Thursday, Apr. 09, 2009
Reality Hardball: Where Baseball and Real Life Collide
If you’re like most baseball fans, you use the sport as a temporary escape from reality.
You exit the real world when you enter the ticket gate and forget about your troubles for a few hours while you yell at the umpires and wash down a hot dog with a cold beer.
With the Myrtle Beach Pelicans opening the season tonight, Grand Strand fans will get their annual baseball fix – a new crop of players to root for, an excuse to get out in the warm weather and Thirsty Thursdays, the happiest happy hour in town at a buck-a-beer.
It’s a harmless pursuit, as long as you don’t spend too many singles on brews or get too graphic with the umps, but there are those who take America’s pastime way too seriously.
Sports surrealists say baseball is a metaphor for life, and in many ways I suppose it’s true.
What is the human animal except an individual (or player) working (or playing) for his own benefit while also contributing to a company (or team) for the group’s greater good?
We go to work each day with our briefcase and computer (bat and glove) to make a living for ourselves, but we go to an office (ballpark) with our co-workers (teammates). In order for us to be individually successful, the company (ballclub) must also succeed.
Not to sound too much like Al Capone in “The Untouchables’’ (I’m not going to bash someone’s brains out with a bat), but baseball speaks to a uniquely American way of life.
But what if we took this metaphor too literally? What if life really was like baseball? It might sound like a nice day in the park, but it also would have its hazards. Let’s go there.
Batter up
If life really was like baseball, you would have to show up at work four hours before game time to prep for the day’s work. That’s more time getting ready for work than your actual work day. There might be extra innings, but there’s no overtime.
And talk about a job that requires lots of service, there are customers (fans) constantly clamoring for your signature the whole time you’re trying to get ready for work, not to mention reporters asking you tough questions while you’re putting on your work pants.
“Joe, your company has really stunk it up for the past fiscal quarter, especially your department? What are you going to do to turn it around? Are you going to be fired?’’
Or traded to a place like Cleveland, or demoted to an even worse town. You go to work one day and, bam, sorry, Charlie no-Hustle, you’ve been shuffled off to Buffalo.
Try working under that kind of pressure and not let it affect your job performance. No wonder so many players fall to the temptation of performance-enhancing drugs (coffee).
Then there’s the travel; half of your work is at home while the other half is on the road. You might spend three days in New York, the weekend in Chicago and then out west to L.A.
The flights, hotels and restaurants are all first class, but there’s no place like home. Now we know why so many of these poor guys have a woman in every city. They miss their wives’ home cooking, both in the kitchen and the bedroom, if you know what I mean.
Working on the road is even more difficult than at home, where the customers are mostly on your side. On the road, you’re constantly being heckled by some bum who has alliegences to another company:
“Joe, you couldn’t get a grand slam at Denny’s! You couldn’t get a triple at Wendy’s! You couldn’t get a double during happy hour! You couldn’t get a single at a strip club!’’
And if you go to knock him out for his bad jokes and manners, you get fined by your company. Zoo animals get better protection from the public, but they work for peanuts.
And imagine 45,000 sets of eyes on you when you sat down at your computer, or in this case, step up to the plate. You think it’s hard to type 90-words-per-minute while someone is talking loudly in the next cubicle, try hitting a 90 mph fastball with a stick while thousands yell your name.
And all that chatter: “Hey typer, typer, typer…’’ or “He can’t type, he can’t type, delete typer!’’ It really would be enough to make you want to drink, or shoot up some steroids.
And how’s this for pressure? Three strikes and you’re out. Not three strikes and you lose your smoke break or can’t wear jeans on casual Friday, but three strikes and you must vacate your cubicle, take the walk of shame to the parking lot and pout until next time.
Whenever three teammates are out, you’ve got to go out in the field and stand around hoping someone hits the ball to you, or better yet, that they don’t. Back and forth all day, like Joe Employee routinely checking to see else if someone started a new pot of coffee.
