Studying the Joy of Sox

Good Vibe Coach — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:32:57 +0000

While I’m in Scottsdale, Arizona for a three day seminar studying manifesting and energy through horses, I thought this study of manifesting and energy in sports an appropriate topic to share today.

This piece comes from the Major League Baseball site and is written by Doug Miller. I think you’ll appreciate hearing about the open minds studying law of attraction in the real world:

The 2004 Boston Red Sox were down, three games to none, to the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series — a deficit no Major League Baseball team had ever overcome in a seven-game set.

In the ninth inning of Game 4 at Fenway Park, with the Sox down a run, Dave Roberts stole a base, Bill Mueller knocked him in to tie it, and David Ortiz’s 12th-inning home run sent Fenway Park into a frenzy and gave the Sox and their Nation of fans new life that eventually culminated with the club’s first World Series championship in 86 years.

This we all know.

But did something extra-special happen that night?

Did something outside the realm of bats and gloves and balls and baselines and outfield grass and pine tar and eye black somehow arrange for these astounding, never-witnessed events to transpire?

That’s what the makers of the film “The Joy of Sox: ‘Weird Science’ and the Power of Intention” are finding out, and the results are nothing short of shocking, heartwarming, and illuminating.

“The Joy of Sox,” which is set to hit theaters by early November, is a documentary that asks if the power of positive thoughts and prayers from Red Sox fans have actually, scientifically played some role in bringing the team two World Series rings in the last four years.

According to the film’s Web site, thejoyofsoxmovie.com, the movie “touches all the bases from Western science to Eastern metaphysics as it explores the physics of the home-field advantage, the power of Red Sox fandom’s positive intentions, and the phenomenon of ‘conditioned spaces,’ a term which describes the healing powers of Lourdes, but just as fitting for Fenway Park — a modern sacred space.”

Directed by award-winning filmmaker Joel Leskowitz, who produced the film with his cousin, Rick Leskowitz, M.D., and Karen Webb, “The Joy of Sox” follows up on Rick Leskowitz’s findings as a board-certified psychiatrist with the Pain Management Program at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, where he began investigating if alternative medicine had any links to Red Sox Nation.

“We measured crowd energy during a live baseball game and correlated the events of the game with readings on a computer that was not measuring volume or sound or vibration,” Rick said.

“It’s a setup used at Princeton for the last 30 years to study mind-machine interactions. And I know it sounds totally woo-woo, but Princeton’s a highly respected place, and those studies were done by the head of the engineering department.”

Rick explained that if you have an unmonitored computer program that simulates flipping a coin 1,000 times per second, you’ll usually get heads and tails about half the time.

“But if people are paying attention to computer, it skews to a significant degree away from 50-50,” he said. “I’m not sure why, but something invisible is connecting to it.”

And when the same program applies to a watched Sox game, the results are staggering.

“The times with the biggest skew away from randomness seemed to be during key moments in the ballgame, like (David) Ortiz hitting or the crowd doing the wave. And during a two-hour block, the biggest skew was when fans sang ‘Sweet Caroline.’ It’s hard to wrap your head around, but data’s data.”

Hours and hours of interviews with doctors from the fields of alternative medicine, holistic medicine, directors of research, professors from some of the leading institutions in the country, not to mention Red Sox players past and present — including Johnny Pesky, Jerry Remy, Mike Timlin, Gabe Kapler, Kevin Millar and Bill “Spaceman” Lee — reveal theories about winning baseball that are unique and innovative.

“Anything that can make a difference of a few points in their batting averages or ERA, that’s something a player will try,” Joel Leskowitz says. “They’re not all meditating together, but they have seen films like ‘The Secret,’ and they know about intangible things like team chemistry and the power of positive thinking.

“We’re looking for a balance. There’s the science and the data, there’s what we get out of talking to the players about their experiences, and then there’s the fans. And they talk about their passion that’s pretty out there. Fan is a shortened version of fanatic, and we definitely had some fanatics.”

So what do you think? Does fan-power translate into real life results able to affect outcomes of games? (You probably know what I think: “How could it NOT??”) As usual, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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Studying the Joy of Sox