As a former major league baseball scout, Laz Gutierrez recognized that a player's mental game is what separates most Division I college athletes.
So when he wanted to study why pitchers suffered from the yips – the sudden and unexplained loss of ability to execute certain skills, such as throwing the ball – he enrolled at Grand Canyon University.
Gutierrez, who spent five years as the mental skills coordinator for the Boston Red Sox and serves as the pitching coach and mental skills director at the University of Miami, is one of several current or former major league mental skills or performance directors who have earned doctorates from GCU.
After being a part of five World Series championships with the San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers, Carl Kochan was hired as director of performance for the St. Louis Cardinals in December, around the same time he graduated after successfully defending his doctorate, titled “The Longitudinal, Grounded Theory Study on Psychological Resilience and Professionals.”
Kellen Lee is in his third season as the mental skills coach for the Seattle Mariners, five years after earning his doctorate from GCU in 2020 and serving as a master resilience trainer/performance expert for the U.S. Army.
Chad Bohling, who is scheduled to earn his doctorate this year, is in his 21st season with the New York Yankees, currently serving as the senior director of organizational performance.
And Justin Su’a, who is on track to earn his doctorate from GCU next spring, was the head of mental performance for the Tampa Bay Rays for five years before starting the Performance Advisory Group, which assists coaches, players and executives in professional sports.
The groundswell of mental skills staffers in baseball over the last 20 years illustrates teams' efforts to address their players’ well-being, as well as their physical tools.
“Remember, this is a people-person industry,” Kochan said. “So before a player is ever an athlete, he's a human being. So, really, making sure that we have that human connection is priority No.1."
He added, “Ultimately, getting to know somebody and understanding what they value, versus balancing what the organization needs, both as a player and as a staff member – that's the fine line that we get to walk every day. And then, oh, by the way, try to win baseball games, too.”
One of the biggest ingredients is trust, and it didn’t hurt that Gutierrez knew Chris Sale – the 2024 National League Cy Young Award winner with Atlanta – when Sale pitched at Florida Gulf Coast University and Gutierrez scouted the South Florida region for Boston.
Sale was drafted by the Chicago White Sox, but the two connected quickly after Sale was traded to Boston after the 2016 season, when Gutierrez already transitioned to the mental skills department.
“He’s an easy guy to talk to because he was in the game and knew both sides of the ball,” Sale said. “He knew how to get information out of people and make them feel comfortable, but he also knew the game and knew when was the right time to go about it.”
Before one of Boston’s off-days, Sale planned to fly to Naples, Florida, to visit his wife and three children and invited Gutierrez, who then could rent a car to drive about 100 miles to see his family.
“There might have been only 14 seconds of silence the entire time,” Sale recalled of the flight. “We spent the whole time talking about anything and everything. Laz is one of my guys.”
As a former strength and conditioning coach, Kochan sought ways to improve his craft and marveled at how mental skills coach and former major league pitcher Bob Tewksbury and sports psychologist/former minor league manager Derin McMains conveyed tough and easy conversations and getting players to view things in a different light while with the Giants.
That swayed Kochan to pursue his doctorate in hopes of understanding what makes players and coaches tick when faced with adversity on a daily basis.
Lee has worked with service members who were thinking about their family and with college student-athletes concerned about an examination, so he recognizes the importance of helping a player direct their focus toward the task at hand and remain fully present.
“Being able to control their focus and focus on essentially what they can control in the moment is a key skill, a key tool in their toolkit to be able to optimize performance in the moment,” said Lee, who played baseball at UC San Diego, served as director of baseball operations at Santa Clara University and taught mental skills and physical education at Presentation High School, an all-girls school in San Jose, California.
Lee’s dissertation focuses on the mental component of injury rehabilitation.
“I just saw that particular subgroup of athletes could seriously benefit from just making sure that their mind is good, super confident going back into sport,” Lee said. “Because fear of injury is really common. Fear of like, 'Oh no, like, am I going to be as good as I was before?’"
Lee’s sounding board includes wife Jaclyn, who is an athletic trainer in San Jose, and brother Korey, a catcher with the Chicago White Sox and his spring training roommate, thanks to the proximity of their spring facilities.
“I tell our players that I feel like I have the answers to the test, because my brother will tell me everything about what players are thinking about, what the pressure are at the high level, and I'm able to use some of those stories to connect what I spent years and years and years studying and understanding and being able to apply it in a very real way,” Lee said. “I'm using real-life examples coming directly from a player.”
Lee liked that GCU professors emphasized that he choose a topic he was passionate about, rather than be steered in a certain direction.
“I felt the power to be able to determine where I wanted to go and how I wanted to go about it,” he said.
GCU News senior writer Mark Gonzales can be reached at [email protected]
***
Related content:
GCU News: Doctoral graduate earns green light on traffic stop study
GCU News: Prized baseball possessions in hands of GCU student
