Archive for the 'Baseball the Teacher' Category

The Noble Hearts Ache

Eric, December 14, 2009, 6 Comments

Today is the first day since the World Series ended that I have felt a compulsion to write about baseball. It’s a good feeling, this impulse, and I was beginning to worry it would never return. But really I should have known that it was only on hiatus and that a super-awesome-mega-trade would bring it back. After all, nothing brings out the amateur baseball philosopher in me like a big-ass trade.

Readers of this blog probably know that I came of age cheering for the Los Angeles Dodgers of the 1990s. This means that the two most significant transactions of my youthful baseball fandom were Pedro Martinez for Delino Deshields, and Mike Piazza for the Florida Marlins. These were massive and tragic mistakes. Therefore I do not believe I would be remiss to assign a certain post-traumatic significance to my current fascination with trades.

In my last post on trades, I discussed the inherent weirdness of bartering with humans. That weird dynamism is part of what makes trades so interesting and activities like fantasy sports so addictive. But aside from the risks and rewards of dealing in commodities as fragile as humans – even great athletes – tend to be, there is a broader meaning to be read in trades: the impact they have on franchises and the communities surrounding them.

There is a psycho-transactional chasm between the trades and free agency. When a star player leaves on his own free will, he is letting down a team. When a team decides to dump its star player, it is letting down its fans. It all comes down to what different parties are owed in the ecosystem of fandom.

In this ecosystem, which works like an unwritten social contract, we all have roles. Here’s a simplified version: Fans like you and I are called upon to spend our money, to clap at certain times, and to hold players and owners accountable. It calls for players to play the best they can, sign the occasional autograph, and generally not make us hate them. And mostly, it calls for front offices to assemble teams with a chance at winning, therefore making fans us want to come spend too much money on beer and merchandise at the ballpark.

Sometimes, in order to fulfill this contract, in order for the ecosystem to thrive, difficult decisions must be made. For Cincinnati Bengals fans, that might mean conducting elaborate protests and practical jokes to gain the attention of a negligent owner in the manner of Who Dey Revolution[1]. For the Toronto Blue Jays, that meant trading Roy Halladay today.

The trading of a superstar is not to be taken lightly. Superstars act as ballasts for franchises. Uniform designs, stadium naming rights, and supporting casts can rotate, but superstars are supposed to be permanent. The term franchise player is no accident. It refers to the centerpiece, the foundation, the keystone that keeps a structure from collapsing in on itself. The meaning of these players to their respective cities, to their fans, and to their teammates, is hard to overstate.

When the Edmonton Oilers traded Wayne Gretzky to Los Angeles in 1988, members of the Canadian Parliament tried to block the deal. An effigy of Oilers owner Peter Pocklington was burned by fans. And within months of the deal, a Gretzky statue was erected in front of Edmonton’s arena. There was a documentary on ESPN earlier this year about the trade called “King’s Ransom.” Had Gretzky left via free agency instead of trade, there would have been no parliamentary shenanigans, no burning effigy of Pocklington, no bronze statue, and no documentary. But he was traded and a nation mourned.

I don’t think Canada will shed as many tears for Roy Halladay, who was born in Colorado, and whose departure has been long-awaited, as it did for The Great One. Partly, this is because unlike the Gretzky trade (or more recently, the Piazza trade), the intentions behind the Halladay deal appear at first glance to be noble. But noble acts can still be painful, and it is worth considering the torturous implications that this trade will have.

As bummed Jays fan Drew Fairservice eloquently pointed out today, the Blue Jays have entered an era in which their ace is Ricky Romero. This could be the first step toward a bright future, a time as bright as the early 1990s for Toronto. After all, it remains to be seen whether the northbound prospects will amount to fair value for Halladay. But regardless of what happens, there will not be another Roy Halladay. There is no fair value for a franchise player. There is no replacement, only a franchise redefined.

