Show notes
Brian talks with former Major League Baseball player and Peak Performer Eric Byrnes, the day before they both compete in IronMan Arizona. Byrnes recently came out with a Documentary on his journey from a Major League field, to 8 IronMan competitions as well as The Western States 100. Watch Eric's Diamond To The Rough Documentary Follow Byrnes on Twitter @byrnes22 Follow Byrnes on Instagram ebyrnes22 You will learn about... What drove Byrne's to professional baseball and a career in sports broadcasting Byrnes' unique path to professional baseball Byrnes' thoughts on the Mental Game and exactly what it means to him The similarities of playing in a Major League Baseball game and competing in an IronMan Byrnes' thoughts on success and what it is to him PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION Byrnes: It’s not about the reward. The reward is a process. Once you understand that the reward, the money, the belt buckles, the metals, everything comes easier. Cain: Welcome to another edition of the Brian Cain Peak Performance Podcast. Today our guest, Eric Byrnes, was one of the most electrifying players of his time in Major League Baseball. His all out all the time approach made him a fan favorite and a player whose hustle, drive, effort, and energy was emulated by high school and college players and programs all over the country. A 2013 inductee to the UCLA Hall of Fame, Byrnes always brings the juice. [Bring the juice!] Cain: Whether it’s playing in the outfield for the Diamondbacks, A’s, Orioles, Rockies, or Mariners, working as an analyst for Major League Baseball Network, or in his endurance race career having completed eight Iron Man triathlons - it will be his ninth in two days from now - and the Western States 100 Mile Mountain Race. Be on the lookout for a documentary about his journey into the world of extreme races called From the Diamond to the Rough which follows him through the Western States 100. You can learn more about Eric at www.Byrnes22.com and on Twitter at @Byrnes22. Please welcome to the Peak Performance Podcast Eric Byrnes. Eric, thanks for joining us man. Byrnes: I need some more Brian Cain in my life. Can I get that intro every morning when I wake up out of bed and just get ready to charge? Cain: We’ll create that as an alarm that you can play. Right now mine pops up and says “where is the beef jerky” as a tribute to Jocko Willard. But we can get that to pop up and play for you. Eric, if you would, give us kind of your journey from St. Francis High School in northern California to where you are today now. Byrnes: Well it’s pretty simple. Basically I grew up in Portola Valley which is a small town in northern California which is I’d say probably more known for a lot of the pioneers of the silicon valley either grew up there or at least settled there in the Portola Valley Woodside area. So baseball or even sports in general wasn’t very popular. But I had this dream and vision of (when I was a kid) doing two things. One of them was playing professional sports and the other one was talking about professional sports. I used to sit around with my buddies and we would just debate whatever - football, baseball, basketball, tennis, this and that, whatever it was we were so passionate about it and we just let it eat. We fed off of sports talk radio. That was something to us. KNBR 680, the sports leader, was it for us. To make a long story longer here I ended up going to St. Francis which was kind of a leap of faith for me because kids from my area there weren’t a lot that went to St. Francis which was known back then as the premier sports school really in the Bay Area. They had De La Salle across the bay. You had Serra which was where Barry Bonds went, Jim Fregosi, Lynn Swann, Tom Brady. And then Bellarmine was also a good one. But St. Francis arguably was the best of the best when it kind of came to all around sports. So I ended up going there and playing football my freshman year. At the time - think about this, you’re a freshman in high school. I don’t even think I had gone through puberty yet. I’m just trying to kind of make my way. I’m in a school with I think there was one other kid from my grade school that went there. All these other guys played Pop Warner, they were all friends and whatnot. It was really kind of a lonely place and I was just kind of trying to find my way. Athletically I have never seen anything like it in my life. Everybody were good athletes. So after football season it was time to make a decision whether or not I was going to play basketball. I realized that if I have any chance of being good here for the first time in my life I’m like I need to focus, narrow my focus a little bit. The decision I made (because basketball ran well into baseball season) was hey look I’m not going to play hoops - which my claim to fame (and still is today) probably my greatest athletic feat was scoring 56 points in an eighth grade basketball game. Not kidding you. I worked with Tom Tolbert at KNBR 680 who played in the NBA for like 7-8 years. I always would give Tolbert crap because he had never scored 56 in a game. But anyway I ended up going. I went to the tryouts. Think about this. I told this story at St. Francis the other night when I went back and showed the documentary Diamond to the Rough. There were 50 kids - 50 - going