I love to take digital photographs. One of my favorite subjects is sports art; baseball to be exact. If I ever get a chance to visit another city, I usually make sure that I can get tickets to the local baseball team and we watch a game. I have played the game for 39 years as a catcher and my wife has learned to ignore me, because I sit in the stands and call out the pitches before the catcher sends signals to his pitcher. I take my camera to the game and I wander around the stadium taking the general sightseeing pictures (broadcast booth, playing field, statues, monuments, etc.) then I go back to my seat and start to zoom in on the players.
Chapter 9 in “Sparks of Genius” talks about “Body Thinking,” or the training of our bodies to perform a physical function over and over, until our body does the movement without even thinking. Chapter 10 talks about “Empathizing,” or mentally placing yourself in another’s position. You may act like that entity, or you may emulate their physical traits. My dad tried to teach me how to pitch by making me watch Detroit Tiger baseball games on the television and try to throw a ball like the pitchers did. It never worked. I was taught how to throw a baseball like a catcher and still do after all these years.
As I said, I have been a catcher for 39 years and that is a lot of squatting when you add it all up. I was taught “how” by a snakeskin, steel tip cowboy boot wearing coach. He used to stand behind me during practice and kick my left buttock every time I did something that he did not like. I hated that stupid metal tip, but it sure made me “body think” my way into being a better catcher. Now I am old in baseball years and I can watch a player’s muscular performance, seeing if they deserved a boot to the butt, or freedom from pain. I take pictures of the players too and I can critique them later.
My boys like to play baseball and I coached their teams for years. There were times I wanted to buy a pair of steel tipped, snakeskin boots, but I prefer to stay out of jail. I taught my players “Body Thinking” through repetition, not pain. I took photographs during games and used them to demonstrate/illustrate where they were not playing correctly. It worked well, but not perfectly. I would tease them as well, by picking one or two idiosyncrasies of their behavior and imitate them during practice. One player had a mental/superstitious issue with making a cross on the plate before each at-bat. I am not sure if he knew this, but we all had a good laugh when I asked the team who I was and walked into the batter’s box, making a crucifix symbol with my bat. It was fair turn-around when my kids finally noticed that I never walked in front of an umpire. Even if he were standing up against the fence, I would politely excuse myself and walk behind him as I went up to bat. I really wished somebody took some pictures of me doing that, because I am not that superstitious and it would have been funny to see.
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