BOONVILLE, Mo.  To a casual observer, Norm Visbeck is a well-adjusted, mature adult with a steady job at the Missouri Department of Fish and Game.  "I count catfish," he says with obvious pride.  "It's my dream job."

"This here makes one."

But probe ever so gently beneath his placid exterior, like a hand-fisherman "noodling" beneath the surface of still water, and you discover that Visbeck is a seething cauldron of insecurities that manifests itself in little things that are apparent only upon closer inspection; reddened areas on his scalp line and his right ear, for example, where he scratches himself constantly.

Kansas City Athletics

"Norm is one of the lucky ones," says William Altgard of the Center for the Study of Sports and Society at the University of Missouri-Columbia.  "He was diagnosed before the St. Louis Cardinals moved to Arizona" in 1988.  "We put him on medication in junior high school, but two decades later the best we can say is he's coping."

St. Louis Hawks

Visbeck is a "Child of Expansion", a youth who developed an attachment to a professional sports team that later moved, leaving him unable to form emotional bonds or function independently as a fully-formed adult personality.  "I probably shouldn't say this on the internet," notes Altgard, "but he still occasionally wets his bed."

The phenomenon is widespread in the Midwest, which has been hit particularly hard by franchise defections notes Eli Sachetti, a psychiatrist who authored the study.  "Kids in Kansas City, St. Louis and Milwaukee are located in geographical 'hot zones'," he notes.  Kansas City has lost the A's in baseball and the Kings in basketball,  Milwaukee lost the Braves to Atlanta, and St. Louis lost the NBA Hawks to Atlanta, the baseball Browns to Baltimore, and the NFL Cardinals to Phoenix, although the official proclamation by the mayor at the time the football team left told the owners "not to let the Arch hit them in the ass on the way out of town."

Kansas City-Omaha Kings' guard Tiny Archibald

Loss of an NHL team appeared to have no affect on a child's development, Sachetti said.  "We sent questionnaires to a bunch of Minnesota guys who would have been kids when the North Stars moved to Dallas in 1993.  They hadn't noticed-they'd been ice-fishing the whole time."

"Why don't you go watch the Timberwolves or something?"

When a new team in the same sport replaces the old, there is some healing, Sachetti said.  "A's, Royals-what's the difference? They both stink, or stank."  He is concerned that the ailment may be mutating in the face of attempts to cure it, however.  "Free agency replicates on a smaller scale the same loss of expansion heartbreak.  We call it the 'Nomar' effect-all those kids in Boston who grew up wearing Garciaparra pajamas-what are they going to do when they get to college?"