ADHD and baseball

I posted about this topic once before, but it bears looking at again.

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In this article from ESPN.com, there is an alarming statistic presented right at the beginning of the article:

Eight percent of Major League Baseball players last year qualified for ADHD exemptions to take stimulants that would otherwise be banned by the MLB.

Now, let's ignore my own personal history, which renders me intimately familiar with ADHD, and look at this from an objective point of view:

ADHD is a neurological disorder, one of the most common in children, that results in inattentive, impulsive and sometimes hyperactive behavior. It affects 3-5% of all chilren, meaning that in a class of 25, there will probably be at least one child that has it.*

Let's dissect that.

First, ADHD is one of the most common neurological disorders in children. While it's true some professional baseball players are still adolescents, most are adults, in both the physical and legal sense.

Secondly, ADHD affects 3-5% of all children. It would be understandable if the rate in baseball mirrored the actual average, even if many adults are able to develop coping mechanisms and thus not exhibit the signs or symptoms of ADHD. However, the eight percent rate given by ESPN has to turn a few heads.

While it's true that some disorders can find a higher prevalence do to environmental factors--like a higher incidence of depression in extreme northern areas like northern Canada and Scandinavia due to the long, dark winters--it makes no sense that baseball would draw those that have ADHD.

Baseball is a sport that demands a lot of focus for long periods of time. This, of course, would explain why a drug like Ritalin or Adderall would be so attractive to a baseball player, but, at the same time, it makes it hard to imagine that someone previously diagnoses with ADHD would choose this particular sport. One or two cases? Sure...but nearly a tenth of all baseball players?

Unless psychologists and psychiatrists are peddling baseball as the new ADHD cure-all, that just doesn't fly.

Consider also the following, from the article cited above:

The diagnostic guidelines also contain specific requirements for determining when the symptoms indicate ADHD. The behaviors must appear early in life, before age 7, and continue for at least 6 months. Above all, the behaviors must create a real handicap in at least two areas of a person’s life such as in the schoolroom, on the playground, at home, in the community, or in social settings. So someone who shows some symptoms but whose schoolwork or friendships are not impaired by these behaviors would not be diagnosed with ADHD. Nor would a child who seems overly active on the playground but functions well elsewhere receive an ADHD diagnosis.

If ADHD was that prevalent in baseball, you would think that ESPN and Baseball Tonight would be airing a few more 'fluff' pieces about playing the game with the neurological disorder...

The point here, and it's a point that needs to be made to the general public, as well, is that ADHD isn't just having a hard time paying attention.

ADHD is being inattentive to the point that it seriously impacts multiple, if not all, facets of your life. It's not just being unable to sit still in class; it's being unable to do what the coach asks in basketball practice, stay tuned to the same episode of Lost for more than ten minutes, maintain silence when a friend is speaking...all of these things.

Perhaps the most damning, is, again taken from the above cited, this paragraph about adult ADHD:

To be diagnosed with ADHD, an adult must have childhood-onset, persistent, and current symptoms.18 The accuracy of the diagnosis of adult ADHD is of utmost importance and should be made by a clinician with expertise in the area of attention dysfunction. For an accurate diagnosis, a history of the patient’s childhood behavior, together with an interview with his life partner, a parent, close friend, or other close associate, will be needed. A physical examination and psychological tests should also be given. Comorbidity with other conditions may exist such as specific learning disabilities, anxiety, or affective disorders.

(bold my emphasis)

For ADHD to be properly diagnosed in adults, there must be evidence of childhood symptoms.

This is a tricky thing--children are, by nature, hyperactive and lack long attention spans. When diagnosing a child, one has immediate access to a child's school environment and can tell fairly easily if a child is that much more inattentive than the rest of the children around him or her.

As an adult, however, one only has access to memory, and, if they're lucky, former school records, not to mention that as time progresses, different standards are expected from children. There's simply no surefire way of knowing if behavior as a child was along the lines of ADHD or simply a child misbehaving.

Is it possible that there are one or two baseball players that have ADHD and meet all of the diagnostic criteria? Of course.

The idea, however, that nearly a tenth of them are reported to have the condition, brings it to almost epidemic proportions--and is worthy of further examination.



*National Institute of Mental Health.

Baseball and Impressionism

While I'm sitting here, trying to figure out how many different ways I can explain why an alliance between England and Spain in the 1490s was important, something else has entered my mind.

