The giant foam finger of fate

Baseball is the only sport that begins its preseason in the spring. As a result, it is closely identified with nature's cycle of renewal. 'Spring training' means baseball, but it is also a broad metaphor for fresh beginnings, hope for the hopeless, limitless horizons, second chances - and Destiny.

Each spring training, Destiny poses a question: 'Will this at last be the [insert team name here] year of destiny?' In the ephemeral giddiness of spring training, the perceived answer is often an unqualified: 'Maybe!' But destiny isn't returning this spring, because this year it had no off-season. Destiny hasn't had a day off since the final out of the final game of last year's Sox/Yankees series, a playoff that truly wasn't over 'til it was over. But once it WAS over, destiny assumed the spotlight and never relinquished it.

The first to feel the impact of the Red Sox' meetup with destiny actually weren't the Yankees themselves. The Yanks were far too desensitized by the series' mindnumbing length, tension and intensity to feel much of anything for weeks. For that matter, the Sox themselves were so profoundly dazed that they won the anticlimactic World Series in a sleepwalk.

No, the first sting of the Sox' big win was felt by sportswriters, particularly those in New York. This group had years of cliches at the ready to be mixed, matched, pureed and jello-molded into new-ish prose. The Sox' loss was prewritten, an old story that required only freshening before it was committed to print. The patterns of past Sox' failures and Yanks' triumphs merely awaited the insertions of the day's heroes, villains, and tragic figures before their periodic recycling.

In the wake of fate's prank for the ages, discerning readers of the NY sports pages noticed that the playoff coverage had taken on petulant overtones. All together, it seemed, the writers' alarms had gone off too early, their spouses were in a bad humor, their dogs had peed in their shoes and their raises hadn't come through. It wasn't so much that the home team had lost, bad as that was. Actually, the writers had gotten Destiny's interoffice memo: 'Sorry boys. You'll have to do some actual work this time.' The stunned writers were caught with their drawers down. No one had a handy back-up story half as good as what they'd planned to phone in since the series began. Their clip art was whisked away, no one knew how to draw, and Destiny had a hearty horselaugh.

In the offseason, numerous attempts to force fate's hand were pulled into the magnetic field of the Sox' historic victory. Writers, fans and team execs in cities where success is glimpsed but rarely grasped worked feverishly to bottle Sox karma. Thanks to the Sox, the Cubs were deemed both MORE likely to break their championship draught (surely it was their turn) and LESS likely (surely the Sox had shipped their jinx along with Garciaparra). Eagles fans made a hamhanded attempt to invoke Sox' karma by appropriating their 'Why Not Us?' slogan. (Memo from Destiny to Eagles' fans: Until you come up with your own slogans, don't expect any smiles from us.) The Mets for their part simply prayed that championship shoots would sprout from the transplanted Martinez.

Everyday practitioners of the ballplayers' craft know the folly of attempting to capture the elusive fate-quark. Holding the bat too tightly, 'aiming' the ball, 'forcing it' and 'trying too hard' are cardinal sins (and not just if you're from St. Louis). Those who never played the game at a high level - most writers, fans, and owners - find it hard to accept as absolutes the philosophical bounds of these intangibles. Our culture assures us that we 'get what we pay for' - why not in baseball? Why wouldn't the most expensive talent inevitably attain the top prize? Why tolerate failure if one can purchase success?

Acceptance of failure is actually at baseball's very core. Ted WIlliams noted that, as a hitter, he was destined to fail most of the time. His solution was to maintain a good strike zone feng shui and hope for the best. The baseball season, incorporating far more games than any other sport, makes a large number of failures (losses) inevitable. Moreover, many of these losses (and more than a few wins) are serendipitous. Humidity, heat, cold, wind, noise, ennui, light (or lack thereof) and the idiosyncracies of various ballparks often trump skill and will in determining outcome. (Of course, we rarely let it go at that, assigning needed heroes and scapegoats to fit the regulation storylines.) With so much of their bread cast upon the waters, it's no wonder ballplayers are known for their superstitions. Success in baseball depends largely on an acceptance of fate's role in the game.

The Red Sox players finally reached the pinnacle of baseball-Zen enlightenment when they let go of their 'cowboy up' posturing (which failed in 2003) to embrace the higher wisdom of accepting their fates as 'idiots'. A cowboy is a model of self-determination, a John Wayne who can hoist himself up by his red sox-straps and summon the slugger within when it really matters. An idiot merely surfs the curls of destiny. Either an idiot or a cowboy might come back from a 3 games to none deficit (the cowboy by summoning greatness, the idiot by not realizing that he was doomed), but only an idiot can get hit in the head with a routine fly ball and still get named series MVP. The idiot can survive anything, the cowboy can survive anything but ridicule. Since ridicule, not the Yankees, had actually been the Sox' primary enemy during their long dry spell, an embrace of their inner idiot had been the key missing ingredient for years.

Baseball's brand of Zen is unique in sports. Different sports homilies and cultures don't transfer well (ask Michael Jordan). What worked for Vince Lombardi would not have worked for Gil Hodges. This is rooted in the natures of the essential tasks required by each sport. Success in football has more in common with success in war than in baseball, and in fact much of football culture sounds and feels like military culture (as George Carlin brilliantly observed). Both Lombardi and Patton understood they were in the business of sending men into harm's way, and they perfected the kind of preparation this required.

