Mind games: How players unwind in clubhouse
SEATTLE >> On a table in the visitors’ clubhouse at T-mobile Park, there are small stacks of paper for the Red Sox players to take at their leisure.
The sheets aren’t baseball-related; rather, crossword puzzles and sudokus.
Several members of the team enjoy these brain-teasers, the pitching staff, in particular. Tanner Houck is a sudoku man, filling out a sheet almost every day with handwriting he describes as “chicken-scratch.”
“I’m not a crossword kinda person, but I’ll grab (sudokus) and work on ‘em when I’ve got some downtime,” he said. “I try to stay off my phone as much as possible.”
The general consensus was that Isaiah Campbell, Garrett Whitlock, and Greg Weissert are among the biggest brainiacs on the pitching staff.
“Greg is a smart guy,” Chase Anderson said.
“Isaiah does ‘em both,” Houck said of the sudoku and crosswords.
“Garrett, he’s a deep thinker,” Chris Martin said. “Isaiah, he’s sneaky-smart, good numbers guy. Crossword puzzle, he’s OK at, he can do the easy ones.”
“Oh god, who told you that?” a smiling Campbell asked, when told that several of his teammates had called him the Einstein of the clubhouse. “I like it. I’ll wear it. I’ll be the guy who knows everything on the team.”
What he really likes, though, is trivia.
“I grew up in an Air Force family, and my dad, we always joke that my dad knows everything, so I kind of get it from him,” the reliever explained. “I like doing trivia, I know just some weird facts that people are like, ‘Why do you know that? How do you know that?’ It’s a little quirk to me.”
“Weissert, he might play not-smart, but he’s got some brains in there, some good brain cells in there,” Campbell joked. “I haven’t seen many people do crosswords, Whitlock’s not great at ‘em.”
“Whitlock’s good at ‘em,” Bobby Dalbec countered. “(Jarren) Duran will do it every now and then, (Connor) Wong likes to do ‘em.”
“I can’t do sudoku,” Dalbec explained. “I do the crosswords, typically. I’m not good with numbers, but I play a lot of word association games. Me, (Daniel) Palka, a bunch of (Triple-a) guys last year would do them every day.”
Solving sudokus can improve memory and focus, among other benefits for the brain. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that doing crosswords could improve cognitive function. Both types of puzzles have been shown to help prevent dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Throughout the spring, players have competed in all manner of games. The Fort Myers clubhouse has a basketball hoop. Several players golf in their free time.
“I don’t mess with those,” Martin said, referring to the sudokus and crosswords. He’s an avid golfer, and “big Youtube guy.”
Likewise for Anderson, who grew up doing a lot of yard work and landscaping, so he enjoys watching videos of that ilk. “I love chainsaws, I love lawn mowers, tree-trimming,” the newcomer said. “That’s just what I grew up doing with my dad.”
One game you probably won’t find anyone playing in the Sox clubhouse is Immaculate Grid. Houck chuckled when reminded that during one particularly lengthy rain delay last year, the game went up on Fenway’s centerfield video board.
“I’m terrible at it,” Campbell said. “It really shows me how much I don’t know about the history of baseball.”
To each their own.
Chris Sale hit hard by former Red Sox teammate in Braves debut
SEATTLE — Chris Sale looked solid Atlanta Braves debut on Sunday, with one notable exception.
Kyle Schwarber welcomed his former Red Sox teammate to the National League East with a leadoff home run. The Philadelphia Phillies slugger sent Sale’s second pitch of the contest 382 feet to right at 114.4 mph.
Schwarber and Sale overlapped briefly when the slugger arrived in Boston at the 2021 trade deadline, but their time as teammates included an unexpected Red Sox playoff run. Expected to finish in last place, the Sox instead clinched one of the AL Wild Cards and defeated the New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays before falling to the Astros in Game 6 of the ALCS.
Otherwise, the 35-yearold (his birthday was March 30) left-hander’s performance was strong. He departed after 5 1/3 innings, having allowed two earned runs on five hits, walked two, hit a batter, and struck out seven. He threw 83 pitches, 56 for strikes (67.4%).
It was Sale’s longest season debut since 2018. He pitched Opening Day ’19 in Seattle but the Mariners knocked him out after three frames, charged with seven earned runs. After missing the entire ’20 season while recovering from Tommy John surgery, and starting the subsequent two campaigns on the injured list (he pitched five innings in his eventual debuts), the southpaw lasted just three innings in his ’23 debut, when the Orioles tagged him for seven earned runs. He only threw 83 or more pitches in nine of his 20 starts for the Sox last season.
Sale spent six seasons in Boston following a trade from the Chicago White Sox in December 2016. Before injuries derailed his career, he was an All-star back-toback in ’17 and ’18, finished second and fourth in AL Cy Young voting, respectively, and made a memorable ninth-inning performance to clinch the 2018 World Series.
The Red Sox traded Sale to the Braves just before the new year for infielder Vaughn Grissom. As a player with 10-and-5 rights, he had to agree to the trade.