Talk:Sophomore jinx

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Portal	Sophomore jinx is maintained by WikiProject Baseball, which aims to improve Wikipedia's coverage of baseball and baseball-related topics. If you would like to participate, visit the project page, or contribute to the discussion
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.
Article Grading: The article has not been rated for quality and/or importance yet. Please rate the article and then leave comments here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.
	This article has been marked as needing image(s).
WikiProject Baseball To-do: edit  Here are some tasks you can do to help with WikiProject Baseball: The current Wikipedia:WikiProject Baseball/Article improvement drive article is New York Yankees. Requests: Keith Bucktrot, Rip Radcliff, Sandwich Pick, Trey Hillman Attention: 1873 New York Mutuals, 1947 Little League World Series, Bobby Cox, China national baseball team, National Association as a major league Expand: 2007 Major League Baseball season, Kansai Big Six Baseball League, Players League Stubs: 2005 Major League Baseball All-Star Game, Batboy, Catch (baseball), Check-swing, International Baseball Federation, Korean Baseball Organization, Korean Series Images: Appeal play, Charging the mound, Corked bat, Error, Wild pitch Quality watch: 8 FA-Class Baseball articles - 6 GA-Class Baseball articles.

Why qualify the sophomore jinx "in baseball"? It is a sports phenomenon. It happens in basketball and football, plus probably in hockey and other sports, although since I'm not a fan of those sports, I'm not sure.

Relatedly, in the NBA, there is a phenomenon known as "hitting the wall," a situation where rookie players play well for 1/2 or 3/5 of the season, and then production falls off significantly. Of course this doesn't happen to all players, but is relatively common due to the differences in the length of the NBA season compared to college and high school. --JRed June 28, 2005 20:04 (UTC)

Another possible cause is a player just happening to have their "career year" in their first year in the major leagues. In baseball, you can examine minor league performance and often a great rookie season can actually be a fluke and the sophomore jinx is simply a player regressing back to their normal performance level.

Maybe this page should be combined or linked somehow with Sophomore slump, since the idea of a lesser second effort extends beyond sports to music, literature, and education. Although I always heard it called the "Sophomore jinx" growing up, "Sophomore slump" may be a more common usage nowdays.