Welcome to Boost Mode, my weekly notebook from the road in international baseball.

After more than 30+years as a player and coach — from dugouts and sitting on buckets to long train rides across Europe talking baseball with other coaches — one thing has become clear to me:

The game never stops teaching you if you’re paying attention.

So each week I hold myself accountable to growth by sharing four simple things with this community:

What I’m Reading.
What I’m Watching.
What I’m Learning.
What I’m Writing.

Some ideas come from research.
Some from conversations with great baseball minds.
Some from experiments we’re running with our players.

But the goal is always the same.

Observe. Adapt. Compete.

If one idea in here helps you see the game differently or move your program forward, then Boost Mode is doing its job. ⚾

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Most athletes grow up hearing the same instruction:

“Repeat the same movement every time.”

But science — and high-level performance — tells a different story.

The human body is not designed for perfect repetition.
It’s designed for variation.

And that’s a good thing. ⚾

What if I told you that trying to repeat the exact same movement every time might actually make you worse?

And possibly more likely to get injured.

Most athletes grow up hearing the same advice:

“Repeat the same movement over and over.”

But the human body doesn’t work that way.

In fact, science shows the opposite.

Your body is designed to produce variation — small differences in movement from one repetition to the next.

And those differences are not mistakes.

They are how elite performers adapt.

⚾ A pitch is never the same.
🎾 A tennis ball never arrives the same way.
🏃 Your body never feels the same from day to day.

So if the environment is constantly changing…

why would the solution stay the same?

Your body produces variation everywhere.

❤️ Your heart beats with slight changes in rhythm (HRV).
👀 Your eyes constantly make tiny adjustments to see clearly.
⚡ Your nervous system fires signals with natural variability.

For years scientists thought this was noise — something to eliminate.

Now we know something different.

Variation is a feature of a healthy system, not a flaw.

Without it, we lose adaptability.

You might assume that after hitting millions of balls, Rafael Nadal has perfected one “correct” forehand.

But Nadal says something interesting.

Every shot is different.

Different spin.
Different speed.
Different height.
Different angle.

So the movement has to change.

The outcome might look the same.

But the movement solution is always slightly different.

That’s elite performance.

Not robotic repetition

Adaptive precision.

This is exactly why we recently ran our spring physical, reaction, and movement testing with our national team athletes.

We aren’t just measuring strength or speed.

We’re looking at something deeper.

How well can an athlete adapt to movement problems?

Because baseball demands it.

⚾ A pitch changes every time.
⚾ A hop off the ground is never identical.
⚾ A swing adjustment happens in milliseconds.

Great players don’t simply repeat technique.

They solve movement problems in real time.

The goal of training isn’t perfect repetition.

It’s developing adaptable athletes.

More movement options.
More coordination.
More ways to solve the problem.

When athletes develop this ability, something powerful happens.

They stop trying to force technique.

And start learning how to compete and adjust under pressure.

The body isn’t built for perfect repetition.

It’s built for adaptability.

Variation in movement is not a mistake.

It’s how elite athletes solve problems.

So the real question becomes:

Are you trying to repeat movements…

Or are you training your body to adapt and compete? ⚾

The 2026 World Baseball Classic is in full swing, and one team I’ve been paying close attention to is the Czech Republic.

Not just because they’re representing European baseball.

But because their journey connects to my own.

The Czech Republic was the first European country I ever played in when I started my overseas baseball career. I played for Draci Brno, where the current Czech national team manager Pavel Chadim was my teammate at the time.

This winter, in the Japan Winter League, I also had the opportunity to spend a month working with Alex Derhak, another coach on the Czech national team staff.

So watching their journey on the world stage has been personal.

And meaningful.

This year’s tournament has been tough for the Czechs.

After losing their first three games — including a 14–0 defeat to Chinese Taipei — they currently sit at the bottom of their group. Even with one game remaining against Japan, the odds of advancing are essentially gone.

But context matters.

The Czech Republic landed in what many consider the Group of Death, facing powerhouse programs like Korea, Australia, and Japan.

And here’s the remarkable part.

Aside from Terrin Vavra, who has MLB experience, the rest of the roster is made up largely of amateur players who still balance baseball with regular day jobs back home.

Teachers.
Students.
Workers.

Yet they’re competing on baseball’s biggest international stage.

That alone says something about what’s possible for European baseball.

This week’s Boost Mode lesson is about variability in training and movement — the idea that elite performance is about solving constantly changing problems.

And that’s exactly what international baseball is.

Every opponent is different.
Every roster is different.
Every environment is different.

The Czech program didn’t get here by saying:

“We’re a small country with amateur players.”

They got here by finding solutions anyway.

Developing players.
Building a culture.
Competing internationally.

And eventually earning their place in the World Baseball Classic.

For us in Austria — and for many federations across Europe — the Czech example should make us ask an important question.

