What dog days?
By
Nick Swisher
Special to ESPN.com
It's mid-August. It's hot. Baseball games are being played one after another with no real break in between. Players' bodies are starting to break down left and right as our bodies realize that playing baseball everyday may not have been exactly what was intended for knees, arms and wrists.
I'm loving every minute of August right now and would rather be nowhere else.
My team is on top of the AL West with a nice lead, and I think I can speak for my team in saying that we learned something from last year when we faltered at the end of the season. This is a pretty young team and our organization realized that after last year and surrounded us with some excellent veteran players like
Frank Thomas,
Jay Payton,
Mark Kotsay and
Jason Kendall. These are guys who have experience in the big spots and aren't afraid to tell us what we're doing right or wrong. They've been really strong in the clubhouse for us and have taken a lot of pressure off the younger guys.
Thanks in part to them, we know what kind of team we have and how capable we are of being a very good team. Now we don't worry about looking at box scores and standings and thinking ahead to the playoffs. We're just playing every game and having a blast doing it.
The addition of those guys to the team especially helped earlier in the season, when we suffered through a stretch where guys were getting injured left and right. We held together as a team and kept playing our butts off instead of panicking and ditching the season. That's the sign of a team that's comfortable out there and isn't going to just fall away. We have a little bit of a legacy to maintain in terms of being a second-half team, and we're relishing justifying that legacy.
I learned a lot from last year and from listening to the advice of others, like my dad. He always said the baseball season was a grind and last year proved it to me. A player must stay conditioned physically and especially mentally to succeed out there every day. It's almost easier to stay in the gym and maintain your body and the physical nature of the game than it is to maintain the mental part. At least it is for me.
I've been able to maintain my normal routine of getting to the park about six hours ahead of time and getting my workout and batting practice in before the game starts, but I know there are a lot of other players who aren't able to do that because of various injuries. In that way, I've been pretty lucky because I'm a young player and I'm not exactly sure what's going to work for me late in the season quite yet, so I want to be able to maintain my routine.
Of course, it's easy to let your mind wander in the middle of leading an 11-4 game when you're in the outfield and it's 110 degrees. But you can't let anything distract you for even a second because any team in the majors is capable of running off eight or nine straight wins. This season definitely has been proof of that, with a ton of teams getting hot for stretches at a time, including us.
So, I've let you in on the bad part of playing in August, but don't think that I'm not having fun here. I'm still having a blast. This has been an amazing season for my team, and I'm just glad to being playing meaningful baseball.
[URL="http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/players/profile?statsId=7435"]Nick Swisher[/URL] is a second-year outfielder/first baseman for the Oakland A's and is the subject of ESPN.com's season-long feature, "Sophomore Year."
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2556133&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab6pos2
