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Keeping It Simple Isn't Always Simple

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By MARC LANCASTER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 10, 2008

Updated: 08/10/2008 12:22 am

SEATTLE - Carlos Pena was an engineering major in college and has said he probably would have pursued a career in computer engineering if baseball hadn't come calling. His conversational patterns tend toward run-on sentences that weave this way and that before reaching a well-thought-out conclusion. On the field and off, his brain inevitably churns through this possibility and that, particularly when he's struggling at the plate.

All of which makes the key to Pena's success as a hitter so frustratingly elusive sometimes. For Pena to launch those majestic home runs, to rack up those walks and get on base, he has to find a way to strip away everything rattling around in his head and focus on perhaps the most trite of baseball's hitting cliches: See the ball, hit the ball.

"The best way to put it is that you eliminate the unnecessary so the necessary can express itself," Pena said. "It's like getting rid of all that that really doesn't help you - all the thinking, all the overanalyzing, all the pressures that I know I add to myself - and keeping it as simple as, 'OK, see the ball.'"

It isn't as easy as it sounds, and that focus has come and gone for Pena throughout this season. But he's in one of those zones now.

Entering Saturday, the first baseman had collected six hits in 13 at-bats during his previous four games, including the game-winning homer Wednesday against Cleveland and another long ball that opened the scoring Friday night in Seattle. He had homered six times in his past 14 games, boosting his season total to 21.

"He's starting to look right," Joe Maddon noted after Friday's victory.

To the Rays' manager, Pena's pitch selection is the prime indicator for whether he's running hot or cold at the plate. And it isn't just parsing whether a particular pitch will be a ball or a strike in the fractions of a second available to him before he has to swing; it's determining whether he's about to get a pitch he can drive and then following through on it.

"Even though sometimes you can be working a pretty good at-bat, if you're not putting your pitch in play, that also promotes the slump," Maddon said. "So I think right now he's laying off the bad one, and when he's seeing his, he's hitting it hard and keeping it fair."

In expounding on the topic, Pena talks about trust. For everything to work properly, he has to trust his eyes to give him the proper read on a pitch and trust his swing to do something with the information it receives.

Sure, he'll make mechanical adjustments here and there, but that happens mostly in the batting cage or when he's taking swings off a tee. He doesn't want to be thinking about anything when he's at the plate in a game situation other than seeing the ball and hitting it.

"It's unbelievable that the simpler you keep it, the better it will be," Pena said. "I like to consider myself an intelligent man, so I might have a formula for many things, but in hitting the formula is as simple as can be, and sometimes I tend to make it complicated, I know."

The challenge is to maintain that simplicity through the good and bad, from spring training through the playoffs, in a sport that is built around routines but is also such a grind that slipping out of them is commonplace. Pena's ultimate goal is to go the distance feeling like he does right now at the plate - the confidence, the trust, the vision.

"That's what I want to master, even though I don't think you ever get to that point," he said. "But at least in the pursuit of it, you become a better hitter."

Reporter Marc Lancaster can be reached at (813) 259-7227 or mlancaster@tampatrib.com.

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