The Most Underrated Performance Enhancer: Having Fun

What the Tiger's did when "Nothing was working."

For the first 90 games of the season, the Detroit Tigers were the best team in Major League Baseball. But the hot streak dates back even further. They finished last year on a tear. When they made the playoffs and upset the Houston Astros in the first round, many analysts thought it was a fluke. They said the team was too young. Too inexperienced. Yet the Tigers quickly put those ideas to rest with their play in the first half of this season. They were the first team to reach 60 wins. A whopping 45 percent of the starting lineup for the American League All-Star team were Tigers.

So, as surprising as their dominance in the first half of the season was, what happened after 95 games may have been even more so. The Tigers went on a horrendous streak, losing 12 of 13 games, including to some very bad teams. The local newspaper, The Detroit Free Press, called the Tigers “​historically bad,​” and provided all sorts of data to back it up. The Tigers nosedived from having the best record in baseball to the eighth-best record in the span of just two weeks.

To quote the Free Press, “Nothing was working.”

But then, their star hitter, Riley Green, who had been slumping worse than anyone, grew a mustache. And sure enough, he started hitting bombs again. Next thing you know, all the players on the team—a bunch of grown ass men—were rubbing Green’s mustache before their own at-bats. And then they, too, started hitting bombs again. Since the arrival of Green’s mustache, the team broke the slump, started hitting again, and has gone 6-4.

Baseball is a long season. 162 games to be exact. It is, as much as anything, a test of patience. There are going to be good streaks and bad streaks. When the Tigers hit their historically bad streak, they didn’t make any major changes to their lineup or strategy. But they did make a major change to their mindset. They went from being the best team in baseball with a bunch of all-stars carrying the weight of the world and everything to lose… to a bunch of guys rubbing each other's mustaches.

That is to say, the Tigers started to have fun again. And then they started to win again.

It’s easy to fit theories onto reality post-hoc. Perhaps it was natural reversion to the mean, and the Tigers were going to start winning again regardless of the mustache. But if you watch the team regularly, you couldn’t help but notice the energy shift once the mustache came to life. It certainly didn’t hurt.

There’s an extremely important lesson in here for everyone: In whatever endeavors you choose, you’ll inevitably face rough patches. Sometimes there is a clear reason, and that clear reason can (and should) be addressed with a material fix. But other times the cause of a rough patch is mysterious—it’s bad luck; it's bad weather; it's bad vibes; it’s who knows what. In those latter instances, when there is no material change to make, it’s often useful to inject a jolt to change your mind. You want to do whatever it takes to shift out of a downward spiral and toward having fun and competing.

That's because when pressure mounts and things go south, the default is to tense up, which almost always makes matters worse. Researchers call it the difference between a performance avoidance and a performance approach mindset. The former is when you play tight and not to lose. The latter is when you play free and to win. As you can guess, ​research​ shows that a performance approach mindset is almost always advantageous.

Riley Green's mustache helped the Tigers transition from a performance-avoidance mindset to a performance approach mindset. It was the headspace they inhabited at the beginning of the season: an underdog, not expected to do anything, and most importantly, a group of guys having fun.

It can be a funky outfit. A pair of goofy shoes. A trending song. A different haircut. A different hair color. Or yes, a mustache. Whatever it takes to break up the monotony of a long and hard stretch, whatever it takes to get out of a performance avoidance mindset and into a performance approach one.

The hustle-culture excellence and performative greatness types that dominate the internet tell you that everything is about grit and being tough and suffering and being super serious all the time. It’s the David Goggins approach to greatness. No doubt, there is a time and a place for that. But there’s also a time and a place to grow a mustache and have fun. And as the Detroit Tigers are showing us, the latter is every bit as important to actual excellence as the former.

-- Brad and Steve