SEATTLE—Revealing that the mystery has baffled scientists for the past hundred years, researchers at the University of Washington announced Friday that they have been studying the brains of select baseball fans to discover how they manage to stay interested throughout the first seven innings. “Although we have been hard at work for decades, we still have yet to unlock the secret of how a human being could summon the mental fortitude to stay focused on a 1-0 baseball game for hours at a time,” said project lead Vanessa Herrera, who explained that by discovering the special neural connections that these select individuals clearly possess, scientists could finally unlock the full potential of the human mind. “The fact is these humans’ brains have evolved in a special way, the average person would lose focus and walk away by the second inning. We always believed that the human mind required some sort of stimulation to remain absorbed, but this upends all of that. This is a sort of intense, internal focus that we only otherwise see in Buddhist monks. Who knows what we could do as a species if we all had that kind of superhuman concentration and patience?” Herrera added that some baseball fans enter a state of such passive absorption that the only other point of comparison was coma patients.