Meditation and ‘Success Hotline’: The secret behind Bobby Witt Jr.’s breakthrough
Before the phone rings even once, a mature but bellowing male voice on the other end picks up. He skips the pleasantries.
“Are you willing to pay the price?” he asks, an opening line that resonates more like a demand.
Bobby Witt Jr., a 23-year-old wunderkind shortstop weeks removed from signing the most lucrative contract in Kansas City Royals history, is on the other end of the line. He’s embarking on his morning routine, like a cup of coffee before breakfast. He doesn’t call to talk.
Just listen.
“You’ve reached the Success Hotline,” the voice says, now a little more matter-of-factly.
For the next, oh, four minutes or so, Robert Gilbert, a sports psychology professor at Montclair State University, provides uninterrupted advice through the muffled audio quality of a man driving through a long tunnel. Same as he’s done for the last 12,000 days. I’ll save you the math here: That’s 32 years. Longer than Witt’s been alive.
So what the heck is a major-league shortstop doing taking part in this phone call? It’s the unspoken part of the journey.
Over the past year, Witt transformed from a No. 1 prospect feeling the weight of that promise into the franchise cornerstone around which the Royals are building their optimism of their first playoff appearance in nearly a decade.
Let’s not get too far ahead, though. In fact, first, a look back.
You probably heard plenty about what unlocked the potential that led to a seventh-place finish in last year’s American League MVP voting. They all knew the breakthrough would come, even if they were growing less certain about when.
This story is about how.
“I had people even coming up to my fiancée, like, ‘What is Bobby doing? He seems happier,’” Witt says.
And?
“I found out how to stop worrying about yesterday or tomorrow.”
The Superman Effect
Before every game, Witt finds a quieter space in each clubhouse, home or away, and, outside the purview of his teammates, closes his eyes.
Midway through last year, he added daily meditation to his routine, part of a checklist so precise that he attempts to stay within five or 10 minutes of a pre-set schedule before games.
The hotline is an ease-into-it opener to the day. A quick podcast arrives next. During the meditation, which he implements in the morning, at the ballpark and often once more before bed, he pays careful attention to his breathing techniques and visualizes the most pressure situations a game might provide — and then he visualizes success. It’s not always the home run, by the way. A sac fly can register. Maybe it’s as simple as moving a runner over.
Then Witt is on to a highlight video, which he too watches nearly every day, and it features a familiar subject: himself.
His own clips, played on loop.
The checklist forms a pretty obvious intention — confidence. Actually, better yet, let’s just use his description.
“Showing up to the field like, kind of a cliche, but a Superman effect,” Witt says. “At home, in my car, I’m Bobby.
“When I get to the field, I’m Junior.”
One morning this spring in Surprise, Arizona, Witt sat in front of his locker and explained the origin of, well, Superman.
Or Junior, rather.
He’s full-fledged into it, and it comes with the imagination of his uniform as a cape. But where it comes from is most notable here.
You have to remember that only two years ago, Witt was attempting to make the team at all of 21 years old, even as most of us knew it was a foregone conclusion that a losing team just might find a way to make room for baseball’s most intriguing prospect. At the time, all Witt knew was winning baseball games. Little league tournaments. A state championship in high school. A gold medal with Team USA at the COPABE Pan-American Championships. That’s far from an exhaustive list.
Nearly a decade before his arrival, the Royals had been refurbished by a farm system filled with top-10 prospects like Eric Hosmer, Alex Gordon and Mike Moustakas. They’d turn those into a pair of runs to the World Series and one title.
With Witt, those expectations were back. But the collection was not. Witt stood alone.
His manager at the time, Mike Matheny, said he’d never felt the anticipation of a debut more, and he might as well have been talking about the environment inside the clubhouse, not just the constant topic of conversation outside those walls.
And then, well, the Royals stunk.
Heck, he stunk. At least by his own expectations.
At the close of June last year, the midway point of his second season, the Royals had lost nearly two-thirds of their games since his arrival. He wasn’t helping much — hitting .244 with a .702 on-base plus slugging (OPS) percentage.
“It added up on me, for sure,” Witt says. “Going home, I don’t know the exact number, but in the last two seasons I’ve lost over 180-plus games (203 actually). So what can I do to change it?
“I didn’t want to be just that guy who just goes through the motions. I wanted to be more. I wanted to be better. I wanted to be the leader..”
The Royals had some ideas. One afternoon, general manager J.J. Picollo passed Witt in a hallway at Kauffman Stadium. As it just so happened, Picollo was minutes removed from receiving some updated data on Witt’s slump, leaving the conclusion obvious: The high fastball was beating him.
“Are you swinging at that pitch because you can’t lay off it, or are you swinging at that pitch because you think you can hit it?” Picollo asked.
“I think I can hit it,” Witt replied.
The evidence, Picollo would explain just as hitting coach Alec Zumwalt had before, suggested otherwise. Witt needed to make a change. And he did. Both improved — his ability to hit the pitch and his ability to refrain from swinging at it so frequently.
That’s the genesis of the explanation for how he became one of baseball’s best hitters over the second half of the season, and how he became baseball’s sixth-most valuable player for the final three months, per a Fangraphs metric — if you talk with the baseball minds involved.
But Witt?
He knew he needed to make another change first.
“I just felt like I was so hard on myself — I’m not performing for my teammates, not doing this or that for the game, and we’re losing all these games,” Witt says. “And I was really worried about that. I had so much pressure on myself that it was hard for me to go back and find it again.”
When Witt went home each night, the introduction to losing ate at him. When he returned to the ballpark, his own mistakes from a day earlier did, too. If he had the gall to take a day off, he felt guilt over it for days.
At one point, and there isn’t some rock-bottom moment that led him there, but it hit him, like some sort of epiphany.
I need help.
Not with the fastball. Not with swing.
“I had to improve my mental performance,” he says.
The solution came quickly. Brian Cain, a mental performance coach, would visit Witt’s high school in Colleyville, Texas. Cain’s daily podcast is on Witt’s checklist today.
The Success Hotline is there, too, which popped into a brighter spotlight in 2022, when U.S. Senator Cory Booker supplied a shoutout. (Gilbert has said he makes no money from the hotline, by the way.)
Packaged together, Witt has his own, self-created cocktail of mental performance. To be clear, he believes the hitting adjustments have been critical to the second half of the season he had a year ago.
The top of the list, though?
He best explains it in an analogy that actually struck him while watching the Chiefs beat the 49ers in the Super Bowl last month.
“If you look at the game, there are maybe five plays that really change the game,” Witt said. “But you never know when those five plays are coming, so you always have to be ready.
“I will see maybe 20,000-plus pitches this year. How can I be focused for those 20,000 pitches, not knowing when one might change the game? You can’t worry about yesterday, and you can’t worry about tomorrow. It’s about what is right there in front of you.”
What stares back at him now, on the eve of his third opening day, is that thing that got to him last year. The thing that tends to follow on the heels of success.
Pressure.
It’s back. Still feels it.
A different perspective.
“There’s always been a target on my chest. That’s not going away,” Witt says. “But that’s a good thing. It makes you want to work more to keep that target on your chest. I want to be the one. If there’s no pressure on you, you’re not where you should be. It’s about doing what you can to control how you react to it.”