Often, it was more like "the team" instead of "the guy". For some reason, at least when/where I played, it was a badge of honor to tie one on until the wee hours and take pride in fighting through it the next day.
Many still do. I have to give credit where credit is due for men (former players) in their 50s, to be able to drink all night and go golfing at 6:30 in the morning the next day.
So is it still part of baseball culture? I would have thought that with the emphasis on conditioning (other than pitchers, conditioning meant taking an extra 100 swings in the cage) that maybe guys were taking a little better care of themselves.
I don't know about the current culture, obviously events like what happened earlier this year give some validity but that could be rare...
I do think it is still there, but the person I was thinking of played in the 70s-80s and is currently coaching.
I dunno about the guy in the 70's/80's, but of course Mickey Mantle is well-documented as having hit a home run while hung over. "They don't know how hard that was," was Mickey's comment.
Transmogrified Tiger wrote:A person's eyes/memory are at their least reliable when recalling high leverage situations.
I heard people say that but I don't know what it's based on or how it could be proven in sports. People that are scared may have trouble remembering what color tie a suspected criminal was wearing (I'm not certain of if this is the type of analogy this thinking comes from but I'm not going to put much more thought into it) but for me, those high pressure situations were ones that I lived for. I loved the feeling. And I was confident of my ability, if not always a little nervous. But that nervousness is what made it different than a practice round/pickup game. I guess you could say it helped me focus on the task at hand. Sure, I may not have a memory of a plane that flew over or a crowd that was noisy but I can remember exactly the way certain things felt. There are still rounds of golf I played 20 years ago that I remember every shot I took and even some of the thought processes I had that day. But I'd never remember how to get to that golf course or who I played with. So I don't know if I'd discount a baseball player like in the original post, that talks about hitting, as an unreliable source.
