Rocket22 posted on June 08, 2015 12:56
Team superstitions, do they truly play into how good our teams play, or how an individual produces on the field, or are they just a figment of our imagination? Some players carry around a rabbits foot, have a favorite bat they use, or wear there lucky socks, shirt, or lucky underwear (hopefully clean). Some players even go as far as eating the same thing every game day. Are superstitions just a mind game? Is there some truth to all this craziness? Today we are going to take a look if superstitions play a role or not.
Let’s take a look for example at the Eagan Yankees (The team I’m currently playing for). We have 2 different jerseys (Black Jersey & Grey Jersey) that we will be wearing throughout the season. As of right now we are off to a nice start but over the past few weeks I have started to notice a trend. I noticed that we hit for more power when we wear the Grey Jerseys but hit (for the most part) for average when we wear the Black Jerseys.
Most of the fellas want to wear the Black Jerseys more, but that worries me since 19 out of 26 HRs this year have come from wearing the Grey Jerseys and the same goes with 55 out of 96 runs scored. This is when I started to think and become really superstitious. I wanted to see if there was any truth to this madness.
I started to think do we wear the Grey Jerseys for the rest of the year for power and production or do we wear the Black jerseys to distract other teams when they see how good we look in them. As you can see these are HUGE decisions a team captain must make for his players and team moral. We are basically a third of the season in and I have gone through our team stats. If my calculations are correct and it looks like they are I have come up with some interesting numbers.
Below I have a breakdown of our record and stats on what each player has done from an offensive level in both jerseys. Even though it’s still early in the season here is a small sample size of what I’m talking about:
Overall Record: 10-5
Grey Jerseys: 5-3
Black Jerseys: 5-2
Grey Jerseys
Old Yeller- 8HR 18RBI .357
Torpedo- 3HR 8RBI .209
Rocky- 4HR 7RBI .300
Mays Hays- 2HR 11RBI .290
Rocket- 2HR 11RBI .322
Santi-N\A
Black Jerseys
Old Yeller- 2HR 13RBI .333
Torpedo- 2HR 7RBI .276
Rocky- 0HR 2RBI .138
Mays Hays- 3HR 11RBI .333
Rocket- 0HR 5RBI .345
Santi- 0HR 3RBI .333
So you see the dilemma, Black Jerseys or Grey Jerseys? All I know is if a team sees us wearing the Black jerseys they will know we are there just to look good in our cool jerseys, but if we are wearing the Grey jerseys we are still trying to look good but we came ready to play. So is this truly being superstitious? Is it actually a superstition? Or is it still all a mind game? All I know is for the rest of the season only time will tell.