No doubt, the ball players wished that the males had the good sense to leave, too, once the party was over —but they didn’t. “During my at bat, I had them in my nose,” said Yankees first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz. Even viewers at home found it hard to watch on TV, because the midges seemed to be covering every part of every player in every shot. It seemed like some kind of biblical plague.
Baseball is famously a game of inches, and with a tiny white ball whistling past hitters at up to a hundred miles an hour, it’s also a game of milliseconds. In fact, the official MLB rules about what a pitcher can wear on the mound are very exacting, so that the flash of a sleeve can’t unfairly distract the batter. The space in centerfield behind the pitcher—referred to as the batter’s eye—is always black, and fans aren’t allowed in that part of the park, so that movement and color hundreds of feet away from the batter can’t interfere with his ability to see the pitch. Now Mother Nature had filled the batter’s eyeball with crawling, horny insects.
No one was happy with the situation. The Yankees infielders were waving their caps and gloves, trying to shoo away the flying midges. The Cleveland batters looked equally uncomfortable. And the midges were probably wishing that big galoots like Chamberlain would get out of their way so they could continue their hot pursuit of love.
Chamberlain seemed particularly irritated and uncomfortable. “Joba had them all over his back and all over his neck and all over everywhere,” said his teammate Mientkiewicz. The umpires weren’t about to come to his rescue. “It was just a little irritation,” said umpire crew chief Bruce Froemming. “We’ve had bugs before. I’ve seen bugs and mosquitoes since I started umpiring.” To Froemming, it might have been a little irritation. Unfortunately for Chamberlain, the midges got under his skin, so to speak. He walked Grady Sizemore on four pitches. Then he threw a wild pitch to Asdrubal Cabrera. Sizemore to second. Cabrera laid down a sacrifice bunt. Sizemore to third. A glimmer of hope when Travis Hafner lined out, but then another wild pitch, this time to Victor Martinez. Sizemore home. Game tied.
The Indians went on to win in the eleventh inning in what is officially known as the Bug Game. “They bugged me, but you’ve got to deal with it,” said an irritated Chamberlain after the game.
Mark Aoyagi is a sports psychologist at the University of Denver, and he knows that’s easier said than done. According to him, it’s simply not possible to actively ignore something that’s irritating you. You have to take another approach. In Chamberlain’s case, Aoyagi says that the young pitcher “can’t not focus on the bugs.” In other words, if he tries
In a way, Aoyagi is arguing for putting something that psychologists call inattentional blindness to good use. The idea is that you can miss things that are literally right under your nose if your attention is focused on something else. In a famous article on the topic, Dan Simons of the University of Illinois described inattentional blindness this way:
Perhaps you have had the following experience: you are searching for an open seat in a crowded movie theater. After scanning for several minutes, you eventually spot one and sit down. The next day, your friends ask why you ignored them at the theater. They were waving at you, and you looked right at them but did not see them.{24}
To demonstrate how powerful this effect is, Simons and his colleague Christopher Chabris made a video of six people passing two basketballs among themselves. You may have seen it—a rare academic study that went viral on the Internet. In the video, three of the people are wearing white shirts; the others are wearing black shirts. The white-shirted players pass only to other white-shirted players, and the black-shirted players do likewise. As they pass the balls among themselves, they dance around one another, so keeping track of who’s passing to whom requires attention. It’s like trying to keep track of which walnut shell the pea is under, if you’re familiar with that game.
In Simons’s experiment, he told subjects to watch the video and count how many times the players in white shirts passed the ball to one another. The video starts in a straightforward manner, with the players weaving and passing, weaving and passing. After about twenty seconds, however, a woman in a gorilla suit walks into the frame from the right, pauses, faces the camera, thumps her chest, and walks out of the frame to the left. All the while, the players continue to weave and pass.
At the end of the fifty-second video, Simons asks subjects whether they saw the gorilla. Typically, 50 percent of the people ask, “What gorilla?” Only after showing them the video a second time, this time with no instruction to count the number of passes, do subjects see the gorilla. Then everyone sees it. It’s completely obvious. No one can believe that the gorilla was “invisible” the first time around. Why do some people miss it? And what does this have to do with coping with annoyance?
Basically, people don’t see the gorilla because “there is no conscious perception without attention,” as Simons puts it. “What’s more, the level of inattentional blindness depends on the difficulty of the primary task.”
Sports psychologist Benjamin Conmy would have applied a version of Simons’s concept of inattentional blindness to Chamberlain’s circumstances in the Bug Game. Conmy advises players that there should be “a total immersion in only the aspects of the present that are germane to accomplishing the task. So, for Chamberlain, that’s executing a baseball pitch. You want athletes to be so immersed in what they are doing that they almost forget where they are. They’re so dialed in that they don’t think about anything else.” When the insects appeared on the field, however, they interfered with Chamberlain’s consciousness. “Now he’s aware of where he is, how he is doing, how these insects might be affecting his preparation,” says Conmy. To get Chamberlain back on track, “I would have had him walk away from the situation and get centered again. Because there was nothing he could do about the situation. The bug spray wasn’t working. The umpires clearly weren’t going to give him a respite. I would have had him say to himself, The next three or four pitches may not be perfect, but they don’t have to be disastrous.”
The point is that as irritating as the bugs were, they didn’t suddenly make Chamberlain an inept pitcher. He was still a fantastic player. “And that’s what he needed to focus on,” says Conmy. “He needed to realize that he was still completely in control of how well he was pitching this year. The insects were something he couldn’t control, and he should have just dealt with that and functioned to the best of his ability.”
It sounds easy, but try that the next time you miss your connecting flight. The fact that it’s something you can’t control is exactly why it drives you crazy. Yet it’s also true that if it’s all in your head, only you can do something about it.
Another approach that Conmy would have used in the circumstances is something he calls cognitive restructuring. “I would have said to him, ‘Remember, Joba, one of the hardest things to do in the world is to hit a baseball. These flies are clearly in this batter’s vision. They’re flying in and out of his eyes. He has no chance of hitting any of the pitches you can throw right now.’”
A final note on the Bug Game saga. It is not possible to speak for all entomologists, but it’s certain that many of them become annoyed when people confuse bugs and insects. The nonbiting midge
Entomologist David Denlinger says that when he was a kid, it did annoy him when people used the term
Unless the midge attack was orchestrated by the Cleveland Indians or their supporters, Joba Chamberlain’s woes can be considered an act of God, as they say in insurance policies, or an act of Nature, as Darwin put it in
