Baseball has developed its own school of thought that draws deeply from ancient Greek wisdom.

Looking back, there’s no way of knowing where it all went wrong. Was the masochism already there at a young age, or, after years of experience, had I developed it as a means of coping? Either way, when I embarked on my baseball career as an earnest Little Leaguer, not even Dante could have anticipated the degree of anguish to which I had committed myself.

Each sport has its own hellish attributes, most of them corporeal in nature. Baseball is unique, however, in that it forgoes most of the physical torment in favor of that of the psychological and emotional. The result is a game whose design exacts a particularly excruciating form of mental anguish, and one that succeeds in pushing even its best players to their outermost limits of frustration.

So why would anyone, let alone some 35 million people worldwide, willingly subject themselves to such abuse? Despite these seemingly prohibitive shortcomings, most of us who have played baseball for any considerable amount of time possess a reverence for the game that borders on the religious. Like many others I know, growing up with baseball provided me a framework that has touched nearly every aspect of my life, and as a result my love for the game is neither mindless nor fanatical, but profoundly grateful.

One of the most important lessons baseball has to teach is how to let go. Consider as an example a pitcher standing on the mound, ball in hand. In that moment, he has just two choices to make — which pitch to throw, and where to throw it. Conversely, as the ball leaves his hand, the hitter has but one choice to make: to swing or not to swing. Granted, these limited choices become much more complicated given situational variables and time constraints, but ultimately these are the elements of baseball over which a player can exert his influence.

Beyond these areas, players have no choice but to allow the game to pass out of their sphere of control and into the hands of entropy. And with entropy comes injustice. During the course of a game some pitchers make mistakes and emerge unscathed, some hitters smash line drives directly into opponents’ outstretched gloves. Errors, bad calls, and luck are all part of baseball, and the possible combinations are as endless as they are without apparent rhyme, reason, or fairness.

Players and coaches respond to such uncertainty by training for it. Many people may not realize that for modern athletes, particularly baseball players, a significant portion of the requisite preparation takes place not in the batting cage or the weight room, but in the pages of a book, or on the exhale of a deep breath during a mediation session with a sports psychologist.

Particularly during my college career, these mental strategies were a huge part of how our team practiced to perform our best. The idea was that by mastering our emotions we would be in the best position to succeed on the field. Those lessons served me well on the diamond, and it didn’t take long to realize that there was randomness and uncertainty in other areas of my life as well.

Homer?

Over time, I slowly began to inject what I had learned from my ‘athletic’ mental training into my personal life. However, what I failed to appreciate at the time was that the mental strategies that my coaches, teammates and I relied so heavily upon borrowed directly from a school of thought that had been around for centuries. This expansion was my initial foray into a larger, ancient body of thought known as Stoicism.

Stoicism was intended by its founders to be an applied philosophy, meaning one less concerned with codifying minutia or expounding abstract theories and more concerned with implementing actionable solutions to help one live their best life. To the Stoics, the best life possible is described as one lived “in agreement with Nature.” However, in the ancient world, “nature” didn’t simply refer to mountains and waterfalls, but rather the entire universe, a logical, ordered cosmos that interacts with and governs all things.

By virtue of being part of this ordered cosmos, each thing is endowed with a certain set of characteristics that are inherently ‘their own.’ For most animals this ‘ownness’ simply entails basic survival instincts; eat, sleep, etc. But for humans there is an additional element: the capacity for rational thought, or reason, and the awareness that one is thinking, or consciousness. Therefore to a Stoic, living your best life meant utilizing the uniquely human characteristics bestowed upon you, namely your consciousness and ability to reason, to interpret the universe and draw inferences.

Through this practice of exercising reason in an attempt to achieve a better, happier life, the Stoics arrived at a brilliantly simple dichotomy: there are things that are within your control, and things that are not. Stoics believed that the entirety of human suffering originated from people failing to properly identify this distinction and subsequently allowing themselves to be negatively affected by things that are completely out of their control.

There’s no shortage of examples of this concept in our modern lives; imagine someone cutting you off in traffic, or neglecting to hold the door for you, or leaning their seat back in front of you on an airplane. A Stoic would claim that we have just as much control over these transgressions as we do over what the offending person ate for breakfast, but because we choose to perceive these situations as personal affronts they immediately fill us with at best, annoyance, and at worst, outrage. In other words, the things that happen to us are not good or bad in themselves, but rather the judgments we make about them are what cause us to experience them as good or bad.

