The Bullpen Gospels - Dirk Hayhurst [34]
The coach looked at his stopwatch. “Alright boys, time to rotate. This group’s heading for field three.”
“What? No, no!” He planned it! That son of a…
Chapter Eleven
I may have had my share of embarrassing moments with Coach Castrate, but overall, camp was going well. I was pitching well, collecting outs, and throwing a mile or two harder, thanks to a deal I made with the guys running the radar gun, at the cost of a log of dip and a six-pack. During those days of spring success. I found it easy to believe all was at peace. Good days at the park have a way of ironing out life’s wrinkles.
I knew, however, from way more experience than I’d like, things don’t go well forever. Whether here in spring or on a team this season, I would struggle again. A moment I sincerely dreaded. If good moments make you carefree, the bad ones suffocate you.
Of course, I couldn’t control my results; all I could control was my approach, but sometimes the results control the approach. I had a lot of failures in my career. Even my successes felt like failures, seeing how I had nothing to show for them. When I failed, it felt so colossally taxing, I became afraid of the slightest potential of it happening each time I took the mound. Soon, it was the only thing I expected myself to do.
It’s easy to talk about success when failure doesn’t mean anything. To me, failure meant a lot. It was something along the lines of self-destruction or imprisonment. It felt like an angry scream from my dad, or an intoxicated fist from my brother. It’s what motivated me, punished, me, and branded me. It was my very wicked master. Thus, each success I had this spring was tempered by the looming shadow of my possible meltdown. Sure I was happy about the results so far. I was doing well, but more importantly, I wasn’t blowing it.
It doesn’t take an all-star to realize this way of thinking was wrong, though, I’ll admit, I never really thought about much of what was going on in my mind until this year. I never thought about quitting before this year either. I needed some answers to big questions. Like, why did the Baseball Reaper show up to only my games, and how could I perform at my best if I was always afraid of the worst? What do you do when all the stars in the canopy of your baseball life turn out to be holes?
I think I would like baseball better if it had superheroes in it. Coping with the game and its uncertainties would be so much easier if there were guys captaining teams who could bench-press trucks and freeze things with their breath. I could always look to their fearless example for inspiration and morale. They’d have all the answers, and if they didn’t, they could just look majestic until you forgot what you were asking. Unfortunately, baseball has no spandex-clad heroes. It does, however, have the next best thing: players with multiyear contracts. That would have to be enough.
Just after the halfway point of spring training, Trevor Hoffman was scheduled to address the minor league pitching staff. Every year during spring training, a big-league pitcher who’s had a good amount of success comes over to talk shop with the minor league pitching horde about what helped them. They talk about what they overcame to get to the golden shores of multifigure contract bigleaguerdom. In previous years, we’d talked with the likes of Rick Suttcliffe, Greg Maddux, and Jake Peavy. This year it was Hoffman’s turn, and I was thrilled.
Despite the lack of merchandisable superpowers, Hoffman was one of my heroes in uniform. He was one of the few remaining players who had not fallen victim to the pitfalls of the sport via performance enhancers or media persecution. He was an icon in the game and someone I thought of as above and beyond the rest of us. If anyone had answers to deep questions and fears, surely it was him.
Why I thought so highly of Hoffman is tough to explain. He had staggering success, but lots of players had that, and I didn’t care much about