Rick Wolff’s resume is about as long as a major league roster, his disparate professions bound together by a adoration of sports and a fascination with sports psychology.
He was a professional baseball player, a college baseball coach, an author of sports psychology books, and an editor and publisher of books by athletes such as Tiger Woods (as well as business figures).
In the early 1990s, he became the psychological coach of the Cleveland baseball team now known as the Guardians, helping them rise from the American League basement to perennial pennant contenders. And for 25 years, he was the host of “The Sports Edge,” a show on New York sports station WFAN dedicated to helping families navigate the increasingly competitive world of youth sports.
His final episode, which dealt with whether children were becoming less interested in youth sports, aired two weeks before he died on April 10 at his home in Armonk, NY, in Westchester County. He was 71. His son, John, said the cause was brain cancer.
Mr. Wolff began his quarter-century with WFAN after finishing his stint as Cleveland’s itinerant psychological coach. Becoming an announcer was hereditary: His father, Bob Wolff, had been a radio and television sports reporter for nearly eight decades, longer than anyone else, according to Guinness World Records.
In hundreds of Sunday morning episodes, Rick Wolff covered weighty youth sports topics like hazing, the impact of social media and concussion risk, as well as more light-hearted topics like Big League Chew gum.
The bad behavior of overcompetitive parents and the mental health of young athletes were motives. In an episode last year that served as an introduction to sports psychology, Mr. Wolff that sending kids to compete without mentally preparing them was “like sending your kid to a big test at school, but they really didn’t study or prepare. for that exam.”
His psychological insights were forged in the melting pot of Major League Baseball.
He started with Cleveland in 1990, as the team was mired in one of the longest playoff droughts in major league history – Cleveland had not made the postseason since 1954.
Cleveland was so infamous for losing that an imaginatively mournful version of the team was at the heart of the 1989 movie comedy Major League.
Mr. Wolff worked with many young players in the Cleveland system, including future stars such as Albert Belle, Manny Ramirez, and Jim Thome in the early 1990s.
He often traveled with Cleveland and its minor league teams and had a dedicated phone line at home where players could call him at any time. Whether they were dealing with a batting slump, pregame jitters or anger issues, he was there to listen to them.
His counseling approach included visualization techniques, muscle memory, and getting players to face their failures. He had some unorthodox views; for example, he argued that setting overly ambitious goals can be paralyzing rather than motivating and that pregame anxiety can often be embraced as a normal part of sports.
While sports psychology was rare in baseball, Mr. Wolff on his show last year, Cleveland’s players took “the mental side of the game seriously” and within a few years were an “American League powerhouse.”
The idea caught on, he added, and “today it’s the rare, rare sports team or professional or college organization that doesn’t have at least one sports psychologist on their staff.”
As an editor at various publishing houses, Mr. Wolff published a slew of New York Times bestsellers, including Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad Poor Dad” (1997) and General Electric CEO Jack Welch, “Jack: Straight From the Gut” (2001). He also acquired a number of sports books, including “A Pitcher’s Story: Innings With David Cone” by Roger Angell and “How I Play Golf” by Tiger Woods.
As an author, his authors include “Secrets of Sports Psychology Revealed: Proven Techniques to Elevate Your Performance” (2018) and “Harvard Boys: A Father and Son’s Adventure Playing Minor League Baseball” (2007), which he co-authored with John Wolff .
He also edited “The Baseball Encyclopedia” from 1988, when he worked for Macmillan publishers.
Richard Hugh Wolff was born on July 14, 1951 in Washington. His mother, Jane (Hoy) Wolff, was a Navy nurse turned housewife. His father was the broadcast voice of the Washington Senators at the time.
In 1961, the Senators moved to Minnesota, where they became the Twins, and the Wolffs eventually moved to Edgemont, NY, in Westchester County, where Mr. Wolff grew up. He played baseball and football at Edgemont High School, graduated in 1969, and went on to Harvard.
As an infielder playing for Harvard, he set out to get a mental edge, but found little information about sports psychology. Over time, he applied the visualization techniques that the surgeon Maxwell Maltz had put forward in his book “Psycho-Cybernetics”.
The Detroit Tigers selected Mr. Wolff late in the 1972 amateur draft, and he played in their minor league system in 1973 and 1974 while completing his Harvard undergraduate degree in psychology.
After playing in the minors, Mr. Wolff became editor-in-chief of the Alexander Hamilton Institute, a now-defunct organization that published educational materials on business and management. He kept that job after becoming head baseball coach in 1978 for Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, NY. He coached there until 1985 and led the team to a 114-81-3 record.
In 1982 he married Patricia Varvaro, who survives him. In addition to her and his son, he is survived by two daughters, Alyssa Wolff and Samantha O’Connor; a brother, Dr. Robert Wolff; a sister, Margy Clark; and three grandchildren.
Mr. Wolff received a master’s degree in psychology from Long Island University in 1985. His book “The Psychology of Winning Baseball: A Coach’s Handbook” (1986) caught the attention of Harvey Dorfman, a psychological coach for the Oakland A’s and one of the first in the major leagues. He called Mr. Wolff and told him that other teams were looking for psychologists. After talking to several teams, Mr. Wolf for Cleveland.
He bonded with Cleveland players by wearing a team uniform and practicing with them.
At the time, his playing days were more recent than the young players he mentored might have thought – just the previous year. He had played three games (and had four hits in seven at bats) with the South Bend (Ind.) White Sox of the Midwest League in 1989 when he was 38, an experience he wrote about for Sports Illustrated.
His South Bend teammates had treated him with caution until he grounded out and fell short a dribbler in their first game together. He wrote that a pitcher asked him after the game, “Tell us, Rick, you must have known him, what kind of player was Babe Ruth?”
With that piece of ribbing, Mr. Wolff knew he had made it. “I had become the target of old-fashioned jabbing — the ultimate acceptance in baseball.”
