Bert Blyleven

The intensity of postseason baseball is supreme and being the starting pitcher in an October game is such a high it’s unbelievable.

Taking the mound in the LDS, LCS or World Series, a pitcher gets almost the same feeling as he does when making an Opening Day start. But there is one key difference: After an Opening Day assignment a pitcher knows he’ll be back on the mound in four or five days. In the posteason, there’s no such guarantee as every start you make might turn out to be the one you will remember all winter long, good or bad.

The biggest thing is to enjoy pitching in the postseason but to really do so success is needed. In my 22 years in the major leagues, I pitched in five postseason series, two of them World Series. I achieved my fair share of success, going 5-1 with a 2.47 ERA. Here’s how I did it.

A keen focus is a must
Every time a pitcher takes the mound in the major leagues he is pumped up but in the postseason you take the mound even more pumped up than usual. Your intensity is at a higher level as you desperately want to get your team on the right track. And you know your teammates are just as excited and pumped up as you are because they also want to start the game on a positive note. But you are the one who must make the pitches and they must be effective, quality pitches.

So it’s only natural for a pitcher to put high expectations on himself when competing in the postseason. That’s fine but he must also know how to deal with those expectations so it doesn’t feel like the weight of the world is on his shoulders.

It’s important for any pitcher making a postseason start to maintain the same routine he follows for regular-season starts. Don’t do anything different. That would be your first mistake and perhaps a costly one at that.

The crowd noise is a factor. There is going to be a huge crowd and the noise is going to be at another level. That presents a real test to a pitcher’s ability to concentrate under the most extreme circumstances he will encounter in his sport.

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Your concentration has to be rigidly channeled so you can focus solely on one thing: pitching to the catcher’s glove. Your complete focus is on hitting that mitt and making good, quality pitches. You must eliminate everything else around you. If you do this well enough, the surroundings are gone from your thought process, the overwhelming noise becomes a far-off din that you pay no mind to as you’ve honed your focus, you’ve found the zone you need to be in to hit the target on a consistent basis and you won’t be shaken by the type of atmosphere that is unique to a postseason game.

Having your hitters help out
There are other elements besides concentration and focus that go into having success pitching in the postseason. One of them is early run support, the importance of which can’t be overstated. I always looked at it as if I could pitch three or four shutout innings to open up a postseason start, then hopefully my offense could give me some early runs making it so much easier to pitch.

Fans do not realize how much easier it is to pitch if you get early run support. When given a cushion to work with a pitcher’s psyche is affected. He goes about his business differently. Pitching with a decent lead, he’s not likely to walk hitters because he knows that would be the cardinal sin.

With early run support you can go straight out and challenge hitters. The worst that can happen is a hitter knocks one out of the park. I gave up my share of home runs in the postseason but it was my aim that if I was going to fall victim to the home run it would be a solo home run, often the result of challenging hitters when I was working with a lead of at least a few runs.

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People would kind of laugh at me when I told them solo home runs are sometimes rally-killers. I’d rather give up a solo home run than two doubles because with two doubles there is the potential for another run to score where as if a guy goes yard with no one aboard, I have a better chance at limiting the damage to one run than if I gave up multiple hits.

Sometimes when someone on a team hits a solo home run that club – whether it wants to admit it or not – at least subconsciously thinks okay, we got a run this inning so now let’s go pitch and play defense and it’s that mindset that can help take a team out of a big inning.

In contrast when pitching from behind in the postseason, the most important thing is not to keep thinking about what went wrong in the last inning or what went wrong with the last hitter. You need to refocus, exercise damage control and stay away from being tagged for a big inning. That’s so important to successful pitching in October.