What better way to learn the intricacies of hitting from a current Major League hitting coach?
A group of 17 young ballplayers had the opportunity of a lifetime today in Farmingdale when current Chicago Cubs hitting coach and Astoria-native Anthony Iapoce ran a private clinic with 1-on-1 instruction.
Iapoce works daily with superstars such as Anthony Rizzo, Kris Bryant and Javy Baez but the New York-native is as down to earth as they come. I’ve had several conversations with him and besides being a brilliant baseball coach he never speaks down to anyone and is a great communicator.
His message to the players today is to work on eliminating negative thoughts. He noted that all professional baseball players are talented and they all work hard – but sometimes they can’t hit. In those instances it’s his job to figure out what’s wrong. Iapoce stated that the best players are able to control their thoughts, eliminate the negative thoughts and “flush the bad at bats.” He told a funny story that Anthony Rizzo has a mini toilet in his locker and he tells teammates to flush the toilet after a bad game so that they can focus on moving on to the next game.
“There is a ton of down time in baseball – what you think about, how positive you are, ho confident you can stay – that’s the separator. When you’re on defense, focusing on defense pitch-to-pitch. As soon as you start to see your thoughts carry out – take deep breaths. That brings you back into the moments. That’s what the best players do. Not everyone has the best swing in order to be the best player – they have the swing that works for them and they understand what pitches they can and can’t hit and they look for that until two strikes and then they try to survive and advance to the best at bat. The more and more Major League players I talk to, they talk about controlling their thoughts,” he added.
“We play 162-game regular season, 30 spring training games and if you make the playoffs, that’s over 200 games,” he said. “Baseball can swallow you up. It’s the only sport you play every day. That’s over 5,000 or 7,000 pitches you are seeing at the plate.”
Prior to his job with the Cubs, he served in the same role for the Texas Rangers. He is a graduate of Lamar University, where he played and was drafted in the 33rd round of the 1994 MLB Draft by the Milwaukee Brewers.
