Growing up in a household that has generations of baseball players, including my great grandfather, my grandfather, my father and my brother, it was almost impossible not to follow suit. I remember back to when I was 6 years old, I was sitting in front of my dad playing with my toys and he told me today was the day I started my baseball career. I’m pretty sure I was more excited that day than I was on Christmas which seems nearly impossible. My father lived towards one goal in his life; he wanted to be drafted by the Atlanta Braves. He never did achieve that goal, but he surrounded himself with baseball his entire life and I instinctively followed suit. So to sum that all up, my life revolved around baseball for quite a while. Fast forwarding to later in my career, I was playing some summer ball and really started to slump badly. For those of you confused, a slump means when you couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn if that were how big a baseball was. Then finally, I smacked a pair of triples and a double, scored 3 runs and batted in another 6. It was one of the best games of my career. From then on, for the next week or so, I was on a tear, ripping everything that was pitched to me. Now, if you haven’t played baseball, or don’t know the secret to baseball greatness, it is all superstition. After that first game, I didn’t wash my jersey, wore the same compression shorts, and socks, and glasses, and wrist tape, and wrist band, and used the same bat. You can get the picture. In a baseball player’s mind, wearing the same clothes, using the same EXACT routine, or using the same equipment meant you would be successful. This is a classic case of illusory correlation, when someone believes there to be a relationship between two things when no such relationship exists. In my mind, it was not washing my clothes and using the same routine that allowed me to break the slump. Do you really think that the dirty socks I’m wearing has anything to do with how I perform at the dish? Probably not, but that is how our mind works. Just as is the case of illusory correlation, our mind is making connections between two very arbitrarily irrelevant things. Much of the time, we like to see things that aren’t really there. Taking this one step further, it’s also a case of correlation, not causation. That is, although my performance may have been better during the time I wore the same clothes, but there is no physical evidence, or logic for that matter, proving the socks gave me some special power to hit the ball better. Most experts will tell you that slumps are entirely in your head, a mental block if you will. But being born and bred a baseball guy, I don’t believe in explanations. I believe in the socks.