The Psychology of Baseball: Inside the Mental Game of the Major League Player
Psychology promises access to the deepest recesses of the human mind, but once we get there, they strongly resemble neural synapses. Baseball at least lends itself to discussions of psychology, as it is the national sport that depends least on sheer strength or speed and most on hand-eye coordination, and its leisurely pace elevates nerve over adrenaline. The yawning chasm separating Tony Gwynn and Mario Mendoza (the latter famous for not hitting well) seems to reside more than usually inside the cranium. University of Missouri psychology professor Stadler splits his book evenly between the neurology of performance and the more workaday issues of pressure that fans ponder. The sections on hitting a pitch and tracking a fly ball, with their emphasis on optics and motor reflexes, are more successful than the chapter on pitching, as it may be more difficult to reduce the act of "painting the black" (i.e., putting a hard pitch exactly in the right place) to a mechanistic feedback loop. The book picks up interest when Stadler turns to the true mysteries of baseball: the storied streaks and slumps, its dismaying chokes, that ineffable X factor that makes this draft pick an All-Star and that one a dud. Showing a pleasing tendency to avoid cant and received conclusions, Stadler deftly marshals a wide variety of evidence to arrive at some canny conclusions.(Apr.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.