October 11, 2005

I GOT THE BASEBALL BLUES

The end of the baseball season is a gloomy time for Horsefeathers. In fact we share Bart Giamatti's sense that baseball's final days, in October, are grimly foreshadowing other endings in life. It puts us in mind of Archibald MacLeish's great poem,
You Andrew Marvell, wherein he writes:

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night
......
And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift, how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on.

        And yet, Horsefeathers spent much of the last month gratefully enjoying baseball at Yankee Stadium. The flaws of the current Yankee team were evident all season and by the All Star break we were resigned to a season of loss. We had come to love the game in the World War II years, when players with names like Coker Triplett and Oscar Grimes butchered ground balls and made every game an adventure in mediocrity. Those were days when George (Snuffy) Stirnweiss, a pudgy second baseman, won a batting title hitting .309. Now the quality of play has become so fine that it gratifies our love of the game, even when our rooting interest seems doomed. Then, somehow, Joe Torre got his collection of rich, pampered athletes to play as a team, to submerge their individual talents in the larger enterprise aimed at winning.
        We refuse to join in the orgy of A-Rod bashing, because we remember the many times this season when he made great plays in the field, or launched home runs to propel the team to victory. Without him, the Yankees would never have won the AL East and gotten to the playoffs.
        One of the symptoms of the decline of our civilization is the behavior of fans, fueled by sportswriters and sportstalk radio. Everyone is an expert and a hanging judge. It’s ‘what have you done for me today?’ We should cherish this great athlete, and yet, and yet…. There is an unavoidable contrast between Rodriguez and his contemporary, Derek Jeter, the team leader. What is it that allows the less talented Jeter to lead and to lead by example. ‘Oh captain, my captain’ ran through my mind as he fought heroically to get the decisive win last night. You could see him urging his teammates on. Don’t quit, don’t give up, fight to the end. On the Normandy beaches Jeter would have been figuring out how to get up those cliffs at Pointe du Hoc. A-Rod might have been the best sniper, the most skillful rock climber, but he’d have been all too human, too anxious, too aware of his feelings, to take the kill shot. I recalled last night, those mid summer revelations of Rodriguez—that he had been in therapy with 3 different therapists at the same time: one for his marriage, one for his problems of early childhood and one for his sports related problems. Clearly he is immersed in our Oprahfied, therapeutic culture, where there's a therapist for every imaginable condition, as well as therapists ready to correct the actual conditions of life. He seemed determined to show that there really is crying in baseball. Could it be that the immense talent he possesses has been feminized so that in the showdown, the shootout at the OK corral, where the masculine virtues---focused aggression, the will to triumph and defeat the enemy---were absent. Is his talent undermined by softness of character and a yearning to be loved? How many times did he try desparately to hit a home run, only to wind up swinging and missing.         What A-Rod needs is not therapeutic empathy, not encouragement to bare his soul and be more metrosexual. He needs to remember that baseball is a game whose object is to utterly defeat the opposition, preferably crush them so their defeat erodes their confidence. Self reflection is NOT required and may be paralyzing. If A-Rod’s reports of his fatherless childhood are meaningful enough to make him flinch from the ultimate triumph in order to protect his father from his own aggression, that is interesting to a psychoanalyst. But if it translates into a strike out when he’s expected to deliver a hit, such knowledge is worthless. We see plenty of people who fail in order to defeat their parents. However, is such psychotherapeutic exploration helpful to Rodriguez? We doubt it. Instead, we think Rodriguez would do far better if he stayed away from grievance counseling therapists, and read Thucydides or Victor Hanson on the nature of warfare. He's still young and if he can harness all of his talent in the service of defeating the Yankee foes there's no limit to what he can accomplish.