammates.

So think about the person or the teammate in your life that you are closest to. How would you speak to them in a moment of strife or frustration? That's kind of the second layer of the Speak to yourself the way you would speak to others.

That's great clarification because, yeah, it makes it, it makes things more personable. And again, your, your level of comfort rises and you're just being very genuine with that person and that's what you would want. So exactly. Shifting to concentration's a funny one for me.

So just broadly, how do you go about working with people's concentration?

Yeah, and I know academically and empirically they're 2 different words, but I think players and coaches for the most part use focus and concentration pretty interchangeably. And so with concentration and, you know, This is something that our entire mental skills department came up with.

So some things I agree with, some things I'm a little more on the fence about, but we came together and we agreed on these pillars. So great. I am more of a fan of the idea of focus when it comes to concentration. Granted, I know they're different empirically, but the way that I speak to some of our players about focus, because once again, baseball is an open sport, but it's a lot more discrete skills within it than basketball, more open.

Granted, a lot of discrete skills in basketball, but you're constantly moving, constantly flowing, is the idea that your focus follows your goals. And that's— and people say, how do I focus up there? How do I concentrate? Have a very, very specific external process goal.

Have you come across the YouTube video? You know, how many— it's a bunch of people in white, a bunch of people in black, and then it says, how many passes does the team in white make? Have you come across this? And for those listening, it then says, go, and you are supposed to, as the viewer, count how many passes the people in white make.

And you're very focused on this, and at the end it says how many, and the answer is like 13. But then a prompt comes up and it says, but did you see the moonwalking bear? And it'll rewind, and then if you stop looking at the passes and just look at the video, there's a person in a bear suit literally moonwalking across the screen.

I show that to people and I say, look, this video is meant to be like, ha, gotcha, you didn't see it. That's good. No, it's good. You were hyperfocused on the passes. And so because of that, you didn't pay attention to things that were irrelevant to your task.

Your focus follows your goals. If you want to be focused out there, be very intentional about what your goal is. Don't just go up to the plate saying, I hope I get a hit, or I'm just going to hit the fastball. I'm going to be on time for the fastball.

No. Where am I looking to hit it? What lane in the zone am I looking to hit? And what type of pitch am I looking to hit? So be very focused on If you have a very specific goal, that's where your focus is going to go, is usually how I describe it big picture.

Is that how you intervene with players or do you do— because I remember at least during my studies, we would have like focused tasks where we would like train things. Well, train things, excuse me. We would have activities where we would attempt to like scale and like go through broad, narrow, and wide different levels of focus.

And we were kind of, I think, hoping that that would transfer over to situations or is it more Along the lines of, hey, let's change our language and let's change our mindset and our intentions behind where our focus goes.

At the upper levels, like AAA and the big leagues, it's a lot less structure of like the formal activities of, hey, we're going to go through, you know, Neidhofer's model of focus here. We're going to go through like, hey, what really helps you in internal external concentration grid?

That's what we used to do.

And yes, and the concentration grids like, hey, you know, all the, all the numbers are scrambled up and you have to go through 1, 2, 3 and find them. We used to do that a lot more. The new regime with the Pirates is a lot more based on organic informal interactions.

But yeah, 4 or 5 years ago, we would have people come into— we called it our mental conditioning dojo. We would shut off the lights, have a strobe light going, and blast heavy metal music and have people go through the concentration grid. And that we would do that.

There would be things we would do out in the field about— we would plant different things in the outfield and say, hey, who can spot these the quickest?

Hmm.

So there were lots, and just try to make it as part of the environment as possible. To answer your question, at least recently with my role in the big leagues, it's been less structured activity and more of these informal conversations or videos that I'll send players.

But the concentration grid is a great one. However, with our talk of ecological dynamics, I do try to make it as in the moment or kind of in situ as possible with our players rather than stuff in the classroom. I really enjoy being in the cage or on the field with them when we're talking about this.

There's that state-dependent memory of, oh, I was in the box talking about this with Andy. So now maybe I'm more likely to remember it in-game.

And that just leads into the question of, since you finished up your studies in sports psychology, you've been introduced to ecological dynamics. I'm curious, like, how that has impacted your practices and how you actually intervene with players today.

