Ammo Grrrll has seasonal thoughts on WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM PROFESSIONAL SPORTS – especially BASEBALL. She wants commenters to know that she “will be slightly less interactive today as her son is here and we will be at a Spring Training game. It is just a coincidence (honest!) that this column was next up in the pipeline.” She writes:
Unless you are very lucky, the first thing you learn about professional sports is that their sole purpose is to break your heart. Your team is not going to make the playoffs. And if it does, it will be annihilated by the New York Yankees in the first round. Your football team is never going to win the Super Bowl, even with four bites at the apple. But at least you won’t have to sit through the Satanic Half-time Ritual with the Mandatory Wardrobe Malfunction because, with your team, the game has traditionally been over before half-time.
So, yeah, bitter disappointment is the norm no matter how hard you root for your team. How loyal a Vikings fan was I back in the day when all the players stood for the National Anthem because Bud Grant never would have allowed them to kneel?
Well, once I was approached by a New York ad agency to star in a commercial in which I would have to pretend to be a Packers fan – and I TURNED IT DOWN. Now, that’s commitment. Or economic insanity. Potato, Potahto.
It is an altogether good thing to learn early on that MUCH of life is going to be a vast surging disappointment. And still you will survive and even thrive!
You are probably not going to make the Cheerleading Squad. (I didn’t, and it broke my heart). You are probably not going to be a Homecoming Queen. (I wasn’t, but I knew THAT wasn’t in the cards!) You may not get into the college of your choice. (I did because back in the Pleistocene Age, you got into college with good grades and excellent test scores – isn’t that a quaint and backward notion?) You are probably not going to think up something like Amazon, Space X, or TurboTax. (I didn’t.) You are more likely to spend your time thinking up funny names for the harridans on The View and it doesn’t pay nearly as well.
In other words, the chances are excellent that you are going to be an Ordinary Person who works hard at an unexciting job for 55 years, lives and loves and procreates and enjoys grandchildren, Sudoku, and Pickleball. And you will realize at the end that that was much more important than being a cheerleader. Though I sure wish I would have thought up Amazon.
But, but, but, once in a great while, when the stars align, a miracle can happen. Always be on the lookout for miracles.
Else, what can we say about the 1987 and 1991 World Series wins for the Minnesota Twins? Or one of the greatest sports feats of all time, the 2004 ALCS series against the Yankees with the Red Sawx down 3 games to naught and behind in the 9th inning of Game Four to boot.
And God, who had been wearing his noise-cancelling headphones because he was so tired of listening to Bostonians whine in that particularly annoying accent, suddenly heard their prayers and declared: “Okay, Okay. It’s possible I have punished Boston enough.” And He smiled on Big Papi and decreed that a miracle would occur. And He saw that it was good.
The scruffy, scrappy Red Sox came back and won Game Four and the next seven straight games to make the World Series an anti-climactic bore, mostly because the usually excellent Cardinals decided not show up for some reason. I have long advocated that that ALCS Series be shown to cancer patients for never-give-up inspiration.
Today, with the emphasis on year-round fitness, and especially weight-training, baseball players look more like every other professional athlete than they used to. Time was a young fella could hope to be a baseball player even if he wasn’t 6’10” or didn’t weigh 300 lbs.
If a kid was gifted with some sort of bizarre, one-in-a-million people coordination, or the eyesight of Ted Williams, and was willing to practice, practice, practice, he had at least a prayer of making the majors. There was “Little” Freddy Patek, who must have got darn tired of hearing announcers call him that. There were a whole bunch of slender, muscular, HUNGRY players from the Dominican Republic. And, of course, Babe Ruth himself, who nobody would have guessed was a professional athlete if he had been a contestant on “What’s My Line?”
In professional football and basketball, because players are usually only seen with other enormous teammates and ex-player interviewers, it’s not always clear just how DIFFERENT they are from ordinary male mortals.
I was once in an elevator in a hotel in Atlanta when the Celtics were in town to play the Hawks and who should walk into my elevator but Kevin McHale and two teammates. I had always been a Celtics fan and blurted out to Mr. McHale that I was a Minnesotan and had been following his career from high school on. They were all polite and friendly. But, Good Golly Miss Molly, they were YUGE! I felt like a little Arizona barrel cactus amongst the California Redwoods.
We had a similar experience when Joe did some minor legal favor for Joey Browner of the Vikings and he invited us to a little party with a few other Vikings and their lovely ladies. Mr. Browner is a soft-spoken and classy man who often helped opponents he had just flattened to get up when they probably would have preferred to remain on the ground to take a short nap. He was only an inch taller than our Joe/Max, but outweighed him by 50 lbs. of solid muscle. Looking at Joe and Joey side by side a person would say, “One of these guys is a slender, fit, nice-looking attorney. And one of these guys is a safety on the Vikings who has been selected for four Pro Bowls.” And everybody would get it right in one.
One of the greatest things we learn from baseball, perhaps more than any other sport, is that as a batter if you succeed in getting a hit one out of three times, you are a virtual superstar! For Ted Williams and (oh so close .388) our beloved Minnesota Twin Rod Carew, they pushed that to 4/10 and it has never been equaled in 75 years!
Now that’s not a good lesson for a surgeon, an airline pilot, or even a programmer, as they have to get as close to 100 percent success as is humanly possible. But for non-life-threatening human endeavors, it is good to know that you don’t have to be perfect to be a success.
In one interview after his retirement — I am quoting from memory here, so give me a break… — the sportscaster asked Williams what he thought his batting average would be in the current era. Williams said, “I don’t know, probably about .220.” The sportscaster was incredulous. “You had a lifetime average of .344, and you think you would only hit .220 today? Why? Because of the way managers use several pitchers a game?”
“No,” replied Williams. “Because I am 70 years old.”
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