Riding the Waves: Shawn Green, Nick Kurtz, and the Fragile Art of Staying in the Zone

Becoming a God

For one week in late May 2002, Shawn Green was a god. It began in unassuming fashion for Green, an outfielder whose smooth swing and lean, 6'4" frame generated surprising power over a 14-year career that included three 40+ home run seasons. It started on the heels of his worst slump of the season, when he went 0-for-15 over five games, and began 0-for-3 on May 19 before lacing a double in his final at-bat of the night to avoid going hitless on the Dodgers’ six-game homestand. Over the previous week, Green had been trying to get out of the slump by adjusting his batting stance to fix his timing — but what happened next, not even Green could have predicted.

To look at the game log of the week that followed — even 23 years later — is to know something remarkable had occurred. Let’s start with the numbers: Over a six-game stretch from May 21 through May 26, Green hit .593 with 9 home runs, 2 doubles, and a triple, collecting 17 RBI and scoring 14 runs in just 27 at-bats. This was highlighted most memorably by a 6-for-6 game on May 23 that saw Green homer four times, and then homer in his first at-bat against Diamondbacks ace Curt Schilling on May 24 to cap a 7-for-7, five-home-run stretch. Green went on to hit two more home runs on May 25 before returning home after another multi-hit effort on the 26th.

In his memoir, The Way of Baseball, Green documents how he felt that week:

“My swing became literally effortless, and everything came together to a degree that I never imagined possible. Psychologists call it a sustained peak experience. Ballplayers call it being in the zone or being locked in. Recalling the historic week now, I am struck by how intensely grounded I was in the moment. There was no past, no future, only the present. “

Chasing Optimal Experiences

Athletes and performers are always chasing “sustained peak experiences.” At its core, performance can be thought of as an exercise in controlling your attention. Once you are in the act of performance (the game, the concert, the board presentation, the 9-1-1 call), there is no more practice, no cramming, no making up for lost time. Performance is about how well the performer can fully actualize their preparation — how effectively they can get out of their own way and allow themselves to execute what they have practiced.

As the saying goes, “You don’t rise to the occasion; you fall to the level of your preparation.” Executing in the moment comes down to putting your attention where it needs to be, when it needs to be there — with consequences for not doing so. Fans grasp this intuitively, and every sport has rituals where fans attempt to distract opposing players in an effort to divert their attention. If a batter’s attention is caught by something irrelevant during an at-bat — a fan heckling, a trash bag moving across the outfield, unproductive thoughts about how their batting glove doesn’t feel quite right — they can easily lose focus and spoil any chance of a successful outcome.

Most athletes, and certainly elite athletes, refine their attentional control by developing rituals and cues that help them intentionally direct their focus on demand. If a batter had to consciously think about how every part of their body was moving through space in order to execute a swing, they would freeze up. Similarly, if a batter went to the plate and let their attention wander freely, the risk of distraction and falling into bad habits would increase exponentially. Instead, a player will typically focus on one or two cues that allow the rest of the movement to flow naturally. “Keep your shoulder in” and “swing down on the ball” are examples of phrases a batter might say to themselves as a pitch is coming in to help them execute their best swing.

Controlling your attention takes effort, and these rituals — when practiced regularly and implemented consistently — become invaluable tools in a player’s mental toolbox. But while rituals and cues can help players focus and develop consistency, they are decidedly different from the types of “optimal experiences” that Green was describing.

What is Flow?

The American-Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was the first to popularize the term “flow” when describing peak experiences. In his 1990 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi defined a flow state as:

“The state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

You’ll likely recognize the characteristics of a flow state:

• Deep but effortless involvement in a task
• A sense of control over one’s actions
• Loss of concern for the self, followed by a stronger sense of self
• An altered perception of time – hours can seem to pass in minutes, or minutes can stretch out to seem like hours
• The experience becomes an end in itself; it is done for its own sake and the doing itself is the reward

Children are particularly adept at accessing flow states, and video game designers are exceptionally skilled at structuring experiences to maximize them. To hear a first-hand account of what it’s like to experience flow, we return to Green.