With that in mind, the game of baseball might as well be a Petri dish for the development of Stoic ideology. Even the best players find themselves in an often arbitrary, seemingly illogical environment where their merit is largely based on results over which they have very little control. The only reasonable conclusion to make in such an environment is the exact same conclusion that the Stoics arrived at when they looked at the world two thousand years earlier: focus on what can be controlled, and accept what cannot.

The lesson that both baseball and Stoicism teach is that as rational beings we have the power to choose how we respond to any situation. However, because of our personal expectations all too often we allow ourselves to be negatively affected by events over which we have absolutely no control. A Stoic would point out that by doing so not only are we behaving irrationally, we’re also causing ourselves unnecessary pain and suffering in the process. This is why Stoicism advocates using reason to eliminate the judgments and assumptions we make about uncontrollable events, and to instead accept things as they happen with the goal of achieving a sage-like existence, free from irrational passions, and therefore free from suffering.

There has been a resurgence of interest in Stoic ideas to the point that ‘controlling what you can control’ has become a cliché in sports and business today. Everyone from elite athletes and coaches to Tim Ferriss is embracing their inner Stoic, looking to ancient wisdom for guidance to maximize their potential. In athletics, sports psychology has assumed this mantle of mental mastery, extolling its wisdom in countless books aimed at improving athletic performance, and particularly in those focused on helping baseball players conquer the unique mental challenges they face on the field.

In The Mental Keys to Hitting, one of the sports psychology books we read as a team in college, mental skills coach Harvey Dorfman includes an entire chapter entitled ‘Approach, Result, Response: Knowing What Can and Cannot Be Controlled.’ Translated into ancient Greek, one could easily imagine it as a catchier title for Epictetus’ famous handbook. Separately, in one of the seminal books on sports psychology, ‘Mind Gym: An Athlete’s Guide to Inner Excellence’, author Gary Mack praises the truly Stoic idea of appropriate perception and response, which he refers to as ‘Responsibility Psychology.’ In that chapter he writes, ‘One of the great powers we have is to choose… Successful people take responsibility for themselves and their game. They understand that it’s not the event but how they respond to it that’s most important.’

At first glance, Stoicism isn’t earth shattering. Many of its core ideas seem to be an extension of common sense, e.g. prepare for the worst, exercise self-control, etc. Most baseball players, and most people for that matter, understand the practical advantages of focusing on the things they can control. We all know what we’re supposed to do in the face of adversity. That being said, none of us are perfect. I don’t know a single baseball player who can profess to have never thrown a helmet out of anger, or person who has never wished a swift death upon the guy talking on his phone at the movie theater.

Epictetus himself confessed to have never known any individual who could claim to be a true sage, and the idea of the Stoic sage itself has become somewhat of a relic, considered an ideal for which to strive rather than something truly attainable. In fact, some great thinkers claim that this dependence on transcendent ideals is a fatal flaw of Stoicism. But in my opinion this appeal to perfection is part of the philosophy’s beauty.

Stoicism acknowledges the fallibility of the human condition but doesn’t accept that limitation as an excuse. Even if we can never reach the summit of perfection that doesn’t mean there isn’t value in striving to get as close as possible. It is in this pursuit that real progress is made, and in the same vein, for the majority of people there are real benefits to be gained from riding the asymptote of Stoicism as close as possible to sage-like wisdom.

By forgoing concepts like hope and regret that can cause unnecessary pain, and instead teaching people to accept and love the present moment, whatever it has in store, Stoic concepts offer people the tools to cultivate their own happiness and tranquility. When and how they choose to use those tools is an existential question for each individual to answer, but denying the value of the tools themselves feels narrow-minded. Stoicism isn’t perfect, but at its heart it is a philosophy that’s designed to help everyday people live better, less painful lives.

On our college baseball team, after every at bat we were required to record in a binder the result, and then next to it, how we felt afterwards. We used a color coding system for our emotions, green for good, yellow for frustrated, and red for downright irate. Through this process we were able to recognize when our emotions were superseding our rationality and correct ourselves accordingly. No one was perfect, but we all felt and played better because we took the time to reflect.

In the same way, the next time you find yourself feeling anxious or dejected, jealous or angry, I encourage you to stop and do this same exercise. Think about whatever is making you feel negatively, and ask, “Do I have any control over this?” If the answer is no, you’re one step closer to living your best life.