Maturity and The National Pastime
It is the time of year when thoughts turn to baseball and writers groan to extract life lessons from the grand old game. Accomplished pitcher Mike Mussina would roll his eyes at that. He once sported a T-shirt that read, "American Sarcasm Society: like we need your support". He earned an economics degree from Stanford in three and a half years while playing baseball. He downplays both that accomplishment and overemphasis on the game as a major source of identity or education, admitting, "Graduating from college doesn't mean you're smart, but it does mean that you're smart enough to know that having a college degree can be a good thing."
Since Mussina started his baseball career with this detached perspective, his state of mind near the end of that career as intimately detailed in John Feinstein's Living on the Black is counterintuitive. He told the writer that he found himself caring MORE about ball and strike calls. As a player approaching middle age, he was now more aware what it would take to make that perfect pitch again. As a player approaching middle age, he was now more aware of his fleeting opportunities than he was when he first assumed the identity of Baseball Pitcher as one of several options open to an intelligent, credentialed young man.
Jim Gattis in Roger Kahn's Good Enough to Dream grappled with same internal intensity at about the same age as Mussina. Gattis was a manager at baseball's lowest level. Leadership deprived him of the game ball Mussina could enlist to express his exasperation. Like Mussina, Gattis's years pressed on him the reality that opportunities quickly expire. Not everyone enforces the same iron discipline in response. Watching his third baseman hesitate to get in front of a ground ball, again, Gattis's pain escaped through the safety valve of a verbal label. "COWARD!"
Roger Kahn was both writer and temporary owner of the minor league team that employed Gattis as manager. Kahn was in a position to see and later to write that such abuse is never a teaching tool. As he turned this episode in his mind and later rendered it with his pen, he offers as much perspective as corrective. First, he reasons that people can be both cowardly and brave at the same time in different areas of life. The same third baseman for whom a skipping grounder represents a threat can coolly evaluate the same baseball as it is hurtled toward his head in excess of 90 miles an hour. Coward?
Only, Kahn doesn't stop with branding his manager as the manager has painfully and permanently branded his player. Kahn, from what he admits is the rarefied privilege of the writer's reflective repose, can see the continuity between a weatherbeaten manager and the fresh-faced players for whom the manager is responsible. The player is at the lowest level of minor-league baseball because he isn't yet ready to face the defensive challenges of the Major Leagues. The manager is working in this setting for the same reason. Gattis is older, not static. He may develop better tools to reach his goals, and he may not. He nevertheless deserves the gracious grounds of appraisal as a work in progress.
If detachment is offered as default demigod, baseball humbles that, too. Living on the Black also follows veteran pitcher Tom Glavine in the last phase of his career as Glavine's cerebral approach results in one of the game's most exalted accomplishments when he surpasses 300 career wins. Glavine implodes in a game which dooms the hopes of his New York Mets in 2007. A reporter asks after the game whether he is devastated, and he takes issue with the word choice. He is a family man whose deepest passions are his wife and his children. He has seen and helped to address suffering in the world. Nothing that happens on a baseball field, he says, can he label as devastating. In the moment, though, when the results of THAT game matter a great deal to Mets fans, his expression of a broader perspective is a failure to empathize and commiserate. This perception or enforcement of distance through words, gestures, or even facial expressions can prove as stultifying to relationships as Gattis's intemperate explosion. To weep with those who weep BECAUSE they weep and not as an expression of bitterness that other people have failed to meet a pre-imposed definition of usefulness is gift indeed.
Since Mussina started his baseball career with this detached perspective, his state of mind near the end of that career as intimately detailed in John Feinstein's Living on the Black is counterintuitive. He told the writer that he found himself caring MORE about ball and strike calls. As a player approaching middle age, he was now more aware what it would take to make that perfect pitch again. As a player approaching middle age, he was now more aware of his fleeting opportunities than he was when he first assumed the identity of Baseball Pitcher as one of several options open to an intelligent, credentialed young man.
Jim Gattis in Roger Kahn's Good Enough to Dream grappled with same internal intensity at about the same age as Mussina. Gattis was a manager at baseball's lowest level. Leadership deprived him of the game ball Mussina could enlist to express his exasperation. Like Mussina, Gattis's years pressed on him the reality that opportunities quickly expire. Not everyone enforces the same iron discipline in response. Watching his third baseman hesitate to get in front of a ground ball, again, Gattis's pain escaped through the safety valve of a verbal label. "COWARD!"
Roger Kahn was both writer and temporary owner of the minor league team that employed Gattis as manager. Kahn was in a position to see and later to write that such abuse is never a teaching tool. As he turned this episode in his mind and later rendered it with his pen, he offers as much perspective as corrective. First, he reasons that people can be both cowardly and brave at the same time in different areas of life. The same third baseman for whom a skipping grounder represents a threat can coolly evaluate the same baseball as it is hurtled toward his head in excess of 90 miles an hour. Coward?
Only, Kahn doesn't stop with branding his manager as the manager has painfully and permanently branded his player. Kahn, from what he admits is the rarefied privilege of the writer's reflective repose, can see the continuity between a weatherbeaten manager and the fresh-faced players for whom the manager is responsible. The player is at the lowest level of minor-league baseball because he isn't yet ready to face the defensive challenges of the Major Leagues. The manager is working in this setting for the same reason. Gattis is older, not static. He may develop better tools to reach his goals, and he may not. He nevertheless deserves the gracious grounds of appraisal as a work in progress.
If detachment is offered as default demigod, baseball humbles that, too. Living on the Black also follows veteran pitcher Tom Glavine in the last phase of his career as Glavine's cerebral approach results in one of the game's most exalted accomplishments when he surpasses 300 career wins. Glavine implodes in a game which dooms the hopes of his New York Mets in 2007. A reporter asks after the game whether he is devastated, and he takes issue with the word choice. He is a family man whose deepest passions are his wife and his children. He has seen and helped to address suffering in the world. Nothing that happens on a baseball field, he says, can he label as devastating. In the moment, though, when the results of THAT game matter a great deal to Mets fans, his expression of a broader perspective is a failure to empathize and commiserate. This perception or enforcement of distance through words, gestures, or even facial expressions can prove as stultifying to relationships as Gattis's intemperate explosion. To weep with those who weep BECAUSE they weep and not as an expression of bitterness that other people have failed to meet a pre-imposed definition of usefulness is gift indeed.
Good stuff. I'm older, not static.
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