Step into the Diamondbacks clubhouse, and visitors won’t be greeted by cleats or gloves. In this MLB sanctuary, it’s different.
Sitting in roughly half of the lockers is something else: puzzles, of the crossword and sudoku variety.
Many of the Diamondbacks players start their day with a puzzle before even preparing to practice or play in a ballgame.
“I won’t let myself eat until I finish the puzzle,” Diamondbacks pitcher Bryce Jarvis said.
For many within the Diamondbacks clubhouse, sudoku puzzles are just a fun way to pass time before the next activity. Players arrive at the clubhouse as early as 7:30 a.m., with workouts scheduled for 10 a.m.
With at least two hours to mentally prepare, the players compete against each other or themselves before the real competition starts.
“It’s just downtime, and you’ll drive yourself crazy staring at a wall or waiting for whatever’s next on the schedule,” Jarvis said.
For pitcher Brandon Pfaadt, games of sudoku serve more than just one purpose. Along with passing time, Pfaadt says that the puzzles help create “different strategies” within his mind that help translate to his pitching.
“I think that’s just for fun just to kill time and a lot of people love them,” Pfaadt said. “Me personally, I’m not a crossword guy but I’m a sudoku guy. I’ll go over there every once and a while and crush those. … Staying calm and having those different strategies. There’s so many different strategies in sudoku and as you get sped up you can get off track pretty easily.”
Sudoku has an ancient history. Dating back to the 1890s, a Paris daily newspaper, Le Siècle, began to create the puzzles. By 1979, the modern version of sudoku began to appear in the U.S. Studies suggest that the definitive number of solutions in a classic puzzle is 5,472,730, 538, according to mathematicians and sudoku experts.
Created by Arthur Wynne, crossword puzzles also share a rich history. In December 1913, the first crossword appeared in the U.S., in New York World. The game became an instant hit. Less than 10 years later, nearly every American newspaper had daily crossword puzzles in their paper.
Similar to sudoku or crossword puzzles, baseball is a game of strategy. Coaches have to make lineups each night, along with what pitchers will throw that night. With nine batters in the lineup each night, that means the manager has 40,320 different ways that he can set his lineup in just a single game. Multiply that by 162 games, and there are 6,531,840 differing possible batting orders over the course of the regular season.
For someone who doesn’t have to create the lineup, like Pfaadt, he has to fight many mental battles within games instead, from pitch selection to the rollercoaster of emotions that comes with giving up runs, hits and striking out batters.
Jarvis agrees with Pfaadt in the sense that sudoku and crossword puzzles are a good test of mental capacities early in the morning.
“Baseball is a mental game and as long as you are doing something to test that capacity, I think it is good,” Jarvis said.
Not only are the puzzles a good test of mental capacity in the morning, but they can also help emotionally after games. Dr. Jonathan Katz, a sports psychologist from New York, said that the routine can help emotionally ground players who may be fighting mental battles.
“I think what a routine does is it stabilizes and provides a foundational grounding effect, kind of emotionally for players,” Katz said. “Because if they follow that, it’s like whether I went 4-for-4 or 0-for-4 (in) my previous game, back to my plan, my process, my routine, my discipline, and that can be very calming as you stack those kind of days on top of each other. It keeps the athlete often from the emotional volatility associated with the performance volatility.”
Crossword puzzles and sudoku puzzles have proven to help with mental capacity and attention span. A 2019 study by the National Institute of Health found that both games improve the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for planning, attention, decision-making and social cognition. Not only does the PFC help in the realm of attention span, but it can aid in many other baseball-related areas including decision making and problem solving.
Dr. Brooke Choulet, a sports psychologist based in Scottsdale, also noted this about the benefits.
“There is a lot of evidence that doing cognitively engaging tasks like Sudoku or things like that can help improve attention,” Choulet said. “And so you’ll see a lot of guys, whether it’s basketball, baseball, football, that will do certain tasks or skills that improve attention before going out on the court or the field.”
As for other Diamondbacks players, the puzzles serve as a way to get some competitive juices flowing. Crossword puzzles in particular get harder as the week progresses. Monday puzzles provide the easiest hints, while Sunday will be the hardest.
Throughout the Diamondbacks clubhouse, there are several desk-like seating areas where players sit and complete puzzles. Pitcher Kyle Backhus and second baseman Tim Tawa are particularly competitive in their one-on-one race to see who finishes the fastest.
“I think it is a good start to the day, you know it gets the mind warmed up a little bit and it’s also just a little bit of competition,” Tawa said.
On the other hand, Backhus exclaimed that he is one of the better sudoku players on the team.
“Personally I think I am better at sudoku than some of the guys, so I kinda rub it in their face a little bit, but they are way better than me at crosswords,” Backhus said. “That’s (directed) at Tim Tawa because he tries to get under my skin a little bit with the crosswords.”
Although many claim to be the master of these puzzles, two Diamondbacks have earned respect team-wide: Jarvis and former bullpen coach Mike Fetters.
“Jarvis is good, I’d say he is the best I’ve seen,” Diamondbacks pitcher Joe Mantiply said. “The best I’ve ever seen was our old bullpen coach, Mike Fetters. He’s been doing them for like 30 years, so he pretty much knows all of them.”
Jarvis doesn’t disagree.
“On a good day I could probably knock it out in like six or seven minutes, pretty much you don’t lift up the pen,” he said. “On a bad day, I’ll be 12, 13 minutes.”
But Jarvis didn’t become the best overnight. He lived by the motto of “to become the best, you have to learn from the best.”
“I would do them (the puzzles) with my grandparents growing up,” Jarvis said. “We would be at their house for Thanksgiving or Christmas and my grandparents would be into them. I wasn’t a whole lot of help then and they would make me feel good when I got the easy clues, but now I can get involved myself so it’s way more fun that way.”
Now that he has the knowledge from his grandparents, the Diamondbacks’ master puzzler has a competitive edge against his teammates.
“I mean doing them for a while definitely helps out, they repeat a lot and you can kind of understand the lingo that goes with the clues, but I’ve always had a knack for puzzles and games,” he said.
In a game defined by mental duels and razor-thin margins, it turns out the Diamondbacks are winning by keeping their minds sharp — one puzzle at a time.
Be the first to comment