In the quiet moments, during the hours away from the tedium that is minor-league baseball, Cody Decker would return to his home and crack open a book by Konstantin Stanislavsky, the famed 19th-century Russian stage actor and theater director.
The pages provide a release, the Royals prospect says, and the subject piques his interest.
In acting circles, Stanislavsky is a patron saint of sorts, the man responsible for creating the Stanislavsky System, a form of a method acting and intense emotional training. So when Decker was a 20-something dreamer forging a path to the major leagues, he drank deeply from thew well of academic acting books.