OC Register: Hoornstra: When it comes to baseball, don’t worry: that cockroach won’t poison your water

[AngelsWin.com]

A funny thing happens when your life shifts from Los Angeles to Phoenix every February: your mornings suddenly become colder. Grass lawns are regularly covered in dew when the sun rises. Your car, if left outdoors overnight, sprouts a thin sheet of frost on its windshield – nothing a squeegee and a blast of heat from the defroster can’t cure. For everyone who partakes in the annual circus of Spring Training, each morning serves as a reminder that the Arizona desert isn’t a permanent swelter.

Pitchers and catchers won’t report for another six weeks, but I can already close my eyes and see the frost melting, the time dragging, as I monitor a translucent windshield. I am reaching for my phone and scrolling through my Twitter notifications. I am firing up a podcast episode. I am waiting.

***

Which happened first: did I read the comment or hear the podcast? I can’t remember.

Back in August, I tweeted out the news that Dodgers pitcher John Axford was diagnosed with a slight fracture on the top of his right fibula. He was headed for the disabled list. It was barely two weeks after the Dodgers acquired Axford from the Toronto Blue Jays. This was a freak injury, the unlikely result of a ball hit back to the mound. Still, the comment came swiftly, begging to be read, waiting to blow: “what in the world are Zaidi and Friedman doing”. Didn’t even bother to use a proper question mark, I thought.

The comment itself wasn’t special. As cynicism goes, this was normal for Twitter in 2018. It just reached so far afield to assign blame – laying the responsibility for one freak injury on the Dodgers’ front office – it got my imagination running compared to most attempts at irreverence. What’s the psychology of a comment like this? I wanted to get to the bottom of how baseball, and sports in general, turns rational adults into irrational tribalists.

It is irrational, right? It’s odd that people create social media accounts whose raison d’être is firing the manager or general manager of your favorite team. We certainly shouldn’t expect these accounts to come into existence shortly after that manager or GM is hired. Maybe sports-talk radio is your preferred medium. The same pathos prevails: callers shouldn’t be dwelling on the problems of teams enjoying a long winning streak, or the team’s best player. Yet they do. We expect it. Why do we expect behavior that seems irrational?

***

Like frost disappearing from a windshield, the answer emerged clear as day before my eyes. The psychologist Rachel Herz was talking on a podcast about Adolf Hitler’s sweater. This wasn’t an actual garment in the Fuhrer’s closet, but rather an imaginary piece of clothing that happens to elicit a strong reaction.

The Hitler sweater was conjured by psychologist Paul Rozin for a study concerning the concept of disgust. It was one of several hypotheticals – things like stepping on an earthworm while walking barefoot on concrete, a person who only changes his underwear once a week. Turns out people are really disgusted by the idea of wearing Hitler’s sweater. A 1994 study sought to take the idea a step further.

“People are told Hitler owned this sweater,” Herz said. “Would you be willing to wear it under varying conditions? When could it become OK? No form of cleaning could make it OK. Mother Teresa wearing it could make it a little bit OK, but in the case of Hitler’s sweater it had to be totally destroyed and burned in order to make it OK.

“Good cannot sanctify bad in the way that bad can sanctify good. … Just one spot of something like a cockroach in a glass of water, or milk, or anything else, has the capacity to destroy the whole thing, because negativity is much more pervasive and powerful from the way that we are built. This is, in fact, adaptive. It’s better to worried about things that can harm us than overly excited about things that might be benevolent.”

***

This inspired my deepest baseball thought of 2018. I’m sharing it now, before the frost melts, because I hope it inspires you in 2019.

Some of sports’ more tribal elements are laid bare for human consumption, like wearing a jersey or a hat. Others are more insidious. Our instinct to protect the tribe from the things that bring harm might express itself quietly. The face-painting, flag-waving hooligan makes for an easy caricature, but what about those of us who scan every box score for possible signs of trouble? Maybe this feels like instinctive behavior because it is.

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I don’t know if any scientific method can connect John Axford’s fibula to the cockroach in our water, but monitoring the replies to a beat writer posting bad news on social media seems like a start. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook comments are rife with exaggerated worry – to the point where, now, the exaggerated worrier is caricatured too. Maybe the Axford comment was never intended to be serious. Maybe it was. It’s hard to know anymore.

In May, I wrote about how social media often does a poor job celebrating and appreciating some of baseball’s more extraordinary feats – in particular, Pat Venditte making a living pitching with both arms, and Shohei Ohtani thriving as a pitcher and a hitter. It’s clear to me now what social media does well. Regardless of the arena – politics, entertainment, religion – the game is skewed toward alerting the tribe to danger. When that danger is hard to see, some of us only reach that much farther. The occasional brave beat writer goes out of his way to save the fan from himself; to point out there’s nothing there. I found myself doing that a lot in 2018.

The great thing about being a fan is that, if nobody is there to save you from yourself, everything usually works out OK anyway. That cockroach won’t poison your water. Try to remember that in the new year.

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