out for a baseball team for 15 spots. Think about that. Cain: This is a freshman. Byrnes: This is high school freshman baseball. There are 50 kids. You know what our tryouts were? Play catch for five minutes. When you get them playing catch we’re going to take half of you and we’re going to put you in the outfield. You are going to catch I think it was maybe 1-2 fly balls, then we are going to put you in the infield, maybe it was 4-5 grounders, and that was it. Backed up with a pitching machine that was spitting balls out in every which direction and you get five swings. Then after that it was like okay. I went in the outfield. I think I clanked one of the balls I was supposed to catch. I go in the infield, beat at a ball or two. I was just so nervous. Then I get to take a couple swings off the pitching machine, foul a c couple off, swing and miss, pop a ball up, pop another one up. “Alright Eric thanks for coming to and we’ll see you, the results will be posted tomorrow in the gym.” So I went to the gym the next day and I just knew I didn’t make it. There is no way. How could I have possibly made the team? I told my mom. I said “look I’m almost positive that I’m going to get cut from this team, I can’t take this, I want to go to Woodside High School, I’m transferring.” It was just too much for me. It was too overwhelming. The competition was too good and the opportunity was too scarce. A lot of life is having opportunity and if you don’t have the opportunity to prove yourself … So I went through the next day and posted on the outside gym wall was all the names of the guys that made it. So I’m looking kind of huddled around. I’m looking from a distance. It’s like “Ryan, Brendan, Bryan, Matt,” all the way down to the bottom. Fifteen names. “Chris” was the last name. No “Eric.” I said “it’s cool, I prepared myself for this, I’m going to Woodside High School no problem.” But guess what? I’m going to look at every one of these 15 guys and I’m going to mark them and I’m going to go out and prove that there is not one of these guys that was a better baseball player than I am. I went back to look at the names, scan the names, make sure exactly who the guys were. I get to the last name and it was “Chris Byrnes.” B-y-r-n-e-s. I’m like “Chris Byrnes? No way there is another Byrnes here, this doesn’t make any sense.” Did he screw up the first name? Did he screw up the last name? What is going on? So I went sprinting after the freshman baseball coach as he was walking away and I’m like “Coach Ferrera, Coach Ferrera!” He turns around and goes “what can I do for you, Chris?” I go “nothing I’ll see you at practice.” That was it. That was all I needed to know. I went from thinking I was getting cut from the freshman baseball team and having to transfer schools to obviously making the team. Cain: 0:08:01 felt standard. Byrnes: And my career kind of took off from there. Cain: Wow. How about that. So you go from making it as Chris Byrnes and seeing the freshman team then you end up getting drafted out of high school - so you obviously had a good career at St. Francis - and then made the decision to not sign pro with the L.A. Dodgers but go on to UCLA. A lot of players that are listening to this or parents or coaches that are listening to this there is always that debate of if you’re a high school kid do you sign and go and start your pro baseball career and get those extra three years of minor league baseball under your belt or do you go to college? Depending on who you talk to you are going to get a different answer - sometimes it’s a dollar figure amount, other times it’s a life experience amount, an education reason. Why did you choose to go to UCLA instead of signing pro baseball straight out of St. Francis High School? Byrnes: I think it’s pretty simple. First of all for people listening to this - and I imagine that a lot of the people that are actually listening are young guys that are trying to find a way. I can’t tell you how important the mental side of baseball is and what that did for me. I just think that my parents instilled in me at a very young age what the most important thing in the world was family first and then education. I knew I had a dream of wanting to play professional sports but I also knew that there was going to be a time and place for it. My belief in myself and my confidence in myself - this was sort of where the mental game kind of really comes in is that you’ve got to be willing to walk. You’ve got to have this ultimate belief in yourself that this is not going to be - when I was a 38th round draft pick out of high school, a 38th round draft pick? I should have been a first round draft pick. Then I got drafted again in the fourth round by the Houston Astros after my junior year where a lot of people would sign. I met with the scouting director of the Houston Astros at the time and he had come back to Cape Cod to watch me play for a week. After the week he was like “hey Eric I’d like to take you to breakfast” and we’re trying to negotiate a contract. The average of the round back then was like $150,000. So they had made an original offer of $90,000 which is nowhere even near the average of the round. Their excuse was that they had given too much of the money to Lance Berkman who they had drafted in the first round. Great choice and great guy to give a lot