During competition, athletes are consistently regulating their own emotions (Friesen et al., 2013a) and the emotions of their teammates (Tamminen et al., 2016). Athletes have identified music as a strategy used for both intrapersonal (Lane, Davis, & Devonport, 2011) and interpersonal emotion regulation (Friesen et al., 2015), while also using music for association/dissociation, enhancing performance, facilitating flow, and improving their qualitative experiences (Gabana et al., 2019). Though theories have been proposed on athletes' individual (Bishop, Karageorghis, & Loizou, 2007) and group music use (Karageorghis et al., 2018), they are yet to be widely applied to other sports. Further examination is thus still needed to better understand the group-level uses of music and the lived experiences of athletes listening to music, and to further develop theories. Researchers in the present study utilized a descriptive phenomenological psychological method (Giorgi, Giorgi, & Morley, 2017), interviewing nine professional baseball players on how they experience music on a gameday. Results are divided into sections focusing on individual, team, and stadium listening, then compared to theories on emotion regulation (Campo et al., 2017; Gross, 1998), music in sport (Bishop, Karageorghis, & Loizou, 2007; Karageorghis et al., 2018), and relevant theories in the field of sport psychology (e.g., Martin, Moritz, & Hall, 1999). Implications for athletes, coaches, sport psychology professionals, and professional baseball organizations are discussed.
