The Head Game

A psychologist takes on the world's most maddening professional sport.

by Steve Weinberg

Though many of the nation's scientists and scholars fantasize about it, not many can boast of publishing books that jostle for space among the pulp thrillers, political screeds and celebrity memoirs dominating the display tables of America's bookselling superstores.

Yet as of April, Mike Stadler, an associate professor of psychology at MU, can officially count himself as one of these favored few. This is thanks in part to the buzz surrounding his latest work, a scholarly tome that, according to one pre-publication reviewer, "could become one of the hot baseball books of the year."

Baseball?

Yes, baseball. Not the normal realm of faculty research, true. But make no mistake: Stadler's book, if you'll excuse the inevitable pun, is heady stuff indeed.

"Baseball is impossible without psychology -- impossible to play, and impossible to appreciate fully as a fan," Stadler says. "The physical demands of the game are intense, and the physical abilities of the players, extraordinary as they are, cannot by themselves meet those demands. Working alone, even the fastest reflexes would be insufficient. The reflexes must be supported by the player's intellect. The player's intellect, in turn, is shaped by those cognitive and emotional forces that are the province of psychology."

Stadler's book, The Psychology of Baseball: Inside the Mental Game of the Major League Player, is published by Gotham Books of New York, a firm with a current front list that also features a journalistic account of a high school chess team and a self-help guide by baseball Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, Jr. Even a cursory glance between the covers of Stadler's new hardback on hardball shows that it shares little with this type of sports fare.

Take, for example, the citations in the endnotes, where entries refer to publications such as the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Perception & Psychophysics, Behavior Genetics, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences. "Psychology professor Stadler splits his book evenly between the neurology of performance and the more workaday issues of pressure," says another appreciative review, this time from book industry heavyweight Publishers Weekly. The reviewer adds that, while the chapter on pitching might be somewhat mechanistic, the book is invaluable in its discussion of baseball's "storied streaks and slumps, its dismaying chokes, that ineffable X factor that makes this draft pick an All-Star and that one a dud."

As with most fans of the game, Stadler, a fit 44-year-old who still plays outfield on a Columbia softball team, fell in love with baseball long before falling in love with his profession. (Full disclosure: the author of this story has both played for and managed the team referenced above. Stadler is our star left fielder.) Unlike most fans, it occurred to Stadler early on that, even though he would never play for a professional ball club, baseball might one day serve as an avenue for professional advancement. The revelation came while he was a graduate student at Purdue.

"I was walking down the hall of the psych building one day when I overheard two of my professors in a heated discussion about a recently published academic paper," Stadler recalls. "One of them broke from their conversation and said to the other, 'Let's ask Mike.' I had only been there a few weeks and doubted that I had much to say about whatever it was they were debating. I was certainly in no position to weigh in on what might have been some thorny theoretical issue."

Then the question came. "How much of the variance in the outcome of an at-bat does a baseball player's batting average account for?"

Stadler felt himself exhale with relief.

"At that stage of my training, I knew more about baseball than about psychology," he recalls. Intrigued by the question, Stadler read the academic paper in the professional journal Psychological Bulletin that had prompted his colleagues' discussion. As he became aware of the contributions psychological science made in understanding sports, Stadler began thinking about factors such as motivation and intelligence. He also began building a collection of research studies related to hitting, fielding and throwing.

It was about this time that Stadler learned of the work of Harvey Dorfman, a consultant to the Oakland Athletics, Florida Marlins, and various players represented by super-agent Scott Boras. Dorfman published an article in the journal Sports Psychologist, disclosing that he helped athletes by using the "techniques of concentration, relaxation, visualization, control of arousal levels and positive self-talk." Dorfman also mentioned his role in helping athletes work through personal issues, which he called "off-field performance inhibitors."

Stadler recognized the importance of Dorfman's services, but thought "there is much more psychology in baseball than that list of services reveals."

Gradually, Stadler realized that some of his research, work seemingly divorced from baseball, could be applied to understanding the sport. One example involved how the concept psychologists call "implicit learning" related closely to what athletes call "muscle memory," that is, "the instinctive ability to react to particular situations without conscious deliberation." Another involved "automaticity," the "ways that practice can change the performance of a skill from the slow, halting, deliberate way it is performed at first to the fast, smooth, effortless way that it is performed later."

As Stadler began to ponder these concepts and their relationship to players' performance, he turned to a ground-breaking, best-selling book by physicist Robert Adair called The Physics of Baseball. Among his other insights, Adair proved that professional athletes claimed to "see" phenomena that could not be true. For example, hitters swore that a fastball from a hard-throwing pitcher rose as it crossed home plate. Some hitters even elevated their swing in anticipation. Adair's experiments demonstrated that the rise was an illusion.

Inspired by Adair's physics-based analysis, Stadler immersed himself in that difficult-to-understand branch of science. Adair's book also led the young professor to examine the conventional psychological wisdom about baseball. Like Adair's conclusions, Stadler's findings both shatter and confirm, depending on the specific piece of conventional wisdom.

The Psychology of Baseball is organized, most generally, around two broad principles: the skills needed to play major league baseball and the variability in performance demonstrated by each pro player. Stadler subdivides his research among the categories of hitting, catching and pitching, because the physical skills and the psychological makeup that account for successes in each of these facets of the sport are different. He then devotes a chapter to the methods those in charge of professional baseball teams use to choose the athletes most likely to succeed at the major league level.

