SURPRISE, ARIZ.
The initial meeting came four years ago, Brett Eibner says. He packed a bag. He prepared for a weekend. He showed up ready for anything. It was 2012, and Eibner, a minor-league outfielder in the Royals system, had traveled to spend a few days with a man named Jack Curtis, a Wisconsin-based author and motivational speaker.
Curtis specialized in working with young baseball players — in sorting through the mental side of the game. Eibner, in many ways, was a special case. A second-round draft pick out of Arkansas in 2010, Eibner’s baseball career, to that point, had been ravaged by injuries, its pace slowed to a frustrating crawl.