Such monotony: hit, miss, sit, stand, scratch, spit and, if you’re lucky, score. To do so requires getting on base and hoping a few teammates do the same to get you to the plate.
It’s just like the real world. No matter how well you do, it’s all for nothing if your co-workers screw it up. Sure, you have your own batting average and ERA, but you are judged solely on winning and losing. No. 2 means just what it did in kindergarten – poop.
At the end of the day your body aches, you’re dog tired and you’ve got a wicked case of hat hair, unless you hop in the shower with 24 naked people (their gender based on the opposite of your sexual orientation). Then you get ready to do it all over again next day.
Sounds like a real grind, and for the most part it is, except for one special day – pay day.
Home run
Say what you want about the negative aspects of real life being like baseball, but the pay is great. In fact, there aren’t many jobs you wouldn’t tolerate as long as the price is right.
Last year, the average annual salary for a Major League Baseball player topped $3 million. I would scrub prison toilets barehanded with a live, rabid badger for that kind of coin.
And let’s say you were a below average toilet scrubber with a wild animal as a scrub brush, the worst in the business. Never fear, the minimum salary for a Major League Baseball player this year is $400,000.
How do those poor guys take it, playing a kid’s game for six- and seven-figure salaries? No wonder they go on strike more than teachers, policemen and firefighters combined.
It’s a good thing they have a strong union (baseball players of the world unite and fight the power) or these poor athletically gifted goons might be making minimum wage.
The irony is most major leaguers could live off minimum wage given their side jobs. Many make far more selling cornflakes and sports cars than they do for hitting a baseball.
In fact, it’s more important for a big-leaguer to be a good pitchman than a good pitcher. You get paid the same regardless of run production; the real money’s in moving product.
Yankee captain Derek Jeter hawks Jiffy peanut butter and Ford cars, but he eats filet mignon and drives a Beamer. Sammy Sosa needed an interpreter to testify before Congress about steroid use, but he had no trouble speaking proper English for Pepsi. Man, that stuff must really work.
But it’s a totally different ballgame (pun intended) on the minor league level.
Yes, some Pelicans players may be dubbed as hot prospects – and may have banked considerable coin with a signing bonus and other contractual perks – but the fact of the matter is: they ain’t in the Big Leagues - yet.
And it’s not chartered planes for the minor leagues – it’s a summer of long bus rides, to places like Lynchburg, Va. and, Frederick, Md. and Wilmington, Del. – not exactly the “SportsCenter’’ spotlight of New York or Boston.
According to MinorLeagueBaseball.com: “Minor League Baseball player contracts are handled by the Major League Baseball office. Here are the salary ranges: First contract season: $1,100/month maximum. After that, open to negotiation. Meal Money: $20 per day at all levels, while on the road.”
But to focus on money alone does a disservice to how great the world would be if it was one big baseball diamond. Sure, the pay is great, but the fringe benefits are even better.
For starters, you don’t even have to be a starter to get the star treatment. Everyone on the team flies via private jet, dines for free in the finest restaurants, gets mobbed by groupies at every stop and has clubhouse attendants wash their clothes, cars and anything else that gets dirty.
It’s like a 25-man rock band on summer tour, except they smash bats and balls instead of guitars and drum kits, and they trash the visiting clubhouses instead of five-star hotels.
And the hits just keep on coming. In what other setting could a grown man scratch and adjust himself so many times in public without showing up in the local newspaper’s police blotter? It’s almost like their jock straps are made of 100 percent sandpaper.
To steal a line from “A League of Their Own,’’ there’s no decorum in baseball. What other job could you freely spit tobacco juice and sunflower seeds on the office floor?
And if your manager does have a problem with your work ethic, don’t tell him to talk to the palm; tell him to talk to your agent, who handles any of the daily hassles that might come along, you know, like a multi-million dollar contract dispute – or fixing a flat tire.
So maybe the Grand Ol’ Game is just a game, after all. But wouldn’t it really be grand if it was also the game of life.
Sign me up and put me in center field, coach (scratch, spit) I’m ready to play every day.
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