JohnFMurray.com

You probably saw it if you watched any of ESPN’s coverage last June. It was a tiny porcelain replica, perched on a shelf in the dugout whenever the Titans played. The object wasn’t to take a bat to it after a particularly aggravating strikeout, but to use it as a reminder to flush away a bad at-bat or a bad pitch — to focus on the task at hand and not be distracted by previous failures.

The powerful reminder was the work of Ken Ravizza, a professor in the school’s Division of Kinesiology and Health Science. The success that followed was another boon to the growing, maturing relationship between sport and psychology.

“Mental skills training,” it’s called. Athletes spend a lot of time on strengthening their bodies and honing their mechanics, but there’s also an increasing emphasis on the way the brain affects performance.

Yes, it may be too new age in some quarters, where the macho, I-can-fix-my-own-problems attitude still applies and some coaches and managers feel threatened by outside advice.

Still, when the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez recently acknowledged that he was undergoing therapy to deal with personal issues, it may have busted some more barriers.

“I think it’s definitely becoming more and more accepted, simply because of the influence that the mental side has on performance,” said John F. Murray, a sports psychologist in Palm Beach, Fla., in a telephone interview. “Often, the difference between winning and losing, or between performing well and not performing well, is how you manage the enormous amount of potential distractions.”

Fullerton’s baseball team, which continues defense of its national title in an NCAA super regional at home against Arizona State beginning Friday, seems a classic example of what happens when you tend to the mind as well as the body.

Flash back to early April 2004. Ravizza, who teaches courses in sport philosophy, applied sport psychology and stress management at Fullerton, received a call from Titans coach George Horton seeking help. Nothing else was working: CSUF was 15-16 and out of the national Top 25, and Horton was out of ideas and out of patience.

Ravizza’s first words to the team: “I don’t know why you are feeling so sorry for yourselves. You have the chance to make the biggest comeback in Cal State Fullerton history.”

In individual and group sessions, Ravizza worked on players’ confidence, focus and sense of team, while providing methods to cope with pressure and stress. He started the momentum and the team took it the rest of the way, winning 32 of its last 38 games and the school’s fourth national championship.

“I saw guys who were insecure, who had lost their confidence,” Ravizza said in an interview with Athletic Management magazine. “I saw guys who couldn’t focus. Mostly, I saw guys who were trying too hard and not getting results. And the harder they tried, the worse it got. And as it got worse, they had no strategies except to try even harder. And ‘try harder’ never works. You have to have something else to go to.”

Ravizza has worked with the Angels, the Nebraska and Arizona State football programs, UCLA’s softball team and a number of U. S. Olympic teams in different sports. And he’s pulled off the neat trick of advising both Fullerton and its baseball arch-rival, Long Beach State.

“He’s really wonderful at rolling up his sleeves and digging up the dirt with the guys,” said Sue Ziegler, a sports psychologist at Cleveland State University, in a phone interview. “He’s a guy’s guy. He’s very effective in terms of communicating, giving you quick and easy strategies that you can implement right off the bat.”

The lessons continue with the 2005 Titans. During last weekend’s regional tournament at Fullerton, Titans outfielder Sergio Pedroza was asked about dealing with a recent hitting slump and whether his approach changed.

“I did the same thing,” he told reporters. “I stuck with the process. I wasn’t getting rewarded. Sometimes it happens in hitting. I talked to Ken Ravizza and he told me it (slump’s end) was going to happen eventually as long as you don’t let it get to you.”

The field of sports psychology, or at least the study of the mind’s effects on performance, goes back as far as the early 1900s, when Indiana University psychologist Norman Triplett determined that cyclists rode faster in groups or pairs than they did when alone. Coleman Griffith of the University of Illinois began more expansive research on sports in the 1920s, and actually did some consulting for the Chicago Cubs for a time in the late 1930s.

But sports psychology didn’t take off until the 1970s, after Eastern Bloc success in the Olympic Games prompted people in this country to take a closer look at the techniques the other side was using.

Today, athletic departments such as Penn State and Oklahoma employ full-time sports psychologists. Most other schools — such as Fullerton, with Ravizza, or UC Riverside, which borrows Bob Corb from the school’s Counseling Center — will use a sports psychologist on an occasional or as-needed basis. Some professional organizations retain psychologists as consultants, and a greater number of individual sport athletes have sought help.

“(Golfer) Brad Faxon said that in 1984 if you worked with a sports psychologist, people thought you were weird,” Murray said. “Now if you don’t work with a sports psychologist, people think you’re weird.”

But the players also understand the enormous expectations and the pressures that come with those pinstripes.

