re: CPM on Off the Bench

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It’s not that at all. Being mentally tough is huge for a baseball player. That doesn’t mean it’s okay for your coach to be the one to try and mentally break you down publicly. Skip was a HUGE proponent of belief and desire and confidence. If pretty good players could convince themselves that they are great, they can have confidence and overperform. While Skip could tear guys down When needed and expected a lot, he also built them up and he rarely spoke this way to the media because he knew his guys were listening. Hearing your coach 3 weeks into the season say that this team just isn’t as talented as he thought creates a mental hurdle that shouldn’t exist. Why try to hurt your team’s confidence like that???

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I agree with all this and think Paul’s public persona is very off-putting, and I THINK if I were a player, it would kind of piss me off. But I will concede that he spends a ton of time with these guys that we don’t see and may have a better pulse on their psychology and what motivates them than we give him credit for. It does say something that his teams tend to flip a switch and get hot when it counts.

I do wonder what his former players think of him. Skip’s guys would die for him, but 1) he’s the best to ever do it, a unicorn, and 2) most of his guys won championships, which tend to not only gloss over, but make worth all the bumps along the way. The ends justify the means, so, 20-25 years later, almost all of his players likely love him, despite whatever relationship they may have had at the time. Paul only has the 1 CWS championship group, so I would be curious what his former players have to say about him in private. He’s not the charismatic giant Skip is and doesn’t have the championships to make all their journeys “worth it,” but if his former players have a respect, admiration, reverence, even love for Paul, then that would say a lot about what we don’t see.