[1] Awesome blog/collective “dedicated to demanding that the Cincinnati Bengals front office act aggressively and rationally in their pursuit of a Super Bowl.” R

Baseball the Teacher and Thinking, 6 Comments

Who’s Our Daddy? A Roger Angell Appreciation

Eric, November 30, 2009, 4 Comments

Roger Angell is 89 years old. He was born in 1920. To put that in perspective, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle were born in 1931. Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were born in 1924. What I’m saying is that Roger Angell is an old man. That fact, of which there is no hiding, is what makes his latest in the New Yorker, Daddies Win, so magnificent.

He takes a few cheap shots at the blogs. He bemoans statistics. But the man still writes like he is living in 1957, in a world where baseball players are made not by television, but by the words floating through the air via radio, and the ones printed on newspaper and magazine pages. He writes like baseball still has the power to capture the imagination of an entire nation. His essay on the Yankees’ latest World Series victory is plucky and poetic. Without being sappy, the piece emits a sort of sepia-tinged nostalgia. What struck me most as I read this was Angell’s knack for magnificent little descriptions. He writes about baseball like the game is still new.

Here are some of my favorite descriptions:

On Alex Rodriguez:

“This year – well, this year he he’s been somebody else.”

“I’ve had the impression that I’m within touching distance of a new species.”

Cliff Lee:

“He throws with an elegant flail, hiding the ball behind his hip or knee and producint it from behind his left shoulder, already in full delivery. His finish brings his left leg up astern like a semaphore, while his arm swings across his waist. This columnar closing posture . . . is classic and reminded me strongly of some fabled pitcher from my boyhood.”

Chase Utley:

“Utley, who has slicked-backed, Jake Gittes hair, possesses a quick back and a very short home-run stroke; he looks like a man in an ATM reaching for his cash.”

AJ Burnett:

“a Tom Joad with beads.”

CC Sabathia

“Sunny looks and pavilion-sized pants and weird, white-toed spikes.”

“his fastball-cutter-changeup assortment . . arrives like a loaded tea tray coming down an airshaft.”

cc: turtlemom4bacon

On the New Yankee Stadium:

“I enjoy the wild, Ginza-esque light shows – the “lightage” I mean – but I’d trade them for the steeply vertical stands of the vacant, now shrouded original and the walls of noise they produced on big nights.”

On Nick Swisher:

Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?

On Hideki Matsui:

“His silence kept him old-fashioned: a ballplayer from the black-and-white newspaper-photograph days, before our heroes talked.”

I’d venture to say the same thing about Angell.

Baseball the Teacher and Media, 4 Comments

When Life Throws You Curveballs, You Take Them The Other Way

Eric, August 31, 2009, 3 Comments

In a literary sense, I sort of like clichés. Before they become hackneyed and mundane, they are tight exceptional metaphors and similes. The first time somebody compared his lover’s eyes to a glowing moon, or her beauty to a red rose it was brilliant. The meaning of those words has worn over time, but not the initial spark of genius from which they were born. Like any writer, I avoid clichés as much as I can, but their initial spark remains bright in my mind.

The same can be true for most conventional wisdom: at one point, it was not conventional. It was just an idea that explained something fairly well, or a strategy that was effective most of the time. The sacrifice bunt, for example, is a conventional strategy in baseball. It’s often employed without second thought, lauded if effective, criticized if ineffective (or used too frequently). But the first time some manager trotted a weak-hitter out to move a runner over with a bunt, it probably blew minds.

In the tendency to assign grand meaning to Sports, I see both the cliché and the conventional wisdom. I see the initial reasoning for doing so and dig the value of this pretense, but I also see the worn out catchphrases and the strained logic and wonder why it happens. There are so many sayings about Sports – and I mean to refer to Sports as a proper noun here – that it gets hard to remember which ones came from Vince Lombardi and which ones originated with some orthopedic surgeon coaching his son’s Little League Team.

Football is War. Baseball is a microcosm for life. Casey Stengel and John Wooden and so on and so forth and I think I’ll grab myself a drink. The task of a coach is to mold young men, men who prove their mettle, prove their value as humans on the field of play. By this world view, people don’t dive in front of slap shots, or lean into inside fastballs, or take a hard charges in the lane merely because they want to win the game, but because winning the game has everything to do with winning at life. And damn it to hell if life is not about winning.

