I’m linking to a very interesting article by Andrea Thompson at Live Science. She’s analyzing Mike Stadler’s book “The Psychology of Baseball”.
While all sports involve a certain amount of psychology to strategize and plan in given situations, baseball is unique as there are so many different mental factors at play.
You can find Stadler’s book here…
And you can find Thompson’s article here… and I’d invite you to read the entire piece!
Some key takeaways…
“Baseball is impossible without psychology: impossible to play, and impossible to appreciate fully as a fan,” Stadler wrote. “Watch any game, and most of what you see is thinking.”
Here are more excerpts from the Stadler book…
Mental agility
“Most baseball players have extraordinary capabilities to coordinate physical and mental processes, including fast reaction times, focus and high visual acuity.
Studies conducted by Columbia University on Babe Ruth while he was playing showed that he could react to visual and sound cues much faster than the average person and that he had better hand-eye coordination than 98.8 percent of the population.
Baseball players tend to have excellent vision, which allows them to see things like the spin on a curveball hurtling toward them at home plate, cues they can use to get a hit.
Reaction time is also critical in baseball, and the better players seem to have better reaction times. There’s some suggestion that this could simply be a matter of having more practice, “but you actually find even within really highly skilled players, the players at the higher end, the faster reaction times still tend to have higher batting averages and be slightly better hitters,” Stadler told LiveScience.”
“Most baseball players do have pretty good vision; a huge proportion of them test at better than 20/20,” Stadler said.
Baseball “Personality”
“Besides the physical process and acute mental abilities, successful baseball players also typically have certain personality traits—this is perhaps best exemplified by the diverging career paths of Darryl Strawberry and Billy Beane, Stadler said.
Both players were drafted by the Mets in 1980 (Strawberry was picked much higher than Beane)—the team even had trouble deciding which player to pick first because of their comparable athletic abilities. But while Strawberry came to be one of the best hitters in baseball, Beane couldn’t hack it in the majors (though he went on to become General Manager of the Oakland A’s).
“Beane was just sort of crushed by the pressure of the batter’s box, just didn’t have that sort of self-confidence, almost arrogance, just to know, ‘I do this well. I’m fine. So what I just struck out, I’m going to hit next time,'” Stadler said.
Strawberry displayed the exact opposite reaction: “You can look at some of Strawberry’s early interviews when he broke into the league and was struggling a little bit as player’s naturally do, but he, even then he just said, ‘I know I’m a good hitter. I’m going to hit plenty of home runs,'” Stadler said. “He just wasn’t worried about the pressure.”’
Player Variability
“When a player starts to have a spate of really bad or good games, fans can get involved in the psychology of “streaks” or “slumps”. But Stadler says that research has shown that these supposed trends are really a matter of fans not taking in the big picture.
“It’s hard for the fan to take that really long view and keep in mind the player’s whole career as opposed to just the last few games’ performance,” he said.
Fans also tend to ignore how much baseball statistics can mask a players’ actual performance. A hitter may have a sub-par batting average, though he is still hitting balls really hard—they’re just hit to fielders who catch them.
In his book, Stadler mentions an interview with pitcher Greg Maddux after a streak of no-hit innings, where Maddux said he just got lucky because some guys hit balls really hard, but hit them right at a fielder.
“I think the players can kind of see that distinction in ways that, you know, because they’ve been around the game so much, that fans … might not be able to see that as the players are,” Stadler said.”
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