Imagine having a list of names on a whiteboard, and a man points to each one, asking, "Is his wife hot?".

Well, that was standard practice in Major League Baseball for decades.

Why were they doing it? Here's the context...

Every season management makes trades, and players are signed. During that process, players are evaluated on a bunch of different statistics. (I won't bore you with all of them because no sport has more acronyms that need essays to explain than baseball.)

After years in mental game coaching & training, I was hired to help a team and found myself in one of these evaluation meetings.

Near the end of the process, a long-time scout for the team walked to the whiteboard, pointed to all the pitchers on the board, and asked:

"Yah, but is his wife hot?"

I listened as men discussed the merits of different players' wives 'attractiveness scores' or asked for a picture to evaluate more closely.

I leaned over to a young executive next to me and asked him what was going on, and he explained:

"The old guys think that you can judge a pitchers confidence, by the attractiveness of his wife. The thinking goes, if a player has a hot wife, he's got a ton of confidence, especially if he looks like a catchers mitt. If his wife is average, than he has questionable confidence."

Afterward, I called my mentor, Harvey Dorfman (AKA The Yoda of Baseball), and asked him about it. He said, "It's been going on for years, Todd. There's still an unsophisticated old boys club that won't progress beyond chest-thumping gorilla behavior."

The next time I heard the question, I brought up examples of why their question had no merit, and not surprisingly, my contract wasn't renewed.