THE SLUMP BUG

 

               When the Chicago Cubs won the 2016 World Series, ending a 108-year drought, I and, I’m sure, many other fans of the team swore to never again bemoan the unfairness of the baseball gods. We’d got what we’d prayed for and were content to move on after a seventh-game WS win that left us breathless. Besides, our bellyaching had long since turned off any of our friends who didn’t share our allegiance and there was no sense returning there.

               But such pledges come with a statute of limitations of undefined length, and for me it lasted five years. When the 2021 team opened its season with a collective .166 batting average over its first 13 games my eyes crossed, my mouth gaped and I uttered a scream of disbelief. How could a lineup that included the core of the ’16 champs be so ineffective for so long, I wondered.  Could their locker room be invaded by a slump bug more potent than covid 19?

               Being a curious sort I set out to investigate that possibility, and discovered research that indicated that, yes, hitting and, therefore, not hitting both can be contagious. There are, it seems, bodies in our brains called “mirror neurons” that cause us to perform actions related to things we have recently witnessed, for good or ill.  Witness a base hit and you’re more likely to get one yourself, studies show. Ditto for the opposite.

               Details later, but first let me assure you that I wasn’t being alarmist in my concern over the Cubs’ early ineffectualness. People who monitor such things report that their batting average through game 13 was the second worst ever, topped (bottomed?) only by the 2003 Detroit Tigers, who began their season 1-12 in the won-lost column (miraculously, the Cubs went 5-8 during their skein).

 Further, the ’03 Tigers were a rag-tag lot that would go on to post 119 losses (to 43 wins) for the season, tying the 1962 New York Mets for the most in MLB history, while the current Cubs are star-studded with a four-man core of Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Javier Baez and Willson Contreras that can boast 10 All-Star Game appearances among them.  All four of those worthies are in their athletic primes, aged 28 through 31 years, and three of them (all but Contreras) are in their final seasons before being eligible for free-agency, usually a potent motivator. On April 17, though, only Contreras was within 50 points of his career batting average.

Worse was a recent team history in which group slumps were a feature, ending promising pennant runs. The 2018 team went into the playoffs off a 95-win regular season only to fall to the Milwaukee Brewers by a 3-1 score in a divisional tie-breaker and then lose to the Colorado Rockies, 2-1 in 13 innings, in a play-in round game. The team’s two-game totals were two runs and nine hits in 22 innings. Both contests, by the way, were played in home Wrigley Field.

Pretty much the same thing happened last season after the division-winning Cubs fell to the Miami Marlins by scores of 5-1 and 2-0 in the first playoff round, also at Wrigley. In their last four post-season games the Cubs have totaled only three runs and 18 hits, a slump by any definition.

Streaks are part of all sports, all the time, of course. Certain baseball batters have the reputation for being “streaky,” but, in fact, they all are, with good and bad games sprinkled unevenly through their seasons. Relatedly, any gambler can tell you he does not win or lose on an even basis but has “up” days in which wins seem to come by accident and others in which they do not come at all. At bat or betting window psychology certainly plays a part in this; winning breeds a positive, self-confident mindset while losing causes one to doubt one’s abilities and sabotages the most-sound plans.

A key physical element in learning any sport is “muscle memory,” the groove formed by repetitively performing a motion, such as a golf or tennis swing. That jibes with something called “action induction,” the tendency to imitate an action that has just been observed. A well-known example is seeing someone yawn and then yawning yourself. A good warm up for a golf or tennis game is to spend a few minutes watching a good player hit balls properly. A history of swinging poorly or watching faulty swings can have an opposite effect, and the more ingrained a bad habit becomes the harder it is to change. That’s why it’s best to get a kid some lessons before he or she takes up a sport.

               A web search turned up on several pages the unattributed info that a baseball hitter is more than 50% more likely to get a hit right after he’s just seen two teammates hit safely than after watching the two make outs. In one oft-noted university study a group of college-age baseball players, 12 varsity players and 12 recreational ones, were shown examples of batters getting and not getting hits, and then fed pitching machine deliveries to swing at. Both groups had better success after watching the positive examples than after the negative ones.

The question of whether seasoned players are affected by such things was answered in the affirmative; the varsity group followed the positive examples better than the less-experience one. For both groups, the effects of the filmed examples waned with time, with the more-immediate ones the most potent.

The contagion theory was affirmed by the Cubs after their dismal first-13; in their next six games they scored 13 or more runs three times, raising their team batting average. It’s still poor, though, .213 on Friday. After an off-season in which they just about white-flagged it by trading away their best pitcher, Yu Darvish, for a passel of pallid prospects, they’re bumping around under .500 with no swift turnaround in sight.

 As noted, Bryant, Rizzo and Baez all will be free to move come 2022 and the team can’t/won’t pay them all, so decisions loom. Maybe a thoroughgoing roster change might bring in a less-suggestible crew.