Here is an excerpt of Green’s personal journal entry on the night of May 23rd, 2002, the night of his 4 homer game, where he describes what he experienced that night. I am including a larger quote because I think the details are fascinating, but I’ve bulleted out a few smaller points below:

… I poured every cell of my body into today’s game. Six-for-six for first time in my life (including Little League), with four of the hits being home runs! I’ve repeatedly recapped today’s game with the media and my teammates, so I may as well put it here too. I’ll write about it and then it’ll be over. Just as I use my batting gloves for closure after both home runs and strikeouts, I’ll use the completion of this journal entry as my symbol for closure. Today’s game is over and I have a new game tomorrow.

My first at-bat was against Glendon Rusch, a veteran left-handed pitcher who is aggressive with his fastball while also mixing in some breaking stuff. With a runner on second and a 0-2 count, I took a fastball high for ball one. The high fastball was intended to set me up for the next pitch, which I suddenly knew would be a breaking ball over the plate that would start at that same height but break downward into the strike zone. He was hoping I’d be fooled and take strike three. I wasn’t fooled. I hit the pitch just inside the line past the first baseman for an RBI double.

In the second inning, with runners at first and second and two outs, Rusch threw a breaking ball for a strike (a smart pitcher will often start you off with the same pitch you pounded for a hit on your previous at-bat, betting that most hitters will mistakenly think he’s scared to throw the same pitch). Next, he threw a hard fastball inside for a ball. Immersed in the moment and with my awareness completely directed out to the mound, I knew what he was going to throw next even before he did.

He was going to come inside on the next pitch.

While I got into my stance, I imagined a pitch coming on the inside corner to make sure my eyes would be ready for it when it happened. Next, I placed my attention on my front foot being nailed to the dirt and then moved my attention out to Rusch as he came set. He threw a fastball on the inside corner and I hit a high fly over the wall in right field for a three-run homer. (It’s so nice to be hitting the ball with backspin again! Those high pop-ups carry for an eternity when my swing is right.)

By the time my third at-bat rolled around, I was locked in. I led off the fourth inning against a rookie I’d never faced before, Brian Mallette. He threw me a 1-1 slider on the inner half of the plate and I put it over the fence and onto the walkway in right-center field. I didn’t even feel my legs moving as I jogged around the bases. When I faced him again in the fifth inning, I no longer needed to focus my attention on my right foot being nailed to the ground.

Everything was working now on its own.

His first pitch was up and away for a ball. Somehow, I knew what was coming next: a two-seam fastball away. I wasn’t thinking about it with my mind, no guessing. He wasn’t tipping his pitches. I just knew. This sense of knowing came from a place much deeper than the mind. I was almost out of my body. At that moment, there wasn’t a pitch near the plate that I couldn’t handle. When the pitch came, I launched it deep into the seats in left field. I floated around the bases with blissful ambivalence, fully occupied as the watcher rather than my usual role as the doer. Of course, I was happy to have just hit my third homer of the day (and fifth in three days), but I was residing in a place beyond numbers.

Fully engaged in the now, without the slightest feeling of anxiety or judgment about what was taking place, I led off the eighth inning against another new pitcher, Jose Cabrera. Sure, I wanted to hit a fourth home run, but I didn’t change my approach. He threw a 1-0 fastball down, maybe even below the strike zone, and I lined it right back up the middle for a single. Even though it wasn’t a home run, it may have been the hardest ball I hit all day…

In the top of the ninth, Adrian Beltre hit a two-out homer to bring me to the plate for a sixth at-bat. The opposing crowd welcomed me with cheers. As the game was already a blowout, I think almost everyone on the field and in the stadium (except Jose Cabrera, out on the mound) wanted to see me hit a fourth home run. I walked up to the plate. I couldn’t help wondering if Cabrera was going to put a ninety-plus miles per hour pitch into my rib cage. I wasn’t worried (God knows every part of my body has tasted leather over the years), but just curious… I stepped out of the box, took a breath, and said to myself, “There’s no sense thinking now.” I shifted my attention back into my body and then onto the guy on the mound…

I took the first pitch for a ball. The next pitch was a changeup that I missed for strike one. Then he threw a fastball down and in and I unloaded on it, my farthest homer of the day, deep into right-center field. This time around the bases, I couldn’t help but smile. Today was a once in a lifetime experience, so I allowed myself to relish it. Six for six with four home runs.

