We Should Care About Athlete Well-Being

Gleyber’s Smile

On February 17th, 2025, a sunny day in Florida, Gleyber Torres walked into the Detroit Tigers Spring Training complex for the first time. As I watched the video on social media, two things jumped out: His incredible beard, and that he looked genuinely happy. These observations were notable to me for a few reasons. First, because I always find it interesting when a former Yankee leaves the Bronx and immediately grows facial hair; I’ve always assumed that a number of players on the Yankees would prefer to have facial hair, and Gleyber’s choice to immediately grow a thick beard felt like a subtle message to his former team — the team he joined as a teenager nine years ago — that he had moved on.

Admittedly, the promotional video does have the feel of a social media post a person might make after a breakup that all-but-screams “look how well I’m doing without you!”, but, and this is the second reason this video piqued my interest, Gleyber also had any number of reasons not to be happy walking into Tigers camp. The Yankees had been signaling for much of 2024 that they did not intend to bring Torres back; they never extended him, then brought in his replacement in Jazz Chisholm (who Gleyber refused to move off of second for), and never engaged Torres in contract talks in the off-season. Even as a free agent, Torres, a 28 year old two-time all-star (although not since 2019) entering the open market for the first time, didn’t generate much interest, and the one year, $15 million contract he signed with Detroit was almost certainly not the deal he was expecting heading into the off-season (Fangraphs crowd-sourced projections showed Gleyber getting a 3 year, $54 million contract). And yet there he was, smiling.

Now if you’ve been following the 2025 season so far you have likely noticed that Gleyber Torres has carried forward a great second half from 2024 into one of the best stretches of his career. As of July 8th, 2025, he has hit .2.75/.386/.418 with 9 home runs and 4 steals and a wRC+ of 132. He has walked more times than he has struck out, and his Statcast page is starkly similar to his 2023 campaign in which he hit .273, with 25 home runs to go along with 13 stolen bases.

So against the backdrop of just how darn happy Torres looked walking into Publix Field at Joker Marchant Stadium on that mid-February morning, it got me thinking: Should our perceptions of a player’s happiness matter at all when we evaluate or project performance?

What Projection Systems Miss

I have had a long-standing fascination with the psychological factors that influence performance. It’s why I have a Master’s Degree in Sport and Performance Psychology and have been a practicing Psychotherapist for nearly a decade. I often find myself imagining two players with identical physical tools, and thinking about the reasons why one player becomes an all-star, and another never breaks into the big leagues. I’m curious about how a player feels having grown up in an organization, and the psychological impact it has on a player to feel that their manager or the organization is moving on while they are in their prime, and still very much present in the clubhouse every day.

Statistical projection systems are remarkably sophisticated achievements, and I personally use them heavily. And they leave out the psychological factors that impact performance for good reason: We don’t have any good way of teasing apart what we can attribute to psychological factors and what we can’t. Psychological factors can also appear to be subjective, which can result in accusations of bias that defeat the purpose of being data-driven in the first place. But while we can strive to rely on quantitative data as much as possible, the players whose performance we are trying to predict are in fact human beings. They have good days and bad days, they are having kids and losing loved ones, they are away from their families for most of the year, and some are adjusting to life in a new city. Many are adjusting to life in a foreign country, and have varying degrees of comfort speaking in that country’s language. They experience stress, anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges just like we do, and have varying abilities to manage their mental state. To ignore these variables completely is to misrepresent athletes as shallower and more one-dimensional than they really are, and to assume that they do not play a role in impacting performance would be, I think, a mistake.

Here are a few thought experiments for you to consider: Can Gleyber’s success in 2025 be partially attributed to finding himself in a clubhouse where he has been embraced, and where he is no longer navigating the tension of an organization that was ready to move on without him? Can the Rockies Brenton Doyle’s struggles to start the season be partially attributed to the unimaginable grief he and his wife experienced when they lost their unborn child in mid-April, and then needing to compartmentalize this loss and return to the field in just a few days? And what about Justin Turner’s move from the Mets in 2013 to the Dodgers in 2014? The one where Turner went from a league average player by wRC+, to a player who was 58% better than league average as a 29 year old and entered the season on a minor league contract just three days before pitchers and catchers reported? Did it have anything to do with the fact that Turner grew up in Lakewood, California, and played his college baseball at Cal State Fullerton, and so his move to Los Angeles represented a homecoming of sorts?

