SEATTLE – On a table in the visitors’ clubhouse at T-Mobile Park, there are small stacks of paper for the Red Sox players to take at their leisure.
The sheets aren’t baseball-related, rather, crossword puzzles and sudokus.
Several members of the team enjoy these brain teasers, the pitching staff, in particular. Tanner Houck is a sudoku man, filling out a sheet almost every day with handwriting he describes as “chicken-scratch.”
“I’m not a crossword kinda person, but I’ll grab (sudokus) and work on ‘em when I’ve got some downtime,” he said. “I try to stay off my phone as much as possible.”
The general consensus was that Isaiah Campbell, Garrett Whitlock, and Greg Weissert are among the biggest brainiacs on the pitching staff.
“Greg is a smart guy,” Chase Anderson said.
“Isaiah does ‘em both,” Houck said of the sudoku and crosswords.
“Garrett, he’s a deep thinker,” Chris Martin said. “Isaiah, he’s sneaky-smart, good numbers guy. Crossword puzzle, he’s okay at, he can do the easy ones.”
“Oh god, who told you that?” a smiling Campbell asked, when told that several of his teammates had called him the Einstein of the clubhouse. “I like it. I’ll wear it. I’ll be the guy who knows everything on the team.”
What he really likes, though, is trivia.
“I grew up in an airforce family, and my dad, we always joke that my dad knows everything, so I kind of get it from him,” the reliever explained. “I like doing trivia, I know just some weird facts that people are like, ‘Why do you know that? How do you know that?’ It’s a little quirk to me.”
“Weissert, he might play not-smart, but he’s got some brains in there, some good brain cells in there,” Campbell joked. “I haven’t seen many people do crosswords, Whitlock’s not great at ‘em.”
“Whitlock’s good at ‘em,” Bobby Dalbec countered. “(Jarren) Duran will do it every now and then, (Connor) Wong likes to do ‘em.”
“I can’t do sudoku,” Dalbec explained. “I do the crosswords, typically. I’m not good with numbers, but I play a lot of word association games. Me, (Daniel) Palka, a bunch of (Triple-A) guys last year would do them every day.”
Solving sudokus can improve memory and focus, among other benefits for the brain. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that doing crosswords could improve cognitive function. Both types of puzzles have been shown to help prevent dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Throughout the spring, players have competed in all manner of games. The Fort Myers clubhouse has a basketball hoop. Several players golf in their free time.
“I don’t mess with those,” Martin said, referring to the sudokus and crosswords. He’s an avid golfer, and “big YouTube guy.”.
Likewise for Anderson, who grew up doing a lot of yard work and landscaping, so he enjoys watching videos of that ilk. “I love chainsaws, I love lawn mowers, tree-trimming,” the newcomer said. “That’s just what I grew up doing with my dad.”
One game you probably won’t find anyone playing in the Sox clubhouse is Immaculate Grid. Houck chuckled when reminded that during one particularly lengthy rain delay last year, the game went up on Fenway’s centerfield video board.
“I’m terrible at it,” Campbell said. “It really shows me how much I don’t know about the history of baseball.”
To each their own.