The point to all this crotchety, self-righteous, rambling is pretty much to bemoan the overwrought (ironic that I’m calling somebody that) way we think about sports. I’m thinking we should back up a smidge. Instead of seeking wisdom in the broad existence of Competition and Running and Playing and Winning and Losing maybe we can find wisdom elsewhere. Maybe the real wisdom can be found in the tiny situations, the intricacies of each game, the times that a particular sporting event lines up with a particular moment in our lives. Baseball is the National Pastime, not the National University or the National Church. Things are better this way.

The game serves a wonderful purpose: not as a metaphor, but as an entity that merits discussion on its own terms. There is insight to be had and wisdom to be found in baseball. The sport has its own language and its own issues and its own ongoing dialogue. Sometimes baseball mirrors greater society and sometimes it exists on a completely separate plane. Baseball and Sports in general, contribute to language and culture and dialogue the way anything else do. There are things a man’s curveball can tell us, but there also things his marriage or his job performance or his fashion sense can tell us.

I love the way Free Darko can extrapolate on-court behavior and performance into stunningly accurate and refreshing takes on an athlete’s broader position in our society, his own personal struggles, and the general mythology of sport. But I also appreciate that while Greg Maddux’s repertoire and approach and legend seem an accurate reflection of his entire existence, he probably wouldn’t put it that way. Sports is just another activity in our lives which means sometimes it’s an effective way to make the nuanced, the deeply personal, the incomprehensible events and emotions that we deal with every day a little easier to understand. But sometimes those events and emotions are better explained in the context of a road trip, or a meal, or a six pack of beer.

The Free Darko guys understand this. They like basketball and have a keen sense for what basketball can tell us about both itself and the broader world, but they realize that the game is not a perfect representation of society. Unlike the speeches of Vince Lombardi, or the pained reminiscing of nostalgia-crazed “those were the days” baseball fans, there is no dogma to be found here. There is only the transitory wisdom and pleasure of a pastime.

We must realize that while Sports can tell us unique and vibrant and refreshing things, it cannot tell us everything. A life is a life, a war is a war, and baseball, to end with a surprisingly fitting cliché, is only a game.

Baseball the Teacher, Conventional Wisdom, Meta and Thinking, 3 Comments

Nate McLouth And The Modern Indentured Servitude

Eric, July 9, 2009, 2 Comments

When I was young and green and full of vigor, I read the sports page every day before school. And by read I mean read through; I looked at the standings, the box scores, a few columns or articles, and finally the Transactions. The Transactions were always tucked somewhere amongst the horse racing odds and high school football scores – hidden in the crowded back pages. Some days it took longer to find the Transactions section than to read it.

There was something so nonchalant about the Transactions. The print was tiny; the language was terse and mechanical. No byline here: this was pure information, like you’d find in a box score, or the stocks page. All suspensions, signings, trades, and waiver wire claims are treated with the same banal objectivity.

After all, what’s a transaction but an exchange? St. James Place for B&O Railroad or $2.95 for a bottle of detergent – it’s all the same. In this context, Roy Halladay for prospects looks just like Joe Triple A for a Player to be Named Later.

There’s something both egalitarian and inhumane about the Transactions. In one sense, it’s only fair that all these moves get equal mention. To the teams involved, to the players whose lives are affected by a cross country trade or disheartening demotion, the newsworthiness of the transaction is completely irrelevant. But on the other hand, the offhandedness of it all, the blasé list of players swapped for one another as mere commodities reveals something kind of startling:

Trades, and the whole idea of trades, are really kind of insane.

Where else on earth can supposedly competitive entities, allegedly separate businesses, legally traffic in humans like they can in sports? What other environment would encourage something like that? Critics bang fantasy baseball for overlooking the human aspect of the sport, for reducing players to their statistics, but they forget something. Fantasy GMs are trading imaginary rights. Real GMs trade human beings.