From a psychological or motor behavior perspective?

Psychological, actually.

So what I just mentioned there, I'm really trying to And because of my role change where I'm not— at the lower levels, and by lower levels, I mean our Dominican Academy, our Complex League, like Low-A, High-A, anything kind of below AA, players don't know what they don't know.

There needs to be some sort of level of formal education. And there are hundreds of players in any organization. So yeah, there are some times where we do classroom settings where we'll talk about these things. But because I'm full-time in the major leagues, I get the chance to be fully ingrained in the environment of these players, of these 26 players that are active and the rehab guys.

So a lot of what I try to do is out on the field, and the examples are very baseball related. I know I mentioned the video about the awareness test with the moonwalking bear, but nearly 90% of my work is done when I'm sitting in the bullpen while a pitcher is pitching, or I'm out in the outfield during batting practice talking with a player, and everything is based on their personal journey.

Of course, I'll bring in some science every now and then. But I try to be a passenger within their environment. And I'm getting a little theoretical and philosophical here, but it's much less structure about we're going to come into the classroom, we're going to talk about concentration.

No, it's I'm going to be here with you. What do you need from me? And what questions can I ask you? What can I pull out of you versus what can I pour into you? But very much like the CLA, I'm not going to sit here and talk to you a lot.

As Franz Bosch said, the coach— the body could care less about what the coach has to say. Well, psychology requires talking, but instead of me just pouring into you, I'm going to ask questions and you are going to be the drill as you talk.

That is your constraint, is you talking and you working through this.

Got you. Got you. And just because it came up in, in my thinking when you were just talking there, and we're seeing these practices, and this is outside of sports right now, we're seeing like different therapeutic practices come up, whether it be like equestrian.

I've seen that. be propped up. And I always had the idea if I ever had a practice, it would be very informal where whatever interest that— whatever environment they were comfortable in, that's where we would go and basically have our therapy session. Would you say your role is like very similar to what a good therapist would be anyways?

I would definitely say so. And just slight humblebrag here, you know, I've just finished the coursework and have started my internship to finish a second master's in clinical mental health counseling that would make me a licensed professional counselor. So just all the letters after my name at this point, just completely pretentious and academic.

You know, the P in PhD stands for pretentious. But, but yes, I would say that's very much how I work. I was given an office in PMC Park this year, kind of near our clubhouse. I maybe went in there 3 times to meet with a player.

The major— what I consider a win for me is when somebody can be very open and vulnerable with me out in the open. 90% of my work is not done behind closed doors. It is like you said, it is where the player feels most comfortable.

Where do they feel most comfortable? On the field, in the weight room, in the cage, in the locker room. So yes, I would say virtually none of my work is done behind closed doors. And I, I, I've— for me, I view that personally as a flattery, and, and I'm honored that the players would choose to talk to me out in the open like that.

Going back to goal setting, this is probably like the most practical question I came up with. How can coaches change their language around goal setting to make like things like concentration, motivation much more effective? And that, and that goes for like season long when it comes to setting macro goals or even like a team vision or something like that, down to like KPIs that we're keeping track of during games.

I think if we could alter our language and have like a little bit more precise goals, I think that would make a huge impact for the practicality for coaches.

I promise I'm not taking the easy way out because I haven't done this yet. I haven't done the whole answer a question with a question. But given your background in coaching, and just so I can kind of have a little more clarity, particularly in the basketball world, how do you go about doing that given your, you know, strong expertise in psychology and your strong background in coaching?

Like, if I were to ask you that question, how would you respond to that? And then I promise I'll, I'll give you mine, and I promise I'm not going to take the easy way out on that again.

You're good. On the larger scale, it's all about, for me, setting When it comes to vision, I've kind of altered it after my experience with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy towards let's pick out 3 values that really represent what we want to represent as a group together.

Let's, let's coerce and do that. And let's not stop there. We're not just like labeling values. Values is great. What actions are we going to implement in practice and then in games that represent those values? And we can, we can, we can track those and we will, we will have visual evidence of whether we're doing this or not.

And then we can hold each other accountable. On a smaller scale, when it comes to games, I haven't thought about that as much, to be honest with you, is because I've never really been in a head coaching role. But I would— my answer would be to basically, again, along similar lines, like the rule of 3.

