Sunday, June 01, 2008
Sports, "Hunt's Grunts"

The game of life

I’m not sure baseball is the greatest sport in the world, but I do know we as Americans need it...

Jeff Zelevansky/Getty Images
Yogi Berra

By Hunt Archbold

“Baseball is 90 percent mental; the other half is physical.’’

The great Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra once uttered those words. I’m not sure baseball is the greatest sport in the world, but I do know we as Americans need it. Here we are in a presidential election year, and it’s shaping up to be one nasty partisan process all the way through Election Day. And as it proceeds, so too will our national pastime. If the World Series goes seven games, it would end a mere five days before we go to the polls to pick our 44th president. Terrorism, global warming, the weakening economy, natural disasters, incurable diseases, senseless acts of violence and crime—my goodness, it can be overbearing. And then there are those mud-slinging politicians always on the airwaves.

But baseball is different. In the stadium or on the field, only what happens on the diamond counts. Baseball has a way of emulating life itself better than any other sport. Within those nine innings, a host of characters take the stage, batting, pitching, catching and running. Some will positively impact the game, others will not. In our daily struggle, we also encounter a bevy of folks coming and going from our lives. Some knock it out of the park. Other take strike three looking.

I’ve played adult baseball for the previous three summers in Atlanta. It had been 20 full years since my final high school game, and in that first season back, I fielded well, struggled at the plate, but overall thoroughly enjoyed myself as I reintroduced myself to the sights, the sounds, and the smells of the game. Still, the following spring, I found a new team that would allow me play the position I love so much, that being catcher.

As in baseball, there are rules we have to follow in life, and there are umpires along the way to remind us when we’ve done wrong. There’s also no clock in baseball. Time doesn’t tick away as it does in many other sports. The game waits for no one, but it doesn’t accommodate anyone either. Likewise, we can’t speed up the events in our own life, even though we sometimes wish we could.

Season No. 2 was good for me. Almost caught almost every inning and played solidly behind the dish, although my throwing technique was a bit inconsistent. At the plate, I made a sharp improvement and even went yard (oh, that felt good!) for the first time in two decades. Yet prior to the third season, the manager decided a change was in order and a younger, bigger, stronger catcher with a big bat was brought in. In his mid-20s, Jeff was not only a good guy, but a handsome fella, too, who could really hit with power. It was also noted to me by teammates that while I arrived at games with a mannequin in the back seat, Jeff brought his very attractive Asian dancer from the Pink Pony, who sometimes sat with us in the dugout and responded with giggles and wiggles when players made obvious sexist remarks. With his bat, glove and shoe-model friend, clearly the new guy was bringing more to the table than the old fella.

So I played a lot of right field last summer, but I also caught my share of innings, too, as Jeff and I would split the catching duties about 65-35 and there were a few games where I caught the duration when he couldn’t make it for one reason or another. One of those days actually arrived on championship Saturday. Our team had previously taken Game 1 of the best-of-three series (and I will say in tooting-my-own-horn fashion that I did have a nice diving catch in the 10th inning that saved a run), and all we had to do was win one game of a scheduled doubleheader if needed on Saturday to win the league title.

The night before, knowing that a possible 18 innings behind the plate in 90-plus degree August heat could be awaiting, I stayed in and took it easy. Still, the next day would not be good for me. For whatever reason, and most likely because I was drinking mere water and not one of those electrolyte replacement drinks, my body began to break down midway through the first game. I was cramping and my vision began to blur. Not good when you’re squatting and trying to call a game. I made my first error of the season in Game 1, and was really concerned after we lost a one-run lead in the bottom of the ninth inning on a walk-off homer.

It just takes one wallop of a bat to change a game completely, and the same can be true with our lives. A sudden, unexpected event can lead us to unbridled joy or heart-breaking sadness. Things can change in an instant.

My last baseball play to date came in the fourth inning of Game 2, a game our pitching-depleted team would ultimately lose in blowout fashion. Snapping out of my crouch, I gunned down a would-be base stealer at third. But in doing so, both my legs went into shutdown mode. I cramped up and fell to the ground in pain. Soon, every muscle was in full contraction mode. I mean, the muscles in my fingers, toes, legs, chest, arms, stomach—everything went ultra-tight.

The only shade available was directly behind the dugout, but as I withered in pain on the ground, I soon realized I was lying in an ant bed, and those little suckers chewed my arms and neck good. I ultimately was able to gingerly get myself home, and a few days later I finally got back to normal. But talk about disappointment—all-in-all, it was one truly sorry end to a baseball season. Especially since, being four decades into this life, it was quite possibly the end of my baseball career, although the book’s still out on that one. So when I hear that Yogi-ism about the game being 90 percent mental, I must beg to differ. Instead, I like to think of what Babe Ruth once said: “I hit big or I miss big, and I like to live as big as I can.”

Happy times … and I don’t care what Tom Hanks said, there is crying in baseball, as I learned in an ant bed behind a dugout in Smyrna last summer (sigh).  SP