Archive for failure

One might detect, if one somehow had the inclination, a certain level of melancholy in some of my baseball writing. I assure you that this is in no way reflected in my love for the game in question, but rather a defect in my upbringing wherein my parents lamentably provided me no real tragedy with which to ground my craft. I am a Mariners fan, and this has done its best to to counter my unfortunate life of fortune, but I doubt it’s enough.

Perhaps this is why I took to baseball, rather than football or basketball; in football the offense and defense of a game is seen as a net zero sum, with only occasional flashes of unstoppable brilliance from either side. In basketball, where defense is still treated by the media with uncomfortable derision, offensive performance is quantified as varying levels of heroism, on a scale from zero to one. Only baseball, as Ted Williams remarked, is littered with failure. The best batters get out six times out of ten, and the onus of this is still placed on the shoulders of the hitter, rather than the will of the defense. We are not yet writing poems about the man who struck out Mighty Casey.

The purpose of this long-winded introduction, as you may have surmised, is to reflect on some of the writings of nineteenth-century philosopher and general malcontent Arthur Schopenhauer, specifically his unshakable opinion that the world is full of suffering. His best line: “A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating with those of the animal being eaten.” Misery is everywhere, and it’s unavaoidable.

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On May 1, 2007, Andruw Jones was hitting .264/.405/.527 and was on his way to winning his tenth gold glove. His Hall of Fame status was all but assured. Five years, three months, and fifteen days later, this happened:

Here, embiggenable at the reader’s discretion, is a snippet of the play-by-play for that inning:

The official scorer of the game, wise to the crippling pressure that age and expectations place on us all, and especially on the rounded shoulders of one Andruw Jones, scored the play as a double. An error, you say? Until the alchemists and the existentialists can brew some elixir that can, at the very least, dull the incremental pain that is the endless life, none of us can claim that Jones had any choice in his actions. We are all, in time, struck down by our own potential.

Ivan Nova does not understand this; he is young. But someday, if he’s fortunate enough, he will be Freddy Garcia, and he will know.

It’s not a big deal or anything, but last Friday marked my thirty-fourth birthday. I’ve never really been big on birthdays; the cake is fine, but the singing and the attention and the sincere well-wishing of acquaintances I can do without. Even-numbered birthdays are even worse, because you can look back at where your halfway mark was, and watch how it steadily increases. Half my life ago, I was a high school senior, playing four-chord songs on the guitar and sweeping up a hardware store on the weekends. With each passing year, the number of baseball players older than me is dwindling in logarithmic fashion toward Moyerdom.

D’Angelo Jimenez is still older than me. He is a thirty-four year old baseball player. Half his life ago, he was a seventeen year-old baseball player. Between those two endpoints, this happened:

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