So let's have 3 keys for the game. And those keys are, again, I want them behavioral. I don't necessarily want— I want them to be qualitative, something that they can control, as opposed to quantitative that may not be able to be within their jurisdiction.

So I would do it. And then we would touch on those during every single timeout. I think that would be important to touch on those every single timeout. So really it wouldn't be too much different. It's a big part is like, it has to relate to our values.

And then for, even for the in-game stuff, it probably should represent our values in some fashion. And then it has to be very actionable. And that's, that's how I would answer it.

I don't know if I have that much to add to that. I love the idea of kind of the macro and micro goals. And yes, everything should be as involved around process as much as possible. As you were talking about, you know, the rule of threes, you know, if we have these 3 core values and I've never done this, you just kind of sparked this in my head.

I think it'd be interesting depending on how many games you play and how comfortable the coach is. If there are 3 core values, whatever they are, you know, if it's attitude, concentration, confidence, just throwing those out there, maybe after every game or after every week.

There is a player from each week that embodies each of those and gets to wear the attitude bracelet that week or the attitude shirt, something like that. I like those kind of actions more than putting stuff up on the wall, which is good.

But I think it'd be great to have kind of anthropomorphize the goals by having players epitomize those each week or each game. And calling them out within the coaching realm where it has nothing to do with how many points you scored. It has everything to do with how well did you embody this value or this goal that we have.

Awesome. Thank you. That's— I do like the way of embodying it and the physical form of representation versus, again, like the tracking and the board. It just feels very non-personable. It feels very, very machine-like.

There's nothing wrong with having, you know, boards that are tracking stats, that are tracking process goals, like, of course. But I think Like I said, the more that we can make the goals personal, and the best way to make them personal is to show, hey, what does this look like?

And having the player embody it in some way, be it with a sticker on their— maybe not, but just something that they wear where it's literally on their person, whether it's a bracelet, whether it's a shirt, whether it's some type of shorts, anything.

The next topic I want to discuss is motivation. Motivation to me, I'll be curious to see where you go with this. It's a tricky subject. I was taught that we can certainly influence motivation. But at least within traditional sports, it's the coaches will run into the issue of like kind of labeling players like, oh, you're not— you guys aren't motivated enough today.

And it's my job to motivate you. Just expound upon motivation and what role coaches can play and cannot play in the motivation of their players.

Yeah. And I do want to keep this applied. I'm sure you and I could speak for hours on self-determination theory. I understand the phrase, You guys aren't motivated, or the player's not motivated. No, they are. They're just motivated to do something that you don't want them doing.

They are motivated to not work hard. Like, that's, that's a form of motivation. They're, they're more motivated to hang out with their partner. They're more motivated to play video games. Like, they're more motivated to do something, just not the thing that you want them to do.

And, you know, I think I have an understanding of that. It's leveraging the motivation of what they want to do and meeting them where they're at there and understanding what they want to do. I'm with you. I don't think it's necessarily the coach's job to be the number one motivator because the number one motivator is the person.

So as the coach, instead of writing them off as unmotivated, find out what does motivate them and then try to leverage that to get them motivated to what you want to do. And at the end of the day, it's ultimately their decision. And this just came to my head too.

I think sometimes when we push so hard to motivate players, it pushes them away. There was an interesting study, and if I can find it, I'll send it to you if you want to put it in the show notes, where when youth athletes were given the option to quit, they actually became more motivated to stay.

You can call it reverse psychology, you can call it whatever you want, but when it was— it's almost like the, you know, say I won't. Like, you don't want to play, go ahead, you just, just, you know, just— it's fine, you can go ahead and quit.

People are actually more motivated to stay when given the option because now that autonomy comes in For a while, they thought they had to be doing this. Oh, you're telling me I can quit? Oh, actually, I don't want to do that. No, I want to stay.

And then they double down on becoming a little more motivated.

Interesting. Yeah, I think the coach's responsibility comes down to— and this goes to ecological dynamics— is setting that environment where it is, it's much easier to be motivated. It's much more engaging. And that is their level of like, that's where, again, if they're practice designers designing activities, Those activities should be inviting for the players to participate in.

