BY HANNAH PURKEY

In print | Published October 7, 2010

Finally. The playoffs. I was starting to think they didn’t really exist, as it had been such a long time since the San Francisco Giants had been invited to participate in them. And, in true Giants style, it took until the last game of the season to make it happen.

But as I bask in the glory of finally making it out of the regular season, the question lingers of how exactly we got here. What makes this season different from the past six? If you ask Aubrey Huff, it’s all because of a red, rhinestone-studded “Rally Thong.” Yes, he does mean a pair of women’s underwear. Huff donned this particular pair of underwear on August 31, before the Giants’ last 30 games of the regular season, and claimed, “Here’s 20 wins right here.” Although most people at the time dismissed this as just another illustration of Huff’s eccentric personality, with this weekend’s win against the Padres, the Giants’ record since the thong-incident is 20-10. His prediction actually came true. Now he is predicting, “We’re going to sell more of these than Panda hats [head gear brought out last season in support of fan favorite Giant Pablo Sandavol].” Who knew underwear could ever be so important in professional baseball?

While I don’t want to stop any baseball fans from investing in the thong industry to help their favorite team out Huff-style, I think there might be more to the Giants’ surge to the top of the NL West than underwear. The truth is that at the upper echelons of athletic competition, the difference between being in the playoffs and watching them from home can come down to the very last game of the season. So what is the final determining factor that, for example, puts the Giants into the playoffs and leaves the Padres picking up the shambles of their season?

Taking into account the number of World Series wins for the New York Yankees and the size of their payroll, many assume that the richer the team the more success they will have. In fact, the MLB set up a blue-ribbon panel in 1999 to look into payroll inequities, according to Jerry Harbour’s book The Performance Paradox. The panel’s reports found that there were payroll inequities in baseball, and these inequities were correlated with a team’s ability to win.

Yet the story is more complicated than that. When a few economics professors took on the panel’s findings in The Wages of Wins, the expanded sample size of their study showed that contrary to the panel’s report, there was no evidence for a link between payroll size and World Series titles. In fact, Harbour points out, in the 2007 playoffs, the Yankees ($216 million payroll) lost to the Indians ($70.5 million), the Phillies ($100.6 million) lost to the Rockies ($60.6 million) and the Cubs ($113.5 million) lost to the Diamondbacks ($69.8 million).

So money cannot buy you a championship. However, investing in your brain might be able to. Yogi Berra’s saying, “Ninety percent of this game is half mental,” might be truer than even he knew. In a study of Canadian Olympic Athletes, researchers Terry Orlick and John Partington found that out of mental, physical and technical readiness factors, only mental readiness showed a statistically significant correlation with Olympic ranking. Of the over 200 Olympic athletes asked, only three percent categorized their focus as “very effective” during competition while 60 percent categorized it as “ineffective.” These results led the researchers to conclude that many Olympians were not performing up to potential due to lack of preparation in dealing with the distractions associated with high-level competitions.

These results have been supported by studies done on paradoxical performance effects, better known as choking under pressure. In a review of recent literature on these effects in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Roy Baumeister and Carolin Showers outline the possible models that explain why some athletes choke under pressure. All of these models approach the problem as arising from self-awareness and are essentially a not-to-do list for teams as they enter the postseason. So here is a bit of what the research has shown and what it could mean for the Giants:

1. Performance-contingent awards can cause players to imagine they have already won the award and therefore choke. This may explain why, entering a three game series against the Padres at home, the Giants almost got swept and thus forced into a three-way tiebreaker to get into the playoffs at all. Take it one day at a time, guys; you haven’t won anything yet.

2. Players can get distracted by worry and fear of failing. Well, Bay Area teams at this point have been so good at failing in the playoffs that I have to imagine they have learned to deal with that fear by now.

3. Under pressure, players stop executing their performances automatically and instead begin to consciously control their actions, leading to a decrease in effectiveness. This suggests that the Giants need to stop thinking and just play. If only there were a catchy Nike slogan that could help them remember this …

If the mental side of sports is really what it takes to win a championship, then I feel pretty good about the Giants’ chances. While this team might have a great pitching staff or might have a deep bench, the one thing the players have proven for sure is that they will do anything to win. So ignore what everyone else says, Huff, and you go ahead and wear your red rhinestone Rally Thong. As long as you have the World Series ring to match, who really cares?

Hannah is a senior. You can reach her at hpurkey1@swarthmore.edu.

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