Read about the results here.

Welcome to the worst or best day of the Major League Baseball season. If you find yourself cheering for a team that can’t seem to buy a win, you might look forward a day when they can’t fall any further back in the standings. If your favorite team is on the cusp of greatness, you might find yourself champing at the bit to see them get back to chasing a pennant. In either scenario, you’re probably agonizing over the upcoming franchise-defining trades that could solidify your team’s future or allow them to add the extra win that takes them to the playoffs, where anything is possible.

At Banished to the Pen, we often expand on baseball questions raised on the Effectively Wild podcast. In this case, we’d like to riff on a simple survey our favorite podcast hosts submitted to members of the Sonoma Stompers baseball team last summer. While running the baseball operations department for the Stompers (and working on an excellent book every fan should read), Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller submitted a two-question daily survey to the players: How locked in are you? What’s your mood? Originally, the surveys were intended to gauge the connection between the two questions but, when the results came in, it appeared that players were hesitant to admit when they didn’t feel locked in or weren’t in a good mood. We want you to be honest with us because we’d like to find out if there’s a connection between the two questions among baseball fans and, since this blog isn’t focused on just one team, we’d like to find out about the moods of many different fan bases.

Maybe you follow more than one team, in which case we’d love to see you fill out different surveys for each team. We’re only using the names associated with the surveys for internal tracking, so feel free to use whatever name you’d like. Thanks in advance and we look forward to sharing the results in an upcoming post.

On an important note, it might seem superficial or trite to weigh baseball fans’ moods while the world experiences once-in-a-generation turmoil over race relations and electoral politics. Banished to the Pen was founded by and is run by baseball fans who live in many different areas of the US, Canada, and even Europe, so the gravity of the protests, counter-protests, and attempts to heal deep wounds are certainly not lost on anyone who contributes to this site. At the same time, we’ve all used sports at times in our lives to give us a short break from whatever our troubles may be, and we hope that a short silly survey in the middle of the summer gives everyone a few moments away from the world, and that sports can continue to be a common ground that brings people from all walks of life together.