Baseball and Aikido

http://www.mokurendojo.com/2008/10/want-to-be-great-at-baseball-learn.html

Want to be great at baseball ? Learn aikido !

Tonight I had the distinct pleasure of being invited to talk with the guys on our local radio sports show, Chasing Foul Balls, on K-106. Kel and I talked about aikido and judo and our programs we are doing here in Magnolia. Hopefully I'll be able to get a MP3 of the segment and I'll post it here (if I can figure out how).
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Right at the end of the segment, one of the guys asked Kel, "Yeah, but does aikido help you throw a baseball better?" This was a gentle jibe at Kel for his performance throwing out the first pitch last season at a local college game. I perked up because it reminded me of a great story about Japan's most famous baseball player training with the founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba. I didn't have time on the air t otell the story, so here it is, excerpted from the May-June 1992 Psychology Today Magazine ...
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Bambino San

Sadaharu Oh benefits from martial arts

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As much as any transformative practice that commands a significant following today, certain martial arts facilitate a many-sided integral dvelopment of human nature. At their best they simultaneously promote moral sensitivity, athletic abilities, and a degree of unitive awareness. Some, such as aikido, are superior to modern sports in their reliance upon spiritual principles, and superior to quiet meditation in their cultivation of stillness in action. The transformative power of martial arts can be seen in the influence of aikido on the great Japanese baseball player Sadaharu Oh.

Oh hit 868 career home runs, to surpass Hank Aaron's American record, and won 15 professional home-run titles in Japan during a 22-year career. He also helped the Tokyo Giants win many national championships, including nine in a row from 1965 through 1973. But he might not have achieved his great success without special training with Hiroshi Arakawa, a baseball instructor. Oh has told his story simply and eloquently.

Though he had been a high-school star as a left-handed pitcher, Oh was assigned to first base as a professional because he was a powerful hitter. But during his first three years with the Tokyo Giants, he did not fulfill his great promise and often drank to excess. The Giants' manager hired Arakawa to work with Oh in 1962. Arakawa extracted a promise from Oh that he would stop drinking and smoking, and during their first months of training introduced him to Morehei Uyeshiba, who offered them insights from aikido. Uyeshiba taught Oh about ma, the "psychic time and space" in which a contest occurs, and other aikido principles. But these first lessons did not have an effect. Not until Arakawa made Oh adopt an unusual one-legged batting stance in his hitting. This change in style helped focus Oh's aikido training. The athlete wrote:

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