Not:

“Why can’t we do that?”

But:

“How did they do that?”

What decisions did their federation make?

What structures did they build?

What risks did they take?

Because progress in European baseball will not come from excuses like:

“We’re small.”
“We don’t have professionals.”
“We don’t have the resources.”

It comes from thinking differently.

From building systems.

From committing to development.

From making competition the driver of growth.

The Czech Republic may not advance in this year’s World Baseball Classic.

But their presence there matters.

For their players.

For their federation.

And for all of European baseball.

Because it proves something important:

You don’t need perfect conditions.

You need belief, creativity, and the courage to compete anyway.

And that mindset — just like variability in training — is what helps programs adapt, evolve, and eventually break through. ⚾

And honestly — I felt amazing.

This winter, after a lot of travel and a busy international schedule, I’ve made a commitment to prioritize my physical fitness routine. As I get older, I want to make sure I’m not just maintaining my health, but actually getting stronger and more resilient with age.

Part of that process has been experimenting with different recovery practices — fasting, training, sauna sessions, and ice baths.

What I’m learning is something simple but powerful.

Your body talks to you.

We just have to take the time to listen.

I came across a passage this week that really resonated with me:

That idea connects directly to this week’s lesson on variability and movement.

Our bodies are constantly giving us information — small changes in energy, tightness, fatigue, recovery, and movement quality.

If we ignore those signals and try to operate like machines — doing the same thing the same way every day — eventually something breaks.

But when we develop awareness — physically and mentally — we can adjust.

We recover better.
We move better.
We perform better.

For me right now, that means mixing things up.

Strength work.
Recovery work.
Sauna heat.
Cold exposure.
Movement training.

Different stresses.

Different recovery.

The body adapts when we give it variation.

Which brings us right back to this week’s Boost Mode lesson:

The human body isn’t built for perfect repetition.

It’s built for adaptation. ⚾

If you know Hiro, you know one thing immediately:

He’s a charting master.

The guy sees the game through spreadsheets the way great hitters see the ball out of a pitcher’s hand.

Somewhere around hour ONE of that train ride, we started talking about something that fascinates both of us:

Swing decisions.

Because when you really study hitting at the highest levels, one thing becomes clear:

The best hitters in the world aren’t just great swingers.

They’re great decision makers.

Every pitch creates a decision.

Swing or take.

But the best hitters in baseball operate with a mental model I call:

Yes – Yes – No.

They are ready to attack the pitch…

until the pitch tells them not to.

That ability — deciding correctly in milliseconds — is one of the biggest separators between elite hitters and average ones.

So the question Hiro and I started asking was:

How can we measure that for our national team players?

Not with expensive technology.

But with tools we actually have.

We realized that with a well-built spreadsheet, we can turn simple game charting into real coaching insight.

All we need to track is two things for every pitch:

1️⃣ Quality of the pitch (Ball or Strike)
2️⃣ Quality of the hitter’s action (Swing or Take)

From those two variables, we can categorize every pitch into four outcomes.

Now every pitch produces a decision score.

From there we can generate two powerful metrics.

((Zone Attacks+Winning Takes)/Total Pitches)×100((Zone\ Attacks + Winning\ Takes) / Total\ Pitches) \times 100((Zone Attacks+Winning Takes)/Total Pitches)×100

This tells us how often the hitter made the correct decision.

In other words:

How good is the hitter’s brain?

Swings in Zone/Total StrikesSwings\ in\ Zone / Total\ StrikesSwings in Zone/Total Strikes

This tells us if a hitter is too passive or properly aggressive in the strike zone.

Because sometimes the problem isn’t chasing.

It’s not attacking when you should.

The real power comes when we layer more context on top.

For example:

⚾ Count-based decisions
Are hitters better in 2–0 counts than in 0–2 counts?

⚾ Pitch-type decisions
Are they making better decisions against fastballs than off-speed?

⚾ Contact quality
Are good decisions actually leading to hard contact?

When we start connecting those dots, we move from simple charting…

to a scouting report on the hitter’s mind.

Great hitting isn’t just mechanics.

It’s decision making under pressure.

And if we want to build better hitters in Austria, we have to start measuring the thing that matters most:

The decision before the swing.

That’s the work we’re building toward right now for 2027 and beyond.

One spreadsheet at a time. ⚾📊

The Czech Republic may have battled through the Group of Death at the World Baseball Classic, but they’ll return to Europe alive, experienced, and better for it. The lesson is the same one we see in movement science, swing decisions, and even personal health: we can’t keep doing the same thing the same way and expect progress. Sometimes growth comes from small adjustments — training variability, looking at the right stats, or even doing something uncomfortable… like not eating for three days. The athletes, teams, and federations willing to embrace those uncomfortable changes are the ones that eventually break through. ⚾