SNY: Salfino: Yanks handling of Hughes questionable

A team must decide whether they will invest in guys like Hughes, who have decent prospects for greatness. This necessarily means that there will be pain along the way. It seems obvious, but it’s easy to forget as the bad outings pile up. You pay now so you can profit later.

Learning how to overcome failure and, more precisely, the fear of failure is the biggest hurdle for the professional athlete. Hughes, for example, knows how to pitch. He’s been doing that his whole life. He now needs to learn how to pitch against the best hitters in the world. That can’t happen in the minors, where he’s already dominated.

Only bad things can happen there. If he pitches well, big deal. He’s proved nothing that will aid him when he again steps on the big-league mound. And if he gets hit in the minors, then you really have a crisis.

This isn’t conjecture. There’s 100 years of science supporting it. It’s called the Yerkes-Dodson Law and it was first postulated in 1908.

The law says that what we understand as “the zone” in sports is really an arousal curve. Performance for all of us, not just athletes (but especially athletes), improves as we are mentally excited, even fearful. The pulse quickens and our focus narrows; time seems to slow down. This is our body’s way of sharpening us for battles that were once literally life or death.

Yerkes-Dodson…which became Yerkes-Oscar Gamble, I believe. Good deal!