Carlos' Corner: 'You have to have a short memory'
Tough day doesn't sour Peņa for long
By Carlos Peņa
Special to MLB.com
Carlos Peņa, a 23-year-old rookie, was acquired by Oakland during the
offseason in a six-player trade with Texas. Expected to replace Jason
Giambi as the A's starting first baseman, perhaps as soon as Opening
Day, Peņa is considered one of the top prospects in the game and is
providing for MLB.com an exclusive daily diary for the 2002 season.
He made an error on the first play of the A's game against San Diego
on Wednesday and went 0-for-3 with two strikeouts, and after the game
he addressed the importance of not dwelling on a tough day.
PHOENIX -- The game got off to a bad start for me today with the
error and didn't get much better, but the challenge that I have to
face every time I make a bad play or have a bad day is this: Analyze
what happened and quickly move on.
When things go wrong, both in baseball and in life, people have a
tendency to get down, to start questioning themselves. But a baseball
career and a life are both too short for that, in my opinion. So what
I try to do is examine why something went wrong, learn from it, then
eliminate the negative energy that's been generated as soon as
possible.
Take my error today, for instance. It happened and right away I was
able to identify why. It was because I wasn't moving my feet the way
I'm supposed to. So you didn't see me put my head down. I kept my
head up and said to Tim [Hudson], "OK, give me another one." And then
I made some nice plays after that. Why? Because I was able to erase
the bad memory very quickly.
It's the same with my strikeouts. Of course I don't like to strike
out, but it's going to happen. So what I do is think about what I did
wrong as soon as I get back to the bench. If I pulled off the ball or
had a bad swing, I think of how to prevent it next time, or ask one
of my coaches or teammates to help me fix it. But remember, these are
big-league pitchers I'm facing. Sometimes they're just going to beat
me. It's not always because of a bad swing, and it's important to
realize that, too.
The key for me is simply to have a short memory for bad things. For
the good things, OK, you can hang onto them longer. That's good. Like
if I went 3-for-4 today with three line drives in the gaps, I want to
keep that positive energy as long as I can. But I didn't do that
today, so I want a short memory of it. You want to analyze things,
but you have to be careful not to overanalyze them.
Carlos Peņa's diary appears as told to Mychael Urban, who covers the
A's for MLB.com.
