"Yo, I Like Your Walk-Up Song": Music Integration in Professional Baseball Gamedays

Abstract

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.