How I Came to Live With the Team
The following is a work of fiction, duh.
In 2007, the American Association of Psychologists purchased ads on scorecards at various baseball stadiums to promote Psychology Awareness Week. The special scorecards included a column for players’ personality types next to the column for fielding position. Fans loved it, and so teams kept printing cards with the extra column. Presently, there’s a debate in the blogosphere concerning whether such columns should be filled in with the Goldsmith or the Myers-Briggs types, or via the Enneagram of Personality. I prefer the Enneagram myself: because the motivations of each type are clearly sketched out, it’s easy to discern which player is which type.
But then I began asking myself tougher questions: Is a Type 2 (Helper) likely to take more pitches in an At-Bat than a Type 7 (Enthusiast)? Is said Helper more likely to take more pitches when he is in an extreme relaxed state (when he will act more like a Type 4 Individualist than normal) or when he is in an extreme stressed state (when he will act more like a Type 8 Challenger)? Before I moved in with the Team and began collecting significant qualitative data to correlate with its daily on-field performance, these questions were impossible to answer.
So that’s just the scorecards — they gave me the idea for what kinds of questions to ask when the time came, if the time ever came, which it did.
More important is this past winter, when I live-blogged/tweeted a community event the Team put on at the local Holidome. There were autograph lines and Q&A’s and baseball-related carnival games (I topped 70 MPH in the Fast Pitch for the first time ever and then celebrated by eating one of every available sausage variety, which wasn’t all of the ones from the full stadium menu, but was still pretty impressive). There was a huge cake in the shape of the Team’s logo. All the players donned baker’s hats and signed their names on the cake using pastry bags full of frosting. Underprivileged youths gave thumbs up from under small chef’s caps of their own.
I worked up the nerve to approach the Third Baseman [3B], who had signed his name first and then slinked off to a corner behind the cake. He had a rep for brooding, being bookish, reading political history and sociology. So I figured we could chat—I like those things, too. I had actually hoped that I might find him wandering down a corridor, stewing.
