Baseball players and autie-like behavior?

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Especially with the playoffs scheduled to start next week, see if you notice:

1) batters stepping out of the box. It's like they're trying to maintain a high level of concentration, and sometimes they need just a little break to gather themselves. Notice this is not allowed in school at all! or at least no where near to the same extent. Batting in baseball perhaps needs an A level of concentration. A lot of learning in school is perhaps more of a loosey-goosey B level of being present, with occasional times of concentrating intensely. For example in math, instead of trying harder, I think it's often better to try diagonally, so to speak, and come at the problem in a different way.

2) and baseball players stim. They chew, spit, re-adjust their gloves and do other things which would be completely unacceptable in a school environment. And I'm all in favor of drawing a distinction between public and private stimming. And alright, sometimes stimming is a distraction to what you want to do, and other times it's helpful. I think baseball players primarily stim to help maintain concentration. Another big benefit of stimming is to help deal with sensory issues.

So, please tell me what you think.

I can see where you're headed with this, but I'd chalk it up to the routine of it all. Keep in mind these men are playing the same game every day for 6+ months. For such a long slog, I'd imagine routines such as these make the proceedings monotonous enough to focus on the task at hand, rather than how ming-numbingly dull it eventually must become.

I've always suspected that whatever aspie athletes there are are most likely baseball players. if you are a baseball fan there are hundreds of anecdotes about how "superstitious" baseball players are. While some may be superstition, some may be autistic related routines.

It would seem baseball would be a good sport for aspies with an interest in sports because it is more based on repetition and perfection of the mechanics than it is fluid athleticism. You can be almost completely nonathletic, have relatively poor motor skills but still master the repetitive motion of pitching a baseball or swinging a bat.

I would think more pitchers than hitters, in particular starters. It's common place that starting pitchers do not speak with anyone the day of a scheduled start, media, fans, even teammates. They are often looked at as not really even part of the team except for a relationship with the catcher and a few fellow pitchers.

Im sure if this is so, it's a small percentage, but it's definitely a sport that lends itself to many typical aspie traits more than others.

Great post!

I am always fascinated by the superstitions and ritualistic behaviors in baseball. Pitchers jumping over the chalk lines when going back to the dugout, the strange wind-ups by some pitchers, the celebratory (and sometimes complex) handshakes and high fives after big plays, and behavior in the batting box. Jose Altuve (of the Astros) has some great repetitive behavior between bats. He unfastens and refastens his batting gloves, and pulls his batting helmet up and down (2 or 3 times) and crosses himself. It's pretty cool and he is one of the best hitters in baseball so maybe there's something to that routine (or stimming).

Oh, and don't touch Adrian Beltre's head!

IMO:
Some days you are fully capable, it feels awesome. Other days you just don't feel right.
Routines are like a chant, a ritualistic dance that leads to an inner trance that can make every day a good day.

It's like the Pavlovian dog drooling upon hearing a bell.
Autistic or not: When you need it, your ritual gets you into a ready mindset.

The strange windups can be attributed to deception in most cases I think. It's not for show. It's to make the ball harder to see, move more or appear to be coming in faster. For example if you go back to Orlando Hernandez "El Duque", that high knee was not just to do it or some weird routine. It became routine, and probably had some mechanical significance to his delivery, but was predominantly to hide the ball for the longest possible time. A pitch arrives a the hitter in under 4/10 of a second. Any amount you can subtract from that and not alter your pitch accuracy makes the hitters job to recognize and hit the pitch much much harder.

I think the high vie celebratory rituals are more team building bonding type things. Id imagine the social dynamics of a baseball clubhouse are strange. They spend so much time together for so long.

The odd batters rituals have been thankfully cut down. Unnecessary. But quirky for sure.

One of my favorite superstitious players was Wade Boggs. The man ate chicken every single day. He had all sorts of numeric rituals as to when he'd work out, the time he'd do other things. How many swings he'd take in practice. He was infamously regimented like that.

Boo, thank you for the very nice compliment!

And what I'm trying to say is that stimming is within the broad, 'normal' human range, to use a very loaded term! But somehow the way we on the Spectrum stim is consider 'wrong' or 'bad.' And we should question that.