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In July 2001, a twenty-three-year-old left-hander for the Oakland Athletics was coming apart in public.

Barry Zito had arrived in the major leagues with the kind of promise that makes people start talking about the next ten years. Then came a rough outing against Minnesota, and the numbers that went with it: six wins, seven losses, an earned run average above five. For a pitcher carrying that kind of promise, that is not a slump. It is a question.

A slump in a rotation is also a slow-motion thing, which is the part people outside the sport miss. You do not get to fix it tomorrow. You get to sit with it for four days and then go out and find out, in front of everyone, whether it is still there.

The scenes I can give you are imagined: the walk up the tunnel, the shower nobody talks in, the drive home with the radio off, the arithmetic a young man does at two in the morning when the thing he is best at has stopped answering him. What happened next is not imagined, because the family told it and the record kept it.

His father flew in.

Joe Zito was a musician by trade, classically trained, a man who had worked for Nat King Cole. He had also spent years as something stranger and more total than a baseball father. He had, in his son's telling, basically quit music for eleven years to work with the boy.

Hold that number for a second, because it is the strangest fact in the episode and it usually goes by unremarked. Eleven years. Not evenings and weekends. A trained musician's working life, set down and left there.

What he brought to Oakland in July 2001 was not a pitching coach and not a pep talk.

It was a book. Creative Mind, published in 1919 by Ernest Holmes, a work that folds together spiritualism, psychology and philosophy, carried across the country by a father who held the conviction the family had always held: that thought creates form.

For four days they read it together. Five, six, seven hours a day, and that is worth saying slowly, because it is most of a working day, four days running, two men and one book.

I picture a room with the curtains half drawn and the television off, though I do not know the room and neither do you. What is on the record is what they did in it. They read. They took notes. They recorded affirmation tapes in Barry's voice, statements of the pitcher he intended to be, and he listened to them afterward the way an athlete does his exercises.

Then the season resumed, and Barry Zito went 11-1 with a 1.32 earned run average the rest of the way.

That line is real. Sports Illustrated printed it whole, and you can check its shape against the baseball record: he finished 17-8, and seventeen minus six is eleven. The next year he won the Cy Young Award.

If you set out to design one story to sell the power of the mind over performance, you could not do better than this. A churchless miracle with box scores.

So this season is about that story and its whole family tree: where the belief came from, three generations deep in one baseball household; the 1919 book and the tradition behind it; the strange philosopher the father brought next; and then the other lineage, the one that ran through laboratories instead of living rooms, where the same idea, that rehearsing a thing in your head changes how you do it with your body, was stripped of its metaphysics, tested on athletes, and found to be partly, modestly, usefully true.

Because both lineages end at the same practice. An athlete, eyes closed, running the performance in the mind before running it in the world.

The only thing the two traditions disagree about is why it works and how much it can do, and that disagreement is the whole subject of this volume.

The place to start is not with Barry, and not with Joe. It is with a church, and with Barry Zito's grandmother, who founded it.