• “Immersed in the moment and with my awareness completely directed out to the mound”
• “I imagined a pitch coming on the inside corner to make sure my eyes would be ready for it when it happened. Next, I placed my attention on my front foot being nailed to the dirt and then moved my attention out to Rusch as he came set”
• “I was locked in… I didn’t even feel my legs moving as I jogged around the bases…I no longer needed to focus my attention on my right foot being nailed to the ground.”
• “Everything was working now on its own.”
• “At that moment, there wasn’t a pitch near the plate that I couldn’t handle”
• "There's no sense thinking now"

Does this sound familiar? Deep but effortless involvement, a sense of control over one’s actions, loss of concern for the self, an altered perception of time, the experience becoming an end in itself; this is what it feels like to experience flow. But just as quickly as you can enter a flow state, it can slip away as quickly as it came.

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Falling out of the zone and riding the waves

Green fell out of the zone as soon as the Dodgers returned home from their road trip. The boos he’d heard a week earlier had morphed into cheers, and as Green tells it, those cheers proved distracting:

“In today’s game, my first back at Dodger Stadium, I fell out of the zone. I got caught up in the emotions of returning home after my historic week. I felt resentment every time I received loud ovations from the crowd, for these were the same fans who had booed me last week. I went up to the plate with too much of the ‘I’ll-show-you’ attitude rather than with the purposeless presence with which I’d stepped up to the plate throughout the road trip.”

The zone, it turns out, is both fragile and impermanent. In fact, the moment you try to hold on too tightly is often the moment you fall out of it.

One of the challenges of peak performance lies in separating process from outcome. Hitters should aim to hit the ball hard and at optimal launch angles, but they won’t succeed every time—and even when they do, it doesn’t guarantee a particular result. The temptation to measure success through on-the-field results is strong, and it is difficult to resist tweaking your approach when you aren’t getting those results.

The phrase “trust the process” has been repeated so often it borders on cliché, yet the human urge to control outcomes—and to measure success by factors outside our control—is deeply ingrained. Modern baseball statistics that estimate process-based performance separately from on-field outcomes (exit velocity, contact rate, xBA, xwOBA, FIP, xFIP, park factors, etc.) are acknowledgments of how much results can be shaped by forces beyond a player’s control. Even so, it’s hard to shake the feeling that there’s something that could have been done differently.

Green’s week in May 2002, and the season that followed—marked by torrid stretches (including another run in June when he homered in four consecutive at-bats against the Angels: the last two of one game and the first two of the next) and months with only a few home runs—illustrates how extreme these variations can be. His ability to stick with his approach and maintain an outcome-independent mindset was key to a season in which he hit .285 with 42 home runs, 110 runs scored, 114 RBI, and finished fifth in MVP voting. As Green wrote:

“The reason I had ten- and twelve-homer months was that I was willing to accept the three- and four-homer months. By not tweaking my approach every time it disappeared, I enabled it to eventually reappear.”

23 Years Later

On July 25, 2025, Athletics rookie Nick Kurtz joined Shawn Green as just the second major league player to go 6-for-6 with four home runs in a game. Watching Kurtz that night was watching flow in action—his effortless swing, his ability to use all fields, the ball exploding off his bat. Since that night, Kurtz has—somewhat surprisingly—not homered in 15 games and 66 plate appearances, managing just two extra-base hits during that stretch (though he’s still hitting .278 with a .409 OBP). While far from a slump, it’s the second-longest homerless streak of his career, behind only the first 16 games he played in the majors.

During quieter stretches like this, Green used a surfer’s metaphor to describe his mindset: patiently waiting on his board for the next big set to roll in, rather than paddling off to a different break in search of waves. The goal was to resist the urge to change his approach as soon as his hot streak cooled. Staying on the board, trusting that the waves will return, requires patience, discipline, presence, and humility.

Right now, it’s easy to imagine Kurtz—like many before him—feeling tempted to paddle back to shore in search of bigger waves. But if he can maintain his approach and wait for the next set to roll in, we will all be in for a treat soon enough.

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