173. Baseball Is as Unfair as Life. (2)

 

We left Scott Rolen fielding that grounder as the winning run streaked toward home.  I want to put you in the stands or in front of the set as the ball bounces toward him.  Say you want to know exactly how games are won and lost, and who's responsible.  You're a scientist, or a judge.  And let's say you've just come from a hockey game where you have been terribly confused.  God himself couldn't have figured out what went on in that melee.

OK, the ball is taking its last bounce.  Rolen is lowering his glove.  You know this is a play the game is riding on.  Is there anything you and the rest of the 44,000 in the stands, or the millions watching on TV, aren't going to know?  Is there going to be any doubt in anybody's mind about the responsibility?  the blame?

This is the world of baseball: a spot of light moving with the ball from one player to another.  If Rolen fields and throws, the spot will move to Votto at first, who will or will not let the ball get through him, but who might, if the ball is thrown in the dirt, dig it out.  You may say "goat" and you may say "hero," but you're never going to say, "I'm ignorant."

Baseball is clarity and knowledge.  It is also loneliness.  Nobody on the field can help Rolen at that moment.  It's him and that ball.  And there's an oddity: knowing that it's just you and the ball and that the game depends on how you handle it makes you anxious, the worst thing you can be when you handle a ball.   So what a good ballplayer wants is ignorance.  Fat lot of good all that clarity and knowledge does him when the ball's coming at him.  So with players of this brainy game it's the stupider the better.  Managers know this.  The best relief pitcher is "a bubble-blower with his brains beat out."

But you can't do that with your own brain.  You've got to train it to blot out what it knows.  Make each play for what it is in itself, without context or drama.  With anxiety lost you can maintain poise, the virtue that fields grounders and wins games most reliably.  Poise through self-control.

It's so easy to lose self-control, and, for pitchers, so disastrous.  In that last and deciding game young Mat Latos, going into the fifth having held the Giants to only two solid singles, got a couple of bad calls by the umpire.  He gave up a single and a triple to two players at the bottom of the batting order.  (This, like everything that happened that inning, could have happened to the most poised pitcher in the world, baseball being the chance thing it is, but I will guess a break in poise.)  OK, the Reds are behind 1-0 but they are a catch-up team, and he can get out of this.  He gets a grounder back to him from Matt Cain.  The runner has to hold as he throws Cain out.  Get the next batter, Angel Pagan, without that runner on third scoring and he's got a good chance of getting out of the inning.  The infield is drawn in for a play at the plate on a grounder.  He gets the grounder.  And Cozart the shortstop fumbles it!  Giants up 2-0.  Now a pretty sure sign of emotional breakdown: he walks the next batter on four pitches.  After that a single and a home run, it's 6-0, and we're out of the playoffs.  If Latos had pulled himself together at any number of places in that inning we might have pulled it out.  We scored four runs and lost 6-4. 

Latos took full blame.  "I lost it."  Just what Cozart said, probably thinking that if he'd made that play Latos would have kept a grip on himself.  But then, by what Rolen had said two games back, neither one could have lost it.  He had already lost the series with his fumble.

Of course no fellow player gave any sign of reproach.  That's not baseball.  There but for the grace of God go I.  But it's more than that.  Players who had lived through a season with Rolen and Cozart had seen them save many games.  Pitchers, as we now know well through face close-ups, can be extremely grateful to fielders.  Watch closely after a good play with men on base.  Nobody has received more tender looks of gratitude than Scott Rolen, winner of eight gold gloves.

Gratitude.  Gratitude to the point of love.  Add that to the clarity and knowledge and loneliness and anxiety in baseball.  Gratitude is an important addition because baseball lacks so much that other sports give us in the way of team spirit, the shoulder-to-shoulder effort that binds us to our fellows.  It's a game for individualists, as we, with our moving spotlight and teammates watching helplessly, have already acknowledged.  Yet there is a bond.  And I think it shows up in the gratitude.  "Good old Pete, hanging onto that ball after he crashed into the fence."

If we see it as more than gratitude, if we see it as love, we're going to have to add pain, because this is an activity in which you can do very little for the loved one, and have to watch him suffer.  I think of Stephen Spender, looking at the war-wounded, feeling "all love's aidlessness."

Gratitude, love, sympathy.  That seems to be what baseball has to offer in place of shoulder-to-shoulder spirit.  The love, felt by both teammates and home fans, has to operate at a distance but you can't say it doesn't form a bond.  Is it a peculiarly American bond?  What a nation of individualists has to hope for?  Another question too deep for one post.