Baseball Beginnings

By John Klima
December 18, 2009

Andrew Lambo had a long summer in Double-A and he’ll tell you so. While Lambo was struggling in pro ball for the first time, he got a crash course in how nasty baseball reporters, fans, fantasy baseball owners and impatient skeptics can get when a prospect ranked No. 1 in his organization prior to the season suddenly discovers, wait a minute, learning to play this game isn’t as easy as it looks.

I saw Lambo in the Arizona Extra-Work League recently and I’ll break him down for you in a sentence: he doesn’t trust his hands. That’s an adjustment that he’s going to have to make to have success. Hate to be so blunt, but when they break this guy down in staff meetings, that’s something they’re going to say. When I talked to Lambo, I offered that impression, and he agreed. You have to like it when a guy can look himself in the mirror and think about what he can learn from a few poor months. Baseball Beginnings caught up with Lambo out in the barren wastelands of professional Fall Ball.

Baseball Beginnings: Not to bury you, but this couldn’t have been the season you wanted.
Lambo: It wasn’t the season that I wanted. But I thought it was a good learning experience. That double-A league was tough, but I thought I learned more about the game this year than I ever had before. I think you have to take it as a positive. You can’t sit there and sulk. You know you have the ability. You know you can hit those guys. You have to bring a little bit more mental consistency up there. The game is faster. You have to slow things up. I didn’t know how to do it. Things got too big. I just needed to relax and start like I had success before. I tried to bring that out here. It’s not my swing or my mechanics, it was what I was swinging at. It was like my mental approach was not there at all. It just deteriorated at the end of the season.

Baseball Beginnings: Did it get better or worse as the season progressed?
Lambo: The first half was better than the second half. The second half, I just started giving up.

Baseball Beginnings: This was the first time you had struggled consistently.
Lambo: In pro baseball, yes.

Baseball Beginnings: So now you had to learn how to deal with it. How did you cope with struggling for the first time? Did some of the mental aspects seep into the swing mechanics?
Lambo: A little bit, but I don’t think it was as bad as my approach. It wasn’t smart. I wasn’t mentally there. I could go on and on, but my mental was not there. When people tell you when you’re younger that the game is 90 percent mental, they’re not lying. Now you really do understand how mental it is. But you don’t want to think too much. You want to go out and have a good game plan. The biggest thing is to have one game plan that fits you. Don’t get too big. Just find your game plan. If you have a consistent game plan, your outcome is going to be good. But you have to have a consistent game plan and that’s where I struggled. I was up and down. If I don’t pay attention to approach as much as I do to my swing, then that’s a roadblock. You have to really pay attention to what’s going on. What’s the count? Who’s on? Who’s the pitcher? What does he got? Those are the little things you need to be aware of.

Baseball Beginnings: So you’re talking about situational awareness.
Lambo: Yes, absolutely. Situational awareness is a good wording for it. Situational awareness is what got me. I didn’t have a handle on what they wanted to do with me with first and third and a runner on first and no outs. I figured it out when they would throw me three sliders in the dirt and I would swing at all three of them.

Baseball Beginnings: So you have the physical, now you’re telling me that you’re learning how to play the game, and never realized that you’d have to.
Lambo: You kind of just want to skim by and just see ball and hit ball. It’s not really how it works. You have to have a game plan. That’s the biggest lesson from this year for me. As far as I’m concerned, it’s up to me to make the adjustments and prove that I can play.

Read 2009 Spring Training Andrew Lambo Q&A

Categories: 2009 Minor Leagues
Tags: Andrew Lambo, Los Angeles Dodgers