A Book of Walks by Bruce Bochy

PUBLISHER’S NOTE
    A WALK WILL DO YOU GOOD
    For millions of San Francisco Giants fans, it feels like Bruce Bochy is a member of the family. We’re so used to seeing his face in the dugout, staring out at the field with a calm, unbothered look almost no matter what happens. He stares out at the action “with all the fuss and fury of a guy watching ribs slow-cook on the grill,” as I put it in the April 2013 issue of San Francisco Magazine . This preternatural unflappability of Bochy’s is essential both to his persona and to his development into probably the best field manager in baseball, a lock to end up in the Baseball Hall of Fame one day.
    â€œHe never looks like a guy who is beaten up by the job,” ESPN anchor and reporter T.J. Quinn commented. “Even Joe Torre sometimes looked like he just came out of an alleyway beating. You could see the scars. With Bochy, you never do.”
    As fans watching at home we know he can’t be as calm as he appears to be. We know that somewhere deep down he’s as jumpy as we are when a Giants reliever loads the bases and goes 3–0 on a hitter with the game on the line. Yet time and again, Bochy has demonstrated that the higher the tension level ratchets up, the calmer he comes off, not just to us watching at home but to his players as well. They credit his even keel as a key factor in the Giants’ unlikely run of winning the World Series in 2010, 2012 and 2014. His deep well of calm — “Zen-like equipoise” I dubbed it in that article — represents the ultimate vote of confidence in his players and encourages them, in turn, to take a longer view and avoid overreaction to short-term setbacks.
    â€œOne could make the case that he, not Phil Jackson, is the real Zen Master,” Chris Ballard wrote in the December 18, 2014, issue of Sports Illustrated .
    It turns out there are lessons to be learned from Bochy. We can’t be him. Very few of us wear World Series rings or serve as a confidante to Buster Posey or Hunter Pence. But we can be a little more like him. We can learn from his example.The Bochy Way is no great mystery. His approach is right there to be seen and emulated — or not:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  ·        Be yourself
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  ·        Don’t overthink
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  ·        Trust your people and trust your gut
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  ·        Lose yourself in a long walk
    The last of these four points might be the key to the whole bunch. Yes, just being yourself is to a certain extent an art form one naturally embraces and pursues or not; it has to come from within, a calm and steady sense of who you are, so you don’t constantly feel pulled this way and that. But in fact, we all need a little help sometimes in regaining our bearings. We all fall into the trap of reacting to events, caught up in this or that disappointment or setback, out of balance because we’re not quite in the moment. Bochy’s long walks help him catch up. They help him stand foursquare in the here and now. They help him jettison the mental clutter that builds up. They help him shoo away the remnants of any distractions so he can take life — and the ups and downs of a baseball game — as it comes, on its own terms.
    â€œIt’s my time to kind of clear the head out,” he says. “It’s just a world of difference, it helps the mental side out so much, I’m convinced of it. I just think better after a walk.”
    Going for long walks carries over to the next two points as well. Bochy as manager understands a basic truth of life that we all know, but sometimes forget: Most of our important thinking comes ahead of time . Bochy thinks every game through beforehand. Often he sequesters himself alone in his manager’s office pregame for ten or twenty