See, on Friday, I went grocery shopping, as I do every so often because food is a very good thing to have. In DeWitt, NY, which is about a fifteen minute drive from where I live in Syracuse, there's a very large Wegman's, which, aside from having a gigantic organic/anti-allergenic section and amazing seafood for the middle of upstate NY, also has an almost bookstore-quality magazine selection, and an impressive selection of books for a relatively cheap price. So, when I saw Baseball Prospectus for 20% off the cover price of $21.95, I jumped.

I've been reading it--not quite cover-to-cover, but close. I started with the Yankees, and then went on to AL East teams, and now I'm going through the rest of the American League alphabetically before I tackle the National League.

It's an amazing guide, and it almost actually makes me interested in the math (my dad would have a heart attack if he knew), but I almost feel like I need to study it like a textbook and write up quizzes to make sure I remember who's who and what all the translated PECOTA stats are.

The thing I notice about this, breaking down each team into player-by-player, is that you end up focusing so much on the details that you almost lose sight of the larger picture. In fact, if it wasn't for the well-written introductory essays on each team, you would get lost. This isn't a fault on Baseball Prospectus's part; their job is predicting player performance, and by extension team performance, and they're damned good at it.

The problem is when we--the fans and non-GMs or baseball analysts--get so wrapped up in, say, Wang's WHIP or Johnny Damon's VORP, we can forget to look at everything else going on around it. For instance, we forget that Wang's won more games over the past two seasons than any other major-league pitcher, and he's got his best years ahead of him.

Perhaps a better comparison: imagine yourself at the Louvre, looking at a Monet masterpiece. You're intrigued by the composition--and you should be, because that's what impressionism does to you--but eventually you spend so much time looking at one or two brush strokes, that you forget to take in the painting as a whole. Then there are the factors that have an effect on the picture that you don't know just from looking at it, such as how Monet nearly went blind. For comparison, consider something like the off-season knee injury to Aaron Boone--because of something totally unrelated to baseball, a pick-up basketball game, the Yankees ended up with a guy projected to break the all-time Home Run record if he stays healthy in Alex Rodriguez.

Stats won't give you that.

You'd never think that putting a baseball team together would be like a work of art, but in multiple ways, it really is. First, you need the right painter with the right skills, which would be like saying you need the right GM. If we go back to the Renaissance, in art history, you also need a wealthy patron to fund you--this would be the owner not afraid of spending money.

Next, you need the right set of brushes--the right manager and the right coaches for the job. Do you go with a thick brush, one that will let the paints speak for themselves, or a small brush, to work out all the details? Usually you need multiple brushes to get it right.

Only then do you worry about the paints, or the players, but even then, there's a lot there.

First, there's the question of whether you mix your own paints (develop your own prospects) or use whatever your patron has in stock or go out and buy from a dealer (think Boras) that might ask for a lot and give you a horrible quality color.

Then there's the color scheme: are you going to emphasize bold colors--the home run hitters and the power pitchers--or use a more muted palate, with your control pitchers and manufactured runs?

Next you need to figure out which colors to apply first--which players do you build your team around? Is it just one or multiple? Do they mix well, or do they clash horribly?

Last, but certainly not least, you need to consider exposure: Is this painting hung under controlled conditions in a gallery like the Ufizzi or the Louvre? Does this team play in a place that lives for baseball, like New York, Boston, Chicago or St. Louis, or is it hidden away in some dusty attic? I've got a comparison here, but as I want to be fairly diplomatic, I won't rag on any one city in particular. Does this artwork age well? Or is it a one-year wonder like the '03 Marlins?

In an ideal world, all of the steps work as they're supposed to, and you end up with the Mona Lisa or Birth of Venus, like the 1998 Yankees, but most of the time there will be something amiss.

The question is, do you dwell on it? Do you dwell on the brush stroke that doesn't quite fit in with the rest? Do you dwell on the choice of using a bold red over a deeper, richer burgundy (think, do you spend time debating over whether you'd rather have someone hit 40 home runs, like A-Rod, or have a .300+ batting average for your career, like Jeter?)

Or can you step back and appreciate the painting--or the team--for what it is as a whole? Can you recognize that there are factors that have gone into the making of the portrait that you'd never know from the finished product? Like the Aaron Boone pick-up game or perhaps the historical reasons baseball is so popular in Japan, hence the number of Japanese major leaguers?

Sabermetrics, statistics, whatever you call them, are important. They're a crucial piece of the whole any way you look at them, for position players or pitchers, rookies or veterans, even managers or coaches.

They're not the entire picture, though. If you focus just on that--if you read a guide like Baseball Prospectus, which will give you the best fantasy team on the planet--but forget to look at anything else, you will get lost.

The gallery of baseball has some great works of art. If you only focus on the technical side of things, you run the risk of forgetting why it's beautiful in the first place.