And if they're not, that's all I ever look at when the players aren't motivated. It's like, oh, well, they're just not interested in the environment I'm setting up for them. That's my responsibility to change that. Outside of that, I don't know. Start going in and asking questions and again, getting a little bit more personal and individual.

I love that you brought that up. It reminded me of something that happened to me personally several many years ago. The Pirates, as the Pirates, we used to have these think tanks where we bring in some Pirates employees, coaches, but we bring in coaches from all over, from different backgrounds.

And one of the icebreakers, or just kind of the initial conversations, it was, what is your record as a head coach? Go around. Hey, I'm Andy. You know, I just coached Little League for a little bit, so my record is 35 and 50, blah, blah, blah.

Hey, I'm Adam. My record is this and that. And it came to this gentleman named John Kessel, who is an OG GOAT. Yeah, you look like you've heard of him. And he said, my record is— I just— these numbers aren't accurate based on what he said.

My record is 756 and 11. And everybody was like, holy cow, that's incredible.

Wow.

Tell us about that, John. He said, I had 756 players come back the next year and 11 that didn't. And I failed them because I didn't create an environment that made them want to come back. Those are my losses.

It's a powerful way to look at things.

I thought so too. And at that point, we stopped asking everybody what their record was. It was nobody's topping that. That's, that's it. We're moving on.

That's, that's Definitely a mic drop moment once he described it.

Yeah, exactly.

Lastly, Andy, and this is like where I've actually, even when I was in school, I kind of differentiated, okay, this is a little bit different compared to any other experiences I've experienced therapeutically, is imagery, the topic of imagery. Are there things that coaches could do to maybe incite just some, some level of imagery effects that are a little bit more technical, but could they change their language about certain things that could aid in that process?

Well, there are, and we'll quickly just go through the fundamentals of imagery/visualization. You know, you want to see it in real time, so you want to— don't have it in slow motion. You want to see it in a first-person perspective, so like through a GoPro, and you want to attach the emotions as much as possible.

And when you mention imagery here, are you referring to how a player sees themselves kind of metaphorically or philosophically, or like using it as a visualization practice technique?

Visualization technique.

That's what I was thinking. Okay. Well, you know, we— GoPros exist. You know, I think it would be awesome to at times strap them to people's heads and have them go through practice when— and bringing in kind of film and observational learning, allocentric point of view and an egocentric point of view.

And an allocentric point of view is kind of how we typically think about film study, where the camera's up on the bleachers and it's showing it from a bird's eye view. Same in football. That's fine. It's better than nothing, but it's nowhere near as effective as an egocentric point of view, which would be that first-person perspective.

So that GoPro aspect, so from a film aspect. But yeah, and even just having players go through visualization, there's nothing wrong. I consult in the offseason. I will have the players sit in the locker room or lie down, and I will take them through a visualization script.

They get to tailor it to their needs, but it may be getting ready for the game. It's you're in the tunnel and you hear the music, and then you run out, you smell the popcorn, you hear the crowd, you sense the basketball under your fingers.

So I think as coaches, it's kind of setting a standard of what visualization is, taking them through a visualization script so players know what that is, and then setting aside time to do it. 2 minutes a day or 2 minutes every other day.

Is a player going to do it every day? No, we don't know. They could just be sitting there trying to fall asleep or thinking about their school day. But I guarantee you'll have 1 or 2 people that do it, and then eventually people will start to get— become accustomed to it.

And as coaches, let's do it with them. Let's sit down with them and go through it. And talk about our experience of it. And that way, as the coach, if we do it with them instead of just, okay guys, y'all sit here and do visualization for 2 minutes, I'm going to go to my office, be in the moment with them that way.

Hey, if you feel silly, I'm here feeling silly with you.

All right, Andy. Well, I greatly appreciate your time. Thank you for doing this. If people have any questions and they want to reach out to you, do you have any way of them connecting with you?

I'm one of the weird millennials with no social media, but if somebody does want to reach out, I can't promise I'll get back immediately with spring training right around the corner, but andy.bass@pirates.com. That's my email address. I try to respond back as fast as possible, but understand baseball is a ridiculous sport and it's every day for 12 hours a day.

So I'll do my best.

All right. Well, thanks again, Andy. Appreciate it. Thank you.

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