It goes without saying that baseball is a business. But the existence of a financial bottom line does not preclude human emotion from its rightful place at the center of well, humanity. When the Pirates traded their best player, Nate McLouth, to Atlanta last month, we were all surprised. Teammate Adam LaRoche was a little more than that:

“It’s kind of like being with your platoon in a battle, and guys keep dropping around you. You keep hanging on, hanging on, and you’ve got to figure: How much longer till you sink? … I’ve still got to be in here telling guys it’s going to be fine with Nate gone. Well, you can only do that for so long until guys just kind of … well, they know.”

The war metaphor may be overwrought, and the rumors that Pittsburgh players held a candlelight vigil for their departed center fielder turned out to be false, but it seems obvious that beyond just baseball and business for the teams involved, the trade mattered on a human level to these guys. Not to mention the three prospects who packed it up from one minor league city to another, and their teammates, and their families, and so on.

We try to hold onto the things we can hold onto – the routines and the consistencies that define our lives. We need those to stay sane, to maintain the notion that we control at least some part of our destinies. The circumstances are obviously different for professional athletes – they are living a worldwide dream, making inconceivable amounts of money (at least at the highest levels), and achieving a kind of rare glory. In that context, the travel and the grueling seasons and the complete lack of control – one man’s fate (where he lives, who he works for) resting on the whim of another man – doesn’t seem so strange, or so undesirable.

I’m not here to lament the state of professional athletes because they get traded. It’s part of the game. We fans grew up with trades, with waiver wires, and disabled lists, and so did they. But it’s not for nothing that athletes covet No Trade Clauses. With the No Trade Clause, they are liberated from the fear and uncertainty of that Transactions section. They can start families, and at least for the length of their contracts, know that only by their own consent will that family be uprooted for job considerations.

This is not an argument for the elimination of trades – they are a vital part of what makes baseball and sport in general so compelling. I just find it strange, borderline illegal even, that such a system exists. And it could only exist, I suppose, in a realm of simulated competition like Major League Baseball, where the real (economic) battle isn’t between franchises on the field, but between baseball and other forms of entertainment.

Athletes are in a strange position. They are the most fundamental ingredient for major sports as we know them to exist. But in a business sense, they are expendable, they are products, albeit valuable products, on display. That it took so long for Free Agency to take hold is a testament to how skewed the system, with its antitrust exemption really is. If Curt Flood was a Well Paid Slave, does that make our current crop of athletes Well Paid Indentured Servants?

Baseball the Teacher, Conventional Wisdom and Thinking, 2 Comments

The Mulder Collective

Eric, June 18, 2009, 4 Comments

Something really weird happened to me this afternoon. I got all nostalgic about Mark Mulder. I was thinking about pitching, preparing to write a post about the rise of a new wave of aces, when all of a sudden there he was. Mark Mulder, free agent. He was sitting in an empty dugout, gazing out on some nameless field, arms crossed, gangly legs kicked out.

Mark Mulder is only 32 years old. He’s got a career record of 103-60. He has started an All-Star game. He has won big in the playoffs. He has led the American League in wins. And now he is all but forgotten. He is not on a big league roster. He is not on a minor league roster. And he is definitely, definitely not among the National League’s ERA leaders.

That list belongs to a different generation. If in some alternate universe Mark Mulder was among the top ten pitchers in the NL in ERA, he would be the second-oldest pitcher there. Once again, Mark Mulder turns 33 in August.

As of today, June 17, 2009, 33-year old Ted Lilly is the elder statesman amongst NL ERA leaders. Next is Dan Haren, 28. After that it’s a bunch of guys aged 23-26. Their names are Johnny Ceuto, Matt Cain, Tim Lincecum, Chad Billingsley, Josh Johnsen, Jair Jurrjens, Yovani Gallardo, and Zach Duke.

ERA is a clumsy metric and stats in mid-June don’t mean a whole lot. But that’s not the point. The list above provides a rough snapshot of the next few years of NL pitching excellence. Surely some of these young guys won’t maintain their current paces, and some guys who aren’t in the top ten will surpass them. If you look beyond the photo’s borders (pardon the extended metaphor), you’ll find unsurprising things: Johan Santana is 11th in the NL in ERA, Roy Halladay is dominating the American League, and CC Sabathia is doing his usual.

