What sports taught me: Part 1

A Horatio Algae Story; meaning it will grow on you...

And now that we have our first bad pun out of the way…sports often get criticized for all sorts of reasons like cheating and taking drugs and being overly-competitive, but enough about the Men’s Senior Baseball League.

When people insult my former league by calling it a “beer” league, I respond that it was much better than that; it was a “beer-and-a-shot-and-if-you-played-on-the-right-team-some-weed-in-the-parking-lot” league.

True story.

We went to Phoenix to play in a national tournament which involves six games in four days and then playoffs and since none of us were in that kind of shape to play that many games in that few days, everybody was stiff and sore until my catcher started passing around some kind of liniment and when I looked at the bottle it had a horse on the label.

So it definitely wasn’t meant for humans, but it was working and I told my catcher to keep using it unless he suddenly felt the urge to signal for a fastball by pawing his hoof on the ground once and signal for a curve by pawing his hoof on the ground twice and if he could refrain from doing either of those I’d give him a sugar cube after the game.

Anyway…

I was recently reading a story about a Kansas City Chiefs player who was playing well and everybody loved him, then played poorly and fans started a Go-Fuck-Me drive to buy out his contract and then started playing well again and he was back to being loved and when he was asked about those ups and downs he said he had learned not to pay any attention to what his critics were saying.

Which is a common attitude among athletes.

When Jeff Francoeur played for the Royals he said he always read my stuff, but never read the comments underneath because people could be such negative assholes and he didn’t want that negative assholery in his head.

(OK, I thought I just made it up, but my laptop seems to think “assholery” is a legitimate word so apparently my laptop has been paying attention to how some people have reacted to a pandemic.)

So there’s lesson number one…

Ignore the ignorant; listen to the wise

When I wrote Judging the Royals it was about baseball as the players saw it and a lot of it contradicted what analytics advocates thought and they’d get on the website and say I didn’t know what I was talking about because they’d read Moneyball — in my opinion one of the most misleading books ever written about sports — and I learned to ignore that criticism from guys who lived in their mom’s basement, never played baseball and would shit their pants if you hit a line drive in their direction and concentrate on what the players thought about what I was writing.

If a guy who never stood in a batter’s box or on a pitcher’s mound was critical, big deal; but if the players thought I made a mistake then I probably had and needed to adjust or write a correction, which I did on more than one occasion.

My first conversation with Ned Yost involved him telling me I had made a mistake (I said Salvador Perez made a bad effort to block a pitch, but Ned said it was a cross-up which means Salvy thought a different pitch was coming) and when I said I’d write about that, Ned said he wasn’t asking me to make a correction and I said I had to because I was trying to get things right and explain the game so fans understood what they were seeing.

Ned then said every team in baseball needed someone doing what I was doing, a great suggestion MLB has yet to implement.

OK, so don’t listen to people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about; do listen to people who have some expertise and experience.

What’s our next lesson?

You can always do more than you think you can

My first encounter with serious sports was Freshman football in high school and as I recall our coaches did not know jack shit about football (we were running the Statue of Liberty play which was invented by Amos Alonzo Stagg in the 1870s and involves pretending to be an immigrant headed for Ellis Island) but the Freshman football coaches did know about running laps and we ran a metric shit ton of those and if I didn’t know my older brother would make fun of me, I would have quit football because we were running way more than I ever had run in my life and way past the point where it fucking hurt.

The above picture is me arriving late on a play, possibly because when they handed out elbow pads and hand pads and rip pads (a “rip” is hitting someone with your forearm and I’d highly recommend it over throwing a punch which can break any one of the 27 bones in your hand) I said give me two of everything because I planned on hitting a lot of stuff, but apparently dressing like the Michelin Man slows you down (OK, that’s an excuse…I could’ve been dressed like  Usain Bolt and still been slow), but as you can see I still led the league in mud stains.

BTW: If you finish a game and somebody doesn’t have dirt on their uniform, that means they weren’t on the field much or didn’t give it much of an effort when they were, although there are exceptions like pitchers and QBs, which is one of the reasons some athletes who get the crap beat out of them on a regular basis hold a low opinion of those two positions, which reminds me of the photo I once saw of the New York Jets linemen sitting on the bench looking like they’d been drug through a swamp and then had a bar fight and Joe Namath next to them lying on a folding lounge chair and his uniform was spotless and could have been worn by any of the millions of brides pretending to be a virgins.

That’s one of the many reasons smart QBs make a habit of buying dinner for the linemen that keep their uniforms white.

Anyway…

Our Freshman team was so bad we scored one touchdown all year and the guy who threw the touchdown pass – Don Gilman – and the guy caught the touchdown pass – Stan Anderson – were immediately elevated to the Jr. Varsity, so after that we didn’t have a single guy who scored a single point in an entire football season, but I did learn I could do way more than I thought I could and I also learned not to dwell on how shitty I felt because that definitely didn’t help.

