![]() Now I watched with amazement as Konerko did much the same. ![]() (I play in what my wife calls "geezerball," an amateur league for those over 35.) With two runners on and my team trailing by a single run, I had done everything wrong: I took a hittable fastball for strike one, chased an unreachable curve ball outside, and then stood frozen as strike three - another fastball, which you should always be ready for with two strikes - split the plate. It was one I could relate to, for I had endured an at-bat remarkably similar to his the week before. Though I was there to see a choke, I was pulling for the guy. Now, however, he had a chance to break open an important game. Konerko generally hits well with runners in scoring position, batting a few points higher than his lifetime average, and he could do so in big moments: He had won game 2 of the 2005 World Series, in fact, by homering with the bases loaded.īut Konerko was also a streaky hitter, and lately he had run cold. It falls heavier when the pitcher has just intentionally walked the previous batter.įeeling this weight now was Paul Konerko, the Sox first baseman. When White Sox slugger Jim Thome, who had already homered once, came to bat, Lewis, on orders from the bench, walked him intentionally to get to the next batter.Ī certain weight - the weight of great opportunity - falls upon any hitter who steps to the plate with the bases loaded. Lewis, perhaps suffering a bit of a decrement himself, walked the first hitter and then surrendered a double that left runners at second and third. Meanwhile, I was introduced to a novel view of what generates or destroys performance under pressure.īeilock, who not long ago played some high-level lacrosse at University of California, San Diego, traces her own interest in choking back to high school, when she discovered that during the tense, game-beginning face-offs, she more often gained control of the ball if she sang to herself, "to keep me from thinking too much." Later, in grad school, it occurred to her that if you could avoid choking by engaging your brain with singing, it followed that choking must rise from what neuroscientists like to call mechanisms - that is, systematic, causal chains of brain activity. And later that summer, I went to see the White Sox play the Red Sox in Fenway - a splendid, tense game, one of the best I've ever seen, in which Chicago lost even as one of its stars redeemed himself while going hitless. (I lost $5 in the deal, too, which I forgot to bill the Times for.) That evening we went to a White Sox game to see someone choke, and were not disappointed. I went to Chicago and visited Beilock in her lab, where she made me choke in a putting game. ![]() It was a sort of dream assignment for me: baseball and cognitive neuroscience. She was working on the book when I researched and wrote this story in summer and fall of 2008. This is an opportune time to finally run this feature, for the subject of the story, University of Chicago psychology professor Sian Beilock, has just published a book, Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Tell You About Getting It Right When You Have To. ![]()
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