But stay within the borders for a moment. Examine this snapshot in detail, ye nostalgic baseball fans, and despair. For soon, none of the old arms outside it will remain. In other words, classes of stud pitchers rise and fall. They rise in exciting waves, cresting like Ceuto and Cain and company right now. Then they fall as pieces, each pitcher alone in success or failure. Some linger, immune to gravity and time like Greg Maddux. Others go the way of the Mulder.

Consider, for a moment, the wave of the early 2000’s. We can call it the Mulder Collective and take 2003 as the year it crested. The American League saw big –or at least very promising – efforts from Roy Halladay, Barry Zito, Johan Santana, CC Sabathia, Mark Buehrle, Joel Pineiro, and Mulder himself. The NL saw big things from Brandon Webb, Javier Vazquez, Roy Oswalt, Mark Prior, Kerry Wood, and Carlos Zambrano. (At this point, Cubs fans are excused). It’s worth noting also, that a year later Jake Peavy and Ben Sheets emerged as aces.

The members of the Mulder Collective didn’t necessarily rise as a monolithic entity. They all entered the league at different times and ages, surrounded by varying degrees of hype and expectations. In the six years since, each member has found his own unique level of success, and they’ve combined for 25 top-5 Cy Young finishes. But at one point, before their destinies unfolded, an air of mystery surrounded the group. Who would climb Mount Olympus? Who would tempt greatness, but ultimately fly too close to the sun?

It’s all fairly arbitrary isn’t it? The Mulder Collective is my invention. It’s how I make myth out of men, because in the end they are just men. That these men happen to be the first pitchers I watched consciously as they entered the league and matured in it is coincidence. That their arrival coincided with the peak of my late-adolescent fantasy baseball obsession is also coincidence. For somebody a few years older, that first class of pitchers might be called the Millwood Collective.

I have no proof statistically that great pitchers arrive in clusters. They probably don’t. If the Mulder Collective is just projected out of my imagination, then the current state of the pitching leader board is an anomaly caused by small sample size, or just a sign of years passing. I’m looking for something meaningful in a relatively meaningless data set.

If the national pastime is baseball, then the national pastime of baseball fans is building up myths and debunking them. Baseball, more than any other sport, is defined by the tension between the truths we believe emotionally and the truths we understand intellectually. It’s about myths and symbols vs. facts and figures; guts and instincts vs. cold competence. In its current form (tools vs. stats, Joe Morgan vs. rational thought), the quarrel has escalated almost to the point where it undermines the fact that its own nature as a pastime. The joy of myth and the joy of fact need one another. Together, they buoy the Game.

In 2003, when the Mulder Collective began to assert itself, I did not have the burden of perspective. There were many great young pitchers and I watched them and I followed their performances and that was it. I would never have bunched them together as a unit like I do in retrospect. I would certainly never have named them. But at the same time, I was excited about them and amazed by them. There was so much joy in Barry Zito’s soul-crushing curveball, in Mark Buehrle’s robotic consistency that I feel ridiculous just typing about it. But it was there. I expected all of them, even Joel Pineiro, to be great.

Now the wave of pitchers dominating baseball is my age or just a few years older. Maybe that’s why I noticed them in the first place. But regardless of how good they are – and they are damn good – the myth seems a little less elevated. I know more about these pitchers as they rise than I did about the members of the Mulder Collective, and I certainly know more about baseball. I know with dead certainty that some of these guys will flame out, or go the way of the Mulder. But a couple will pitch like heroes long enough that they become them.

There is no back-story compelling enough to preordain success. Nor does any past achievement guarantee a future one. The Mulder Collective is breaking, piece by piece into the individual stories of its members. And it will be replaced by these new kids, with new stories. The real magic is in that cycle, those stories, and the mysteries of their unfolding.

Baseball the Teacher and Features, 4 Comments

Fandom & Identity: Reflections In A Cloudy Stadium Bathroom Mirror

Eric, June 8, 2009, 8 Comments

There is a video making its way around the internet of some American Jewish kids on vacation in Jerusalem spewing a bunch of racist garbage, mostly about Barack Obama. . The kids are drunk, probably from some wealthy yeshiva in the Northeast, and shamefully ignorant of just about everything:

It’s an appalling representation of Jews, Americans, and Young People – three subgroups to which I proudly belong. By posting and talking about it here, I’m probably not doing myself any favors as such, but the clip merits discussion.