Eventually every Yankee, even Derek Jeter, will experience the wrath of a stadium crowd. It’s as inevitable as a delay on the D Train.

In a little more than a year as a Yankee, third baseman Alex Rodriguez already has run the emotional gantlet. He has experienced the exhilaration of a pennant race, followed by the devastation of a history-making playoff loss to the Boston Red Sox.

Who knows what it is like to be A-Rod in New York?

To carry all those heavy expectations every day. To listen to the boos that tumble on him from almost every park in the American League. To feel like he has to play like a Hall of Famer every game to justify the largest contract in big-league history.

This season, he has been exceptional. Rodriguez is leading the American League in home runs, runs scored, RBI and slugging percentage. He is third in on-base percentage and fourth in batting average.

So who knows what combination of stresses and successes led him into therapy? But last week Rodriguez, perhaps the world’s most image-conscious athlete, announced he is seeing a shrink.

“A-Rod making a statement like that, an athlete of his stature saying that, could advance sports psychology by 10 years,” Dr. John Murray, a sports psychologist in Palm Beach, Fla., said by telephone this week. “A-Rod’s efforts will hopefully go a long way toward removing the stigma of getting the help of a sports psychologist, be it for simple mental skills training, or serious counseling.”

Murray, 43, worked with Jim Bauman (now a U.S. Olympic Committee psychologist) at Washington State in 1998, and has worked with the University of Florida and the Miami Dolphins. In his private practice, he has counseled numerous golfers, cyclists and football and tennis players. This week he started a Web site “CongratsARod.com”  he hopes will take the psychological pulse of the athletic community.

“I see it a lot of times, especially in the traditional sports like baseball and football,” Murray said, “where the players might be somewhat reluctant to seek the counsel of a sports psychologist when they’re feeling panicky, or they’re choking, or they’re losing the motivation and wanting to quit. It’s a case where we need to break down barriers.”

Baseball, probably more than any other team sport, is susceptible to psychological problems. The daily seven-month grind, the contemplative pace of the game, the fact that, at its heart, baseball is a one-on-one sport, can make players emotionally vulnerable.

In 1971 Pittsburgh’s Steve Blass pitched two complete-game World Series victories. The next year, he won 19 games. The next year, he walked 84 batters and struck out only 27. And in 1974, his last season, he pitched one game, walked seven and never pitched again.

St. Louis’ Rick Ankiel, who is attempting a comeback as an outfielder at Class AA Springfield, never rediscovered the strike zone after his infamous playoff implosion in 2000.

Reliable-fielding second basemen Steve Sax and Chuck Knoblauch, all of a sudden, had difficulty making the simple throw to first. Catcher Mackey Sasser often had to double-clutch just to throw the ball back to the pitcher.

“What starts as a slump, like going three games without a base hit because of a slight technical or mental flaw, suddenly takes on a life all its own,” Murray said. “Players can lose confidence. They can lose focus. They have trouble managing their energy problems, which leads to anger, fear, even apathy and boredom.

“What players need to know is that there’s nothing to be ashamed of in seeking counseling. Why should there be a stigma? Hopefully, some day we can get to a place where seeking help is commonplace.”

Murray said athletes have to remember a simple message: “As tough as things can get, the mind is even tougher.” And he offers the case of tennis professional Vince Spadea as proof.

In the midst of a record-breaking slump, Spadea came to Murray . Once ranked as high as 19th in the world in 1999, he lost an ATP-record 21 matches in a row and, by 2001, his ranking had fallen to 229th.

“He was ready to quit tennis. The fire had died,” said Murray. “He spent a year and a half living in a cellar. He needed something to re-ignite the fire that was the reason he became a tennis player in the first place. He needed to believe in himself again.

“When he was winning, I don’t think he really appreciated how great he was. I think success happened so quickly, he didn’t realize how good his life was. He was very reluctant to come to me, but he listened. All he really needed was a pep talk.”

Spadea, 30, won his first ATP tournament last season in Scottsdale, Ariz., beating Andy Roddick in the semifinals. He finished 2004 ranked all the way back to 19th.

Spadea needed to hit rock bottom before he sought help. Who knows what moved A-Rod to seek therapy?

Maybe he too needs a pep talk. Or maybe he needs to talk about a childhood where his father left the family when Rodriguez was 9 years old.

Whatever the reason, it took courage for him to make public this very private part of his life. And for this, all of us who have jeered A-Rod now should cheer him.

Dr. John F. Murray is a sports psychologist and clinical psychologist providing sports psychology and counseling services based in Palm Beach, Florida.