For weeks after joining the low-Class A Lexington Legends in late April, Royals minor-leaguer Brewer Hicklen sat in the team’s dugout between at-bats with a journal propped on his lap.
He bore down on it with a pen and scribbled what he saw in his trip to the box before the thoughts raced out of his mind.
“Just to take the negative and turn it into a positive,” Hicklen said in late May, when he was hitting .295 with a .523 slugging percentage in his first 24 games of the season.
Journaling allowed Hicklen, who is 6 feet, 2 inches tall and weighs 208 pounds, to rein in his frustration and focus on what was in front of him.