The fact that there are racist Jewish kids shouldn’t be a surprise. There are racists and idiots of every race, religion, and nationality. We’re all human and the human condition is fragile, flawed, and fickle. Despite understanding all that intellectually, I can’t help but find the video really revolting on a gut level. I barely made it through the whole thing.

To be honest, if this were a clip of some white kid in Georgia making the same bigoted comments, I wouldn’t be writing about it. I would have watched it, shook my head, and moved on. However, with identity come pride and shame all the emotions in between. Maybe this is a personality flaw, but while I can understand that underneath labels and colors and languages we are all the same, I still expect more of the groups I’m a part of. Not to be better – nobody is better – but to at least try harder at it.

This feeling manifests itself in all sorts of places. When I see some drunken, American tourist making a mess of things in a foreign city, I can’t help but roll my eyes and think he’s not doing much to help our image in the world. When Eliot Spitzer got caught banging a high-priced hooker, the first thing I thought – and I’m not especially proud of this – was “bad for the Jews.” When Manny Ramirez was suspended last month, I had to wonder why, why must it be a Dodger?

After all, fandom is just another level on which we identify. A friend of mine here in New York is a big Kansas City Royals fan. On the once-in-a-blue-hat occasion that he sees somebody sporting some Royals gear, he approaches them about it. It’s exciting for him to find someone who shares his relatively obscure identity.

And with identity comes identity politics. We work to advance our own particular fandoms – Yankee fans want to be better, more dedicated, more educated, stand on higher moral ground, than Red Sox fans, and vice versa. Same goes for any rivalry in any sport, or in politics, or in global affairs. In a very dramatic essay called The Sporting Spirit, George Orwell assesses the rise of gung-ho fandom in grim terms:

There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism — that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.

Well, yeah.

Without getting into too much detail about the relataive sanity of fandom – or whether the habit of identifying oneself with large power units is truly lunatic – I think Orwell’s point is generally correct. There is an innate urge to identify ones self with a larger unit, whether familiar, religious, national, or athletic. Often society does the work for us. We can’t help where we are born or who our family is. Even the things we are supposedly free to choose like political affiliation, religion, taste in music, or favorite sports teams, are often inherited from our parents or subconsciously absorbed from the people we grew up around.

Sports fandom isn’t just bound up with the rise of nationalism, it is nationalism. There is no intellectual or moral reasoning involved in the way we pick our favorite teams — it’s geography and family and a number of other subliminal factors. I grew up in Los Angeles, thus I am a Dodger fan. My mother’s family is from Miami and brainwashed me from a young age, thus I am a Dolphins fan. Is it random and illogical? Yes, but no more random and illogical than patriotism – and like patriotism not necessarily (sorry Mr. Orwell) such a bad thing. Teams are homelands. We all need those. That’s why a group of bat-shit crazy costumed criminals can get together, start a support group, and call it the Raider Nation.

Then again, these are artificial nations. Membership in the Raider Nation is just a luxury afforded by the institutions and protections of the American Nation. And words exchanged between fans during heated competition bear much less historical weight than words like the ones uttered by the kids in that video. Fan violence is real and tragic, but it pales in comparison to religious or nationalist violence. The personal and historic significance of our identities varies over time. In the end some have to mean more than others. If one of the kids in those videos was wearing a Dodger cap, I would have certainly noticed. But “bad for the Dodger fans” is the last thing I would have thought about.

Baseball the Teacher, Politics and Thinking, 8 Comments

Keith Hernandez Meets A Tenor

Eric, April 13, 2009, 0 Comments

(yet another thing to love about KH)

Keith Hernandez espouses on his arrival in New York (in New York Mag) and on meeting Placido Domingo:

And you’d be a fool to live here and not take advantage of the cultural stuff. So I would go to Broadway plays and even some operas. I met Plácido Domingo backstage once. The guy is a huge baseball fan, and he said “Sorry, I have a cold, I sang like a .230 hitter. Next time, I promise I’ll be a .300 singer for you.”