Basketball hinges on deception, physicality and technical skill. The skill of course is basically in getting the ball through the hoop. Physicality is something you're more or less born with (see Shaq). The deception lies (hmm, deception ALWAYS lies) in who will deliver the ball, and from what spot on the court. Since the hoop is just a tiny spot on the court and a timer dictates how long one has to get there, deception is critical to success. Basketball has a surreal aura of Three Card Monte being played by unnaturally tall men in shorts. Its most beloved practitioners - the Globetrotters, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan - tend to be its most adept tricksters. It's a battle of the slickest, a contest of misdirection, juke and jive. Observe the way a group of football players and a group of basketball players in a social gathering dress and behave. So disparate are their cultures, you can tell them apart every time. Baseball culture does contain some aspects of guile (note how closely great base stealers resemble great basketball players), but the importance of jive in basbeall has probably been in decline since Gaylord Perry threw his last spitball.

Some combination of football's regimentation and repitition, baskeball's shuck-and-jive flair, and baseball's resignation to fatalism are probably the forces that shape all our destinies. Of these, baseball's fate factor is the least understood, requiring something resembling religious faith to engage. So nebulous and humbling are baseball's lessons that we generally prefer to compensate with extra helpings of Trump bluster or Schwartzenegger bravado - even when what we really need is more Warren Buffet steadfastness or Jimmy Stewart humility. The gritty, plodding determination of football or the brash, rule-bending edginess of basketball are far easier to institutionalize and reproduce than Forrest Gump's floating feather relationship to the forces that govern our existence.

Because baseball's fragile lessons don't institutionalize well, we can derive some insight into big-league organizations by taking note of how far up the corporate ladder its philosophy survives. Taking the Sox and Yanks as convenient examples, we see that the right baseball stuff is practiced at least to the level of the manager's office. The reactions of the hierarchies to the stunning defeat/victory may give us a clue as to their corporate thinking. The Sox' Theo Epstein (younger than any man with a pro ball club as a toy has any right to be) correctly did not attempt to capture lightning in a bottle, and let players such as Martinez depart. His reactions to questions such as 'Was this a fluke?' and 'Can the Sox repeat?' were more idiot than cowboy (suggesting that nearly a century of championship drought can sometimes have an enlightening impact on an institution). Basically, Epstein promised that the Sox would put the best team it could on the field every year, and that it hoped to win their share of games. The Yankees, on the other hand, moved to 'fix' their problems (for the Yanks, a mere best record in the AL is a problem) in the same manner they have in the past - by acquiring big name players. Their adjustment in philosophy this year was in picking up pitchers (Johnson) rather than sluggers (passing on Beltran). (The NY writers, as if to prove they'd learned nothing at all, hailed Johnson's signing as a victory over the Red Sox in the very same way they gloated over the Rodriguez signing the previous year.) Steinbrenner for his part is feeling his age, and seems inclined to interfere less with his 'baseball people'. To the degree this gives Torre and his contingent more sway over decisions, the Yanks should enjoy some healthy baseball Zen. It's a hopeful sign that the team at least did not make foolish wholesale changes in the off season. But there's no reason to believe that there has been a rush of Zen insight at the top of the Yanks' food chain. (Such insights rarely arrive in a rush, anyway. In Boston they required nearly a century of humiliations.) Should Steinbrenner decide to reach back for something extra from his 'old school' management manual (it's always possible) the team could unravel pretty quickly. In which case, they could quickly rediscover how far down it is to the bottom of their division.

(Time out in this trashing of NY sports writing to praise Buster Olney, the exceptional FORMER NY Times baseball writer whose book, 'The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty' foretold and documented the end of the recent era of Yankee dominance. The key word here of course is 'former'. He is missed.)

We all attempt to make manifest and certain the intangible and elusive quarks that add up to success in both sports and life. We pursue them regardless of the fact that, like quarks, the mere act of being observed changes their very natures and renders the pursuit meaningless. We engage writers to capture the versimilitudes and nuances that constitute the essence of sporting events. But until we understand that in attempting to capture the moment we have also missed the point, we learn nothing of real significance.

The essence of a sport is embodied in the managers who flourish in it. Football yields master motivators (Lombardi), father figures (Landry), bipolar bosses (Parcells) and strategy geeks (Belichik). Basketball's greatest coach was the sly Auerbach. (Phil Jackson's longstanding rep as his teams' Zen master was a red herring. The crafty and driven Jordan was the motivator and leader of the great Bulls teams, and Jackson was Zen enough to know how to get out of his way. Basketball is far more a Penn & Teller show than a Zen pursuit.)

Baseball produces true Zen masters such as the impenetrable Casey Stengel and the circuitous Yogi Berra. Joe Torre, though less cryptic, probably belongs in this category as well. By this barometer, we believe the quintessential baseball manager would be Yoda. We can see him exchanging his light saber for a bat, and inspiring his young charges with tales of the wonders fate has in store for them, if only they believe.

{ON THIS SUBJECT: A fine interview with Bill James, a man who needs no introduction to baseball fans.}

Categories: Baseball