I’d be singing Beach Boy songs in my head while my heart felt like it was auditioning for the part of that nasty little monster that burst out of John Hurt’s chest in Alien.

On to lesson three.

Doing things right can make you better

When I was a kid in the early 1960s and you sucked at baseball the coaches were dads and didn’t know how to fix anything or anybody so they’d send you to right field and hope nobody hit a ball in your direction or – if you really sucked – they’d just send you home.

One Christmas I got the gift of being sent to the Royals Fantasy Camp and since I hadn’t played baseball since I was a kid and stood in right field I decided to go to a batting cage and met Chris Egelston (hi, Chris, ‘cuz I know you’re reading this) and Chris made it to Double A with the Baltimore Orioles and after watching my swing and getting control of his laughter he talked me into some hitting lessons.

I quickly learned there was a right way to do pretty much everything (like holding a bat in your fingers instead of your palms) and they were learnable techniques and if you learned those techniques you could make yourself better.

Not good.

But better.

I didn’t have enough physical talent to actually be good, but I was starting to understand baseball concepts and when I asked Russ Morman (he played in the big leagues for the White Sox, Royals and Marlins) what he thought of my playing skills, Russ said…and I quote:

“You’re the kind of guy we cut and make a coach.”

Which is a remarkably concise insult and compliment wrapped up in an 11-word sentence.

The difference between process and results

OK, so doing things right is the “process” which you control and what happens next is the “result” which you don’t control (you can do everything right and still lose because you ran into someone who did everything better), so you focus on what you control because focusing on things you don’t control won’t get you anywhere, but that’ll be hard because the fans and media will focus on results.

Ever wonder how a guy can be Manager of the Year one year and fired the next?

I once managed two teams in two different divisions in the same year and the team with talent went 25-0 and the team without talent went 11-14. Same manager saying the same things, but the 11-14 team didn’t have enough talent.

But focusing on the process and ignoring results is just the kind of sophisticated and mature thinking that will probably get you fired because your boss doesn’t give a flaming rat’s ass if you’re a Heroin Addict Running a White Slavery Ring (which would look awesome on a business card) as long as you make your quarterly numbers and he or she gets their bonus.

But if you’re a Heroin Addict Running a White Slavery Ring, focus on the process and do it well.

Mindless repetition isn’t mindless

I read a book about a guy in college who decided to do his part and join the military during the First Iraq War and being smarter than the average bear, quickly understood why his drill sergeants would scream at him while he was making his bed and punish him if it wasn’t perfect.

The seemingly-crazy drill sergeants were training him to do things correctly under pressure (like calling in the right coordinates for an air strike while people tried to shoot him) and that’s what repetition does for you when someone hits a screaming line drive in the left-center gap during a World Series; repetition has created muscle memory.

You’ve practiced your jump turn to get started (both feet come off the ground at the same time because it’s faster), learned to run correct routes (you run to a spot behind where you think the ball will land because if you’re too deep you can always slow down and come back, but if you’re too shallow you’re screwed), you slow down on the balls of your feet (because if you slow down on your heels, your head will bounce and screw up your view of the ball) and you do all that without thinking because you’ve done it a ba-jillion-and-a-half times while shagging flies during batting practice.

Green Bay Packer lineman Fuzzy Thurston told a story about running a play over and over and over and finally he turned to Coach Vince Lombardi and said: “Coach, we can do this in our sleep” and Lombardi grinned and Fuzzy realized that was the point:

They could run the play in their sleep.

Back then the Packers had like eight plays in their playbook (and variations off those plays), but they pretty much ran them to perfection and other teams would say they knew exactly what the Packers were going to do, they just couldn’t stop them from doing it.

The harder you work the luckier you’ll get

Branch Rickey once said: “Luck is the residue of design” and someone else once said, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” and nothing illustrates that point better than the fact that Ozzie Smith used to occasionally practice fielding grounders from his knees so if he ever had to do it in a game, he’d know how to make the play.

So someone might see Ozzie dive, come up throwing from his knees, arc a rainbow over to first base and think it was a lucky play, but it wasn’t; preparation just met opportunity.

I’ve got one Ozzie Smith story that involves me and it goes like this:

I was in St. Louis for their Opening Day and got on a crowded elevator with Ozzie Smith and he was wearing a sport coat that was made out of some kind of material that glistened and shimmered and looked like a team of angels were involved in its design and I said:

“Great jacket.”

Ozzie smiled and modestly said: “Oh, it’s just something I found in the closet.”

And I asked: “Whose closet?”

Which made the Greatest Shortstop in the History of Baseball laugh his ass off and that happened because I’d prepared to be a smartass all my life and met an opportunity.

And now stay tuned for What Sports Taught Me: Part 2 which I’ll post whenever the hell I feel like it because sports also taught me don’t make promises you can’t keep.

Talk to you soon.