No word on whether Keith asked Plácido to help him move afterward.

Baseball the Teacher and Spring Training, 0 Comments

Alex Rodriguez: Tragic Hero? (Part II)

Eric, March 31, 2009, 2 Comments

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” – The Witches of Macbeth

This started as an essay called Alex Rodriguez: Tragic Hero. I had noble intensions for it; I was going to compare A-Rod to Macbeth. I would have matched A-Rod’s time in Seattle to Macbeth’s glory as a military hero. I would have talked about how Scott Boras was his Lady Macbeth, encouraging him to take the money from Texas (or slay King Duncan). I would have argued that once A-Rod did go to Texas, his insecurities about the circumstance led him to steroids, and eventually the living hell that is New York and its media. Kind of like Macbeth’s raging paranoia on the throne. I didn’t have a match for the fortune telling witches, but otherwise the whole thing was going to be beautiful. Then I remembered this was a blog, not a high school essay.

(If it were a high school essay, the thesis would read something like this: So and So defines the tragic hero as a sympathetic protagonist who is undone by his own flaws or mistakes. Baseball player Alex Rodriguez (A-Rod), is a tragic hero because a blind, overwhelming desire to be loved by everybody has caused him to make some significant mistakes and hurt his reputation. The main example of this is his use of steroids.)

So I’ll just pose this as a question: Is Alex Rodriguez a tragic hero, well-intended at first but undone by one catastrophic flaw? Maybe. He’s certainly a wounded hero, hardly the knight in shining polyester who sat above even the great Jeter and Garciaparra on the triumvirate of convention-shattering shortstops in the 90s.

Where he’s gained status as an all-time great hitter, he seems to have lost it as a champion of the sport. First, he took the money with Texas. Then he got himself shipped to New York and did the honorable thing for his pal Jeter by shifting over to third base. The rest I don’t need to get into –the regular season dominance and postseason struggles are fresh in all our minds. The clubhouse dramas and marriage problems, and now the steroids are fresh too.

But what’s guided all this behavior? I think back about the excerpt I started with in the last post, from the poet Cody Walker:

When I was younger I wanted to be a baseball player. But I can’t remember whether I loved baseball, or whether I just wanted everyone to love me. A confession, then: I still want everyone to love me—blindly, entirely, without sense or reason.

Which motivates Alex Rodriguez? His love for baseball, or his desire to be loved? The answer is probably a lot more complicated than either choice. Money fits in there somewhere too, and a whole litany of subtle factors I probably couldn’t understand. But more than greed or competitive lust for victory, it feels to me that Rodriguez has been guided by an unquenchable desire to be loved, praised, adored.

If his tragic flaw (or at least self-damaging one) really is an addiction to Praise, Adulation, and Worship, then maybe it all makes sense. Maybe his crucial error was somehow letting his own sense of humanity get intertwined to unrealistic notions of heroism. Maybe it was the high off all that admiration that so skewed his understanding of consequence. Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Will heroism itself be the undoing of Alex Rodriguez?

Part III coming when it comes…

Baseball the Teacher, Books, Features and Thinking, 2 Comments

Alex Rodriguez: Tragic Hero? (Part I)

Eric, March 30, 2009, 0 Comments

-Cody Walker

Most of the people I love and respect say they are happy to live out their lives in anonymity. To make some money, have a family or not have a family, pursue their interests, and not be bothered with history or legacy. I love and respect them. I love and respect that about them. But here’s a confession: I’m not like that. I understand that the best I can probably expect is to be remembered for a few generations by my family as something more than a mere historical fact. Many of my ancestors haven’t even gotten that much. But I can’t help wanting more.

Maybe it’s the writer in me, but I have this certain pressing interest in legacy. I wouldn’t call it an obsession; I certainly wouldn’t call it a blind desire to be loved or adored. It’s just a nagging desire to be respected. I want to affect the way somebody reads the world, and I want them to appreciate me for it. I want to write something so good that it makes other writers think for a passing minute about just giving up, the way I have a thousand times. And when I’m dead, I want those slight changes in perceptions I caused, the moments of doubt and inspiration I stirred, to bond as some sort of collective body – a legacy.

