One thing I really like about baseball is that there’s always just so much going on. If you don’t pay attention 100 percent, you can easily miss something.

One thing I hone in on is weird personality quirks or tics players have while on the field. Josh Willingham used to open his eyes really wide before stepping into the batter’s box. Addison Reed immediately props his cap atop his head the second he walks off the mound because he hates how they feel pulled all the way down.

But the other night, I tweeted that one of my favorite things this season was the “Bobby Wilson monocle” celebration every time he gets a hit.

The Bobby Wilson monocle after he gets base hits is probably my favorite thing about this year's #MNTwins — Brandon Warne (@Brandon_Warne) August 15, 2018

This is what it looks like:

To me, it looks like Mr. Peanut and perhaps could signify a seeing-eye single. In baseball slang, a seeing-eye single is a ball that just sneaks through the infield. In some circles, you might hear it called a “Texas Leaguer,” but the general idea is all the same.

But when I approached Wilson’s locker to talk to him about a completely unrelated subject — for a column that’ll come out sometime this weekend — I figured I might as well shoot my shot and find out what it was all about.

I wasn’t expecting much of an answer. Wilson isn’t exactly Chris Gimenez as far as quotes go, but he’s a friendly face in the clubhouse who is always willing to talk shop. In this business, you grow to like the guys who let you put away the recorder and notebook as much as those who fill them up.

Wilson is one of those guys, but it isn’t like I served him a hunk of choice beef waiting for him to sear it and send it back medium-rare. It was me lobbing him a softball to break the ice for the conversation I was really hoping to have.

“It’s actually a good story,” Wilson said as he reached into his locker. “I was going through an especially difficult stretch offensively, and I went up to (Twins radio voice and former player) Danny Gladden and just said, ‘Danny, I need a hug.'”

Wilson got his hug, but not before he got an education.

“You ever heard of the Eye of the Tiger?” Gladden quizzed Wilson. Wilson thought for a while, and was like, “Uh, you mean like the song from Rocky or whatever?”

Instead, Gladden pulled a stone out of his pocket. “It’s called the Eye of the Tiger stone,” Wilson explained. “It’s a heart that he always carries with him.” Wilson pulled a Twins toiletries bag out of his locker. He dug into it and found a black felt bag, and out of it proffered a small stone, shaped like a heart and colored like stained wood.

The Eye of the Tiger. That’s what Wilson is gesturing when he gets a hit — in the direction of fellow catcher Mitch Garver.

“This is for good energy, to have good people surround you,” Gladden told Wilson. “Good energy, good mojo, good vibes coming your way.”

Wilson must have picked up on the fact that I was a little confused; maybe my facial expression gave it away. Wilson confessed he too was skeptical at first. “So it was just kind of really weird,” he admitted.

“I think the next day, or maybe it was even that day, I went out there and got three hits,” he said. Wilson said he wasn’t sure exactly when the encounter took place, but that he remembered he was hitting .113 and the Twins were at home.

“I remember looking up at the board and thinking ‘This is awful,’” Wilson said, referring to the spot where the player stats are posted every day. “Every time I’d look at the board I just have this negative energy like ‘God, what is this?’

“At that point, you’ve done all your work. You’ve done everything. You’re just searching for anything to give you an edge. Even as long as I’ve been in the league, it doesn’t matter. You’re looking at the board, and you’re getting crushed on social media. I felt like I was going down that path where you get negative thoughts. This kind of gave me a new outlook on everything.”

I believe I’ve figured out when the encounter took place, and Wilson’s memory is pretty good. Sometime between July 6-7, Wilson was hitting .114 on the season. On July 7, Wilson went out and got a pair of hits. In his next game, he went 1-for-3, and in the game after that, Wilson went 3-for-4 in an 8-5 win over Kansas City.

The upshot is this: if my investigation is correct, Wilson was hitting .114/.191/.203 on the year pre-Eye of the Tiger. Since then, coming into Friday night’s action, Wilson was hitting a respectable .275/.302/.412.

It’s only crazy if it doesn’t work, right?

At that point, I had to hear straight from Gladden about this phenomenon, so I ran upstairs to the broadcast location to ask him about it.

“You’re damn right!” he said as he pulled a big heart-shaped piece out of his jeans pocket, but not after first giving me an uneasy side-eye glance when I asked him about the Eye of the Tiger. “I bring this with me everywhere.”

“I was telling Mitch about what happened, so that’s kind of been our little inside thing — the Eye of the Tiger,” Wilson said. “We went out and bought a bunch of stones and the necklaces that a bunch of us wear. It’s just kind of been a little thing that he and I and LoMo use. Even some of the coaches talk about keeping the good energy, keeping the vibes going. Not letting everything get surrounded by bad energy.

“Which it very well could be. You could have seen all these guys in here with their heads down after the trade deadline, but we’re kinda keeping that good energy. That’s kind of been our message between Mitch and I; keep the high energy, keep the intensity. Let’s not get too worried about anything else. Let’s just try to keep the good vibes and energy and see what happens.”

As luck would have it, Gladden-Wilson hugs have become a daily occurrence.

“I see (Danny) every day now and give him a hug,” Wilson said with a laugh. “We always talk about keeping good energy. I don’t know where he came up with it. Like I said, I got him, Mitch, LoMo and Smitty (first base coach Jeff Smith) a necklace. We wear it during the game just to keep good energy.”

Where did Wilson find such a thing?

“I got it on Amazon,” he said. “I was looking it up to see like what it meant. I believe it’s Buddhist. I was looking it up because Danny was saying ‘You need to look it up,’ and that’s kind of what it said. I needed good energy.

“This game is so negative all the time. You can fall into that trap of staying negative, or you can say “Yeah, I am hitting .113, but you know what, I’m going to have good energy. I’m not going to be a pessimist. I’m going to grind through it and get back to where I want to be. That’s kind of the way it went. That’s the Eye of the Tiger.”