Why Royals’ Bobby Witt Jr. is the subject of a national ‘Success Hotline’ message
With 10 numbers punched into the iPhone keypad, starting with New Jersey’s 973 area code, a tap on the green icon begins the call.
It doesn’t ring. Instead, there’s a brief silence on the other end, before a 77-year-old man with the energy of a 25-year-old takes over. He’s already in mid-sentence.
“Great minds think alike,” he says as a form of an attention-grabber, because he is the only one speaking. And then a catch-phrase: “Yoooooou’ve reached the Success Hotline.”
We’ve been here before, if you’ll recall. I was introduced to this concept back in February, sitting alongside a then 23-year-old who phones into the hotline daily.
You might know him.
His name, Bobby Witt Jr.
His fame, the soon-to-be runner-up in the American League MVP race, and the player single most responsible for the Royals’ historic single-year turnaround.
Anyway, “This is message 12,294,” the voice on the recording continues.
We’re along for the ride on part of Witt’s morning routine, self-imposed late last season as a mechanism that preceded the improvement we all see. The behind-the-scenes improvement needed to happen first.
He purposefully embraced mental performance, settling on a daily pattern that erased negativity in a sport that breeds failure and replacing it with thoughts of such optimism that he felt it worthy of a superhero persona.
Superman, he described it. Bobby punched numbers into the phone by morning. Junior saw the benefit at the ballpark by night.
But today, I’m the one calling.
Witt is mired in an 0-for-10 skid in the American League Division Series against the Yankees, which returns to Kauffman Stadium on Wednesday night knotted at 1. It’s more of a reintroduction to playoff baseball in Kansas City, which hasn’t experienced it in nearly a decade.
And I know how Witt might be handling it. The same way he handles the 5-for-10 streaks. With his phone call. And with a similarly targeted daily podcast on mental performance from Brian Cain. And with some medication
The Success Hotline is out there for the world, and I’m curious what Witt might hear Tuesday, a day before Game 3. I’ve called a few times this year. But the stakes now, at least for Witt Jr., have never been higher.
“I’m Rob Gilbert,” the voice bellows, “and today’s message is specially dedicated to future Hall of Famer Bobby Witt Jr.”
Wait.
What?
Witt has never met Rob Gilbert. They live some 1,200 apart, Witt in Kansas City, Gilbert in New Jersey, where he’s a sports psychology professor at Montclair State University.
There’s a connection, though. Witt has heard Gilbert’s voice every day for more than a year. He heard Wednesday’s message, too.
And Gilbert? He read my column in the spring, as it turns out, and discovered that Witt was a listener. He made a point to follow his stats throughout the season.
It all lines up so perfectly this week. Gilbert lives just 12 miles from Manhattan, but he grew up in Boston, and being a kid in Boston in the 1950s meant at least a couple of things: You loved Ted Williams. And you hated the New York Yankees.
The reason for dedicating a message to Witt Jr.?
Precisely that.
“I’m definitely a Royals fan this week,” Gilbert told me in a phone conversation. “The Yankees cannot lose enough.”
The story veers in a couple of directions from here.
There’s the cream-of-the-crop professional athlete who had an revelation about needing to renovate his mental approach to baseball and then integrating the 4- or 5-minute message into his layered routine.
There’s the 77-year-old man who hasn’t missed a day of providing those messages in the last 33 years, hoping someone, somewhere, finds their utility.
Both compelling.
Witt is built for what he’s enduring at this moment — a slump that’s magnified because of its timing and its rarity — because he very intentionally built himself for it. He constructed his season, perhaps the best season in Royals franchise history, to treat what we might think is a big deal — like, say, an 0-for-10 skid in a playoff series — as nothing. It hasn’t always been easy. The regime is work.
Don’t take that as a guarantee the results suddenly flip. It’s baseball, after all. Take it as assurance that the process puts him in a better position to flip them.
For a year, a lack of consternation over past results has driven the present. And with Bobby Witt Jr., the present typically looks pretty good.
If we can acknowledge that he has slightly expanded the zone in the ALDS — his chase rate has increased about 5% — we too must acknowledge his acute ability to snap back into place. To, well, find success hours after listening to a hotline reserved for it.
You know, that wasn’t the initial intent of the messages — that professional athletes and politicians and everyday people would be calling from all over the world. Rangers third baseman Josh Jung calls in. Two years ago, U.S. Senator Cory Booker gave it a shoutout.
The original audience? A single class of college students.
Gilbert began as a high wrestling coach, a job in which he trained his athletes five days per week. In 1992, when he began teaching a graduate course in sports psychology, he interacted with his students just once per week. It quickly became an adjustment he wasn’t willing to live with, so he began the recordings as a way to reach his students every day. He mapped out a plan for 14 weeks (or just 98 days, he promptly recalls).
By the end of the 98 days, people from all over the world were calling. So he never stopped. Like, literally, never. He hasn’t skipped a single day. He did one message from a hospital bed. Did another after recovering from anesthesia.
“I want my listeners to get off the line and say, ‘I can do this,’” Gilbert said. “If nothing else, I want to give them an injection of energy.
“You might be in a bad mood, but if you hear a song from high school that you really liked, all of a sudden your mood changes. I want to be a mood-changer.”
How about a momentum-changer?
His background is sports, after all. Gilbert offers plenty of sports analogies over a half-hour conversation. The best athletes in the world, he says, are those who act as though it’s impossible to fail. They lie to themselves in that way, he points out, purposefully forgetting their own history.
That’s where he hopes all of his listeners conclude their daily call-ins. They derive from any number of inspirations, often from people in his life intentionally placing things in front of him.
On Wednesday, after dedicating the message to Witt, Gilbert spoke about what he might include in a hypothetical book he’d author. He recapped the first two chapters, which had come a day earlier: I want that; and I really, really want that.
The third chapter he introduced: I will do whatever it takes to get that.
A fourth chapter: Starting now.
“Just do it,” he said. “Message over.”
But it wasn’t over. Not quite. Three words followed.
“Go Kansas City.”
This story was originally published October 9, 2024 at 10:06 AM.