I realize the sentiment is totally narcissistic and hollow. I know that ‘success’ as a writer or anything else won’t be the panacea that answers for all my existential insecurities. Plus, the logic is terrible. When I’m dead, I won’t know whether or not somebody is reading me, loving me, hating me. And if dead Eric Nusbaum were able to tell, I doubt he would care much.

So I deal with it. I push my silly glorious fantasies off to the corner and shut them out and try to live in the moment and do the best I can. It’s not terribly hard. We all wrestle with our stupid demons.

I think as children we all want to be loved like that. We want to be astronauts because astronauts pilot space ships, but also because they sit shotgun in open convertibles and wave their way down parade routes. We want to be movie stars because movie stars get to see their faces on billboards and big screens. We want to be President and see our names alongside Washington’s, Lincoln’s, Kennedy’s. And we want to be baseball players. Not merely to hit home runs, but to circle the bases and look up at the lights and out at the crowd. We want to collect our own cards.

But most of us move on. Our interests change, our talents leave us in the wake of people who are soon to come up short themselves. And that’s how life goes for the 99.9% of which you and I are probably a part. We may or may not still want everyone to love us, but regardless we realize they probably won’t. The love of a few people is a lot better than none, and perhaps more meaningful than the love of everybody.

Except that’s only 99.9%. Somebody out there never has to give up on those dreams, never has to settle. It’s just math. Somebody has to walk on the moon, win an Oscar, deliver the State of the Union, greet his team in the dugout with hugs and high fives. What about that guy? Does he ever adjust like the rest of us? Does the adulation merely carry him, like a wave, to oblivious success? Or is it like a drug? Perhaps he comes to need glory and depend on it for nourishment. Perhaps he doesn’t just want to be loved – blindly, entirely, without sense or reason, but his very existence hinges on it.

And what if that guy played third base for the New York Yankees?

This will continue, in much less self-indulgent fashion, over the course of the week.

Baseball the Teacher, Memoir and Thinking, 0 Comments

Barry Bonds: Guilty Or Guilty?

Eric, March 24, 2009, 0 Comments

Dayn Perry had an excellent post this morning, “The Case Against the Case Against Barry Bonds.” In terms easy for a legal novice like me to understand, he explains the main elements of the federal case and simultaneously cuts it to shreds. He also seamlessly uses the phrase “many-tentacled:”

Barry Bonds’ terminally looming jury trial has been postponed, perhaps until the fall. At some point, though, he’ll probably be dragged in front of his peers on four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice. All of it, of course, traces back to the many-tentacled BALCO scandal, which has been too much with us for the better part of a decade. But it’s going to end soon, and this will almost certainly be the closing scene: Bonds’ walking out of the federal courthouse in San Francisco a free man.

Maybe I found the post so informative because I haven’t followed the Bonds case much. I’ve been burnt out on steroid and PED stories, and anyway the jury in my head convicted Barry Bonds about five years ago. Perry’s post leaves me asking an important question. Who cares? Aside from the purely legal aspect (Bonds probably broke the law), I don’t see how the outcome of this trial does anything to significantly affect his legacy. He’s guilty in the public conscience, and it will take a hell of a lot more than some court decision for him to regain his footing. It will take a lot of humility, some profuse apologies, and maybe a little bit of groveling. None of those are going to happen here.

The example I can’t help but turn to (noting the difference between killing someone and cheating a little) is OJ Simpson. Most people think OJ did it. Obviously that brings up a lot of racial implications i, but Bonds can easily be substituted for Roger Clemens or Rafael Pameiro who their own legal swamps, and the question doesn’t change. A major sports star betrays the public’s trust, refuses to own up, and devolves into some kind of sad parody of his former existence.

How long before Barry Bonds coauthors If I Juiced: The Mystery Novel? How long before Bobby Estalella, the career .216 hitter who owned up to his own steroid use, is held as a model of dignity beside his former teammate?

Baseball the Teacher, Links and Thinking, 0 Comments