Next, Stadler covers "streaks and slumps," which he defines as the differences within the performance of a player or a team over time. If physical conditioning does not vary (and thus can be ruled out as a variable to account for highs and lows), then psychological conditioning must be responsible. With that hypothesis in mind, Stadler explores the never-ending debate about whether athletes really go through hot streaks and cold slumps. The players themselves and their managers sound persuasive when they talk about streaks and slumps. But is their certainty based in fact, in superstition, or in something in between?

Stadler cannot say for sure, of course, because some debates cannot be resolved with 100-percent certainty. But he knows this much: "Simply looking at whether or not an at bat resulted in a hit is to look past how well the ball was hit. A lazy infield pop-up and a line drive that knocks down the third baseman ... both go into the scorebook as outs. So when a ball is put in play, the result depends to some extent on the quality of the contact, and to some extent on luck."

The book's final chapter examines the psychology of those who watch baseball. As fans observe the game, he says, they must use their own cognitive resources to interpret what they see. Sometimes we do this accurately, sometimes not. Stadler seeks to understand which factors "affect the ways we perceive and think about the game."

Stadler's conclusions will likely fascinate and frustrate baseball fans. For instance, most onlookers tend to believe a strikeout demonstrates the mastery of the pitcher and that a home run is the pitcher's fault. Not necessarily so, Stadler says. A strikeout is often no more than the law of averages at work. Home runs can be as random as which way the wind is blowing.

"Our intuitive explanations of other people's behavior are marked by consistent and common errors, and this can occur in baseball as much as in any other aspect of life," Stadler says. These strikeout and home run fallacies are simply "fundamental attribution errors," mistaken beliefs created by "our inclination to attribute the cause of another's behavior more to the actor and less to the situation than is appropriate."

In the case of the pitcher striking out a batter or allowing a home run, the "situation" includes the law of averages (all batters strike out at least occasionally) and the wind direction (on another day, a breeze blowing in might have turned the home run into a catchable fly ball).

Overemphasizing the pitcher's role demonstrates "that our intuition is limited by what we have the ability to name, by what we are aware of [and] by our native cognitive capacities and patterns of thinking," Stadler says.

Such a statement is typical of the best of Stadler's work, a finding that transcends the world of baseball, one that might even make the world beyond the diamond a better place -- if only we all acted with the knowledge of how limited our cognition really is.

At MU, Stadler's fellow researchers watched the progression of the book with fascination.

"As scientists, we typically conduct experiments on just one or two subdivisions of cognitive psychology at a time in the laboratory, in order to understand their mechanisms in detail," says Nelson Cowan, a professor of psychological sciences. "However, to make them all come to life, it really helps to examine how they work together in a real-life example that is of personal interest to readers." As to the implicit learning realm of Stadler's research, Todd Schachthman, another professor of psychological sciences, calls it "perhaps the most important concept in the field of psychology in the past 20 years."

Stadler says he learned to love baseball while playing the game as a kid in Springfield, Ohio, where his mother worked as a nurse and hospital administrator and his father served as a Lutheran minister. Stadler eventually earned a scholarship to Wright State University, about 20 miles from home. Sadly, he says, Wright State wanted him for his brains, not his baseball.

As an undergraduate, he recalls avidly reading Psychology Today, a magazine then famous for publishing sophisticated articles by professionals such as Paul Ekman and Jerome Bruner. A lively honors introductory psychology course cemented Stadler's interest in the workings of the human mind.

Stadler enrolled in graduate school at Purdue University, earning his master's degree in 1987, and his doctorate in 1989. His dissertation, "Chunking and Implicit Pattern Learning in a Serial Reaction Time Task," examined forms of learning that seem to occur automatically; that is, types of knowledge acquisition in which individuals cannot describe what they have learned, even though it influences how they perform the skill. An example of this is language learning: Children quickly pick up the rules of grammar long before they receive formal education.

The doctorate led to an assistant professorship at Louisiana State University, where Stadler remained three years. Since arriving at MU in 1992, Stadler has won teaching awards, obtained grants, including one from the National Institute of Mental Health for "Contrasting Implicit and Explicit Learning," and, most recently, has become deeply involved in the MU Honors College.

The Honors College excels at melding disparate disciplines. MU psychology professor Tim Trull marvels at how, in that same spirit, the new author is able to apply research to athletes and their fans with equal relevance. Another colleague, Professor Alan J. Strathman, takes it a step further. "Psychologists have been very concerned lately that the public does not understand what psychology is all about," Strathman says. "It's not simply about Freud and profiling serial killers for the FBI, but that's a common misperception. A book like Mike's helps give psychology away to the public, so that they get a more representative view of what it really is, and so that they can get the benefit of a lot of research they simply do not know exists."

In the book's chapter about the complexity of baseball players catching fly balls, Stadler cites some of that research, as carried out by an academic named Mike McBeath. Now an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University, McBeath directs the program on cognition, action and perception. McBeath says it makes sense to popularize that research with examples from baseball, which "can be thought of as a metaphor for many human endeavors."

Metaphors, cognitive research and anything else sounding academic tend to play poorly among professional athletes. Within Major League Baseball, Stadler received almost no cooperation while gathering information for the book. Dave Ritterpusch served as a rare exception.

Not a professional athlete himself, Ritterpusch parlayed an unusual career in the U.S. military, the executive branch of the federal government and private consulting into a job with the Baltimore Orioles. Once inside, Ritterpusch pioneered psychological testing for players as early as 1973. He was sympathetic to the cold shoulder Stadler received from major leaguers, and advised him not to worry too much about it.

There is a "tendency by people in baseball to not want to go beyond the physical. They don't want to hear about, can't see beyond, physical ability," Ritterpusch told Stadler. "The same people believe the earth is flat."