While I can’t know for certain, I believe correlations like these are worth thinking about. They are worth thinking about because the players themselves matter as people, but in the context of baseball they matter because happy baseball players perform better than unhappy ones. Said slightly differently, the same baseball player will perform better if they are happier than they would if they were less happy. This shouldn’t be a controversial statement (there are numerous studies that show a positive link between athlete well-being and performance), but it does suggest that paying closer attention to changes in the factors that influence well-being could be a valuable predictor in fluctuations in performance. But how should we understand well-being, and what should we look for?

Well-Being: A Primer

Well-being as a construct has actually been fairly widely discussed in academic literature, but it has also been surprisingly difficult to define. In general, well-being has been defined as, “optimal psychological experience and functioning”, but this definition has it’s limitations because it is pretty broad and doesn’t really tell us anything about what “optimal experience” actually means. When trying to focus more specifically, well-being has frequently been divided into two buckets; Hedonic Well-Being and Eudaimonic Well-Being, with Hedonic Well-Being being synonymous with subjective well-being, or how someone feels, and Eudaimonic Well-Being, representing Psychological Well-Being (PWB), which focuses on the loftier and more future-oriented goal of “living well and actualizing one’s human potentials”.

Subjective Well-Being is more concerned with the present moment, and having high Subjective Well-Being has been found to have three components: having frequent positive feelings, infrequent negative feelings, and reporting having a high life satisfaction.

Psychological Well-Being has never had a universally agreed upon definition, but one of the simplest psychological theories that correlates with well-being is called Self-Determination Theory (SDT), developed by the Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. SDT identifies self-determination, or the extent to which a person feels in control of their own life, as being broken down into three categories: competence (how much we feel like we can do what’s being asked of us), autonomy (how much freedom we feel we have to do things on our terms), and relatedness (a broader sense of feeling connected to others).

According to Self-Determination Theory, paying attention to how competent we feel, how autonomous we believe we are, and how connected we feel to a community can be instructive in understanding what is contributing to our sense of well-being. It can also provide valuable data to identify what we can change to improve our well-being. In order to avoid turning this into more of a psychology paper than I already have, I am going to include a similar tool, the Psychological Wellbeing Scale at the end of this article for you to take yourself, as well as two other scales, the Satisfaction with Life Scale and the Flourishing Scale. These will hopefully give you a good sense of what is being measured, and will give you the opportunity to see where you score.

It’s important to note that both subjective well-being and psychological well-being are important. In fact, in an article published in 2023, Trainor and Bundon report that the presence of both types of well-being produces the most well-rounded sense of well-being for people, and that both contribute to greater mental health. This should make some sense because hedonic well-being focuses more on immediate well-being (how we feel in our day-to-day), while eudaimonic well-being focuses more on long-term well-being (our view of our life overall).

Why Should we Care About Athlete Well-Being?

So why should we care about athlete well-being? Well to put it simply, even if your goal is to be as cold and objective as possible in your analysis, if fluctuations in well-being impact performance then well-being is worth paying attention to. Maybe we should consider how aggressively assigning a player to a tougher league might influence their sense of competence if they struggle out of the gate, or how Luis Robert Jr’s 2024 performance was impacted by simply being on the worst team of all time while being floated in trade rumors all season, or how the incredible consistency of Jose Ramirez may be connected to his decision to take less money to stay in Cleveland, a city where he has now lived for the last twelve years and where he obviously feels at home. I’m not saying that these factors are even primarily responsible for these outcomes, but I am saying that they matter. Because these players aren’t robots, and you cannot separate their play on the field from the human being actually playing. As Psychologist Carl Rogers wrote in his famous book On Becoming a Person, “a person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.”

But this isn’t just a moral imperative; the implications extend into our own lives as well. In a world that has become increasingly polarized, where we spend more and more time interacting with digital representations of human beings and curated social media feeds, where Americans’ mental and physical health are at the lowest point in the history of Gallup’s polling and where loneliness has been described as an epidemic, considering the complexity and the well-being of another can be a radical act. It’s an act of empathy, and empathy exercises our mental muscles that build social connection, compassion, and increase our own well-being. As Carl Rogers also said, “it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual.” It is not easy, but it is important.

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