of money to, right? But apparently it affected their second, third, and fourth round draft picks. Ironically none of us ended up signing. Here was my thing. It wasn’t about the money. I knew that $90,000 - and then you pay taxes on a bonus which is like $45,000. Even if it was $150,000 and you told me I’m going to walk away with $75,000 I’ll go blow $75,000 in a weekend. That wasn’t going to change my life. I understood that. I knew that. What I wanted was an organization that believed in me, that said “hey Eric look we’re going to give you every opportunity to succeed.” That is what I needed. Sure enough I went to breakfast and it was the scouting director and one other guy. They sat there and they said “hey here is the deal, we gave all our money to Berkman, we’ve been watching you play for a week now, we think you’re a circus act in the outfield, you pull the baseball way too much, you can’t hit the ball the other way, you’re fast but you run funny and really awkward, so here is our $90,000 offer take it or leave it at this point but it goes off the table tomorrow.” I’m like wow. Cain: That is what they said? Byrnes: I said “so hold on let me get this straight, you guys are telling me that you are going to basically offer me way less than the average of the round and then on top of that--” I said “hold on guys this isn’t about the money so what do you want me to do?” I said “you want me to sign with an organization that already doesn’t believe in me for the minimal value of the round and I’m going to start with my back against the wall knowing your guys’ feelings about my game.” Where in the manual of being a scouting director when you’re trying to sign a player does it say “let’s go ridicule him and demean him and then monetarily show him we don’t have any support for him either” and think that that person would sign? “You guys can go fuck yourself.” I got up and walked out. That was it. That was the last time I ever spoke to the Houston Astros. Cain: So you go back to UCLA for your senior year and then go on and get drafted and make your way up to the big leagues. Talk a little bit about that mental game or that belief that you had in yourself. Let me slow down here I’m all jacked up. What is the mental game to you, Eric? What is the mental game of baseball? Byrnes: Confidence. Belief in yourself. It kind of goes back to the story that I just told. I don’t respond the way I did without the confidence and without the belief in myself. Even going back to my freshman year I don’t go back freshman year of high school and having that “I’ll walk, I’ll transfer schools, I need an opportunity, I need to play, I am going to be a professional baseball player.” I didn’t tell a lot of people. I told my mom. That was it. I kept it really low. I wasn’t parading around with a megaphone to all my friends. But when I was 13 years old my dad used to throw me in batting practice all the time. He knew nothing about baseball. Absolutely zero. He was a fourth degree black belt in kenpo karate. He’d take me out and we’d go to the town center of Portola Valley and just throw BP days and days and days. Just all day. Eventually when I was 13 I was like there is only so much BP he can throw me. My parents are like “hey we got you a” - they thought they were all clever but they were like “we got you a birthday present, his name is Mike.” I’m like “what do you mean his name is Mike?” “We got you a new friend for your birthday, Mike.” I’m like “what?” Iron Mike. Cain: Oh yeah. Byrnes: So down below where we lived, our house the way it was situated was kind of up on a hill, and then down below in part of the property you couldn’t really see was a batting cage with an Iron Mike machine. When I was 13 years old I cranked that thing up to 90 miles per hour, throwing as fast as it could throw. At first I had a tough time - foul balls off, foul balls off, foul balls off - and eventually *poof* I was ranking it, right? Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam! Well guess what? When I got to face - I was a sophomore in high school. I had just got called up to varsity. I didn’t start with varsity when I was a sophomore. I got called up to varsity to face Dan Serafini. Dan Serafini was a first round pick out of Serra. He threw 92 miles per hour from the left side. A nasty little sink. There were 50 scouts in the stands, maybe more. I went there to face him. Everyone else 0:15:53 sample for right? Cain: Yeah. Byrnes: And I’m like no problem *whap whap whap* three bullets off of Dan Serafini. Barely anyone else was touching him. It’s repetition. It is a skill that was developed through hard work. Even during football season - I played football through high school but even during football season before school in the morning I’d still bang 50 balls before I went to school. I got home at night, the sun is going down, dark, whatever, I’d put on a few lights we’d put up in the cage, boom, just 50 more. Didn’t overdo it. I just loved to hit. Well guess what? Guess what that created? Confidence. So when I got there against Dan Serafini as a sophomore in high school still not sure if I - I’m barely going through puberty at this point and I’m hitting bullets off of 92 mile per hour fastballs when no one else is touching him. Now you’ve got 50 sco…
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