Head Game | Illumination

"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.

Published by the Office of Research.