Over at our Mariners blog, Lookout Landing, Jeff Sullivan has a great piece exploring how much of an impact a player’s environment has on his emotions, and more importantly, how all this relates to his performance on the field. He uses the history of new Mariner Ian Snell as a jumping-off point.
If A Player Struggles, Can We Always Know Why?
↵↵Ian Snell requested a demotion last year from Pittsburgh to AAA Indianapolis. He didn’t want to come back up, even after having extraordinary success in the minors. He admitted that there was too much negativity in the bigs, that he couldn’t let things roll off his back, that the environment he faced as a Pirate made him depressed.
↵[...] what if Snell doesn’t improve in 2010? What if he keeps on struggling to throw strikes? What if batters keep destroying his fastball? What would that tell us about the relationship between happiness and success?
↵Would it tell us anything?
↵↵The post, which is well worth a read, doesn’t attempt to definitively answer any questions, but it’s a great conversation-starter. If the factors behind a player’s performance are a case-by-case basis, is our psychoanalysis even relevant?
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