Tag: baseball

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I’m Already Tired, I Gotta Retire Too?

Postaday for June 11th: I Am a Rock. Is it easy for you to ask for help when you need it, or do you prefer to rely only on yourself? Why?

I have talked to my therapist at length. No, I don’t like asking people for help. Let’s ask Dale.

Hey, Dale. Turn off the TV for a second.

Can’t. Crudites are up by two, top of the eighth.

Crudites?

That’s a baseball team you invented because you haven’t decided where I live yet.

I thought I made you a Mets fan.

Did you? I don’t remember that.

Well, nevermind. Let me ask you a question.

Go ahead. Damn it, Manless! You bum!

Is it easy for you to ask people for help?

Buck-o, I get on my knees every day and ask God to help Manless get cancer. Ace pitcher, my ass.

No, but seriously. Like, do you ever ask Loretta for help.

Uh, I don’t know, do I? Every time you write about me, she ain’t around.

Well, now’s your chance. Let’s do some character building. Tell me about a time you asked Loretta for help.

Damn it!

Dale.

Sorry. What do you want me to do?

Was there ever a time when you needed Loretta to help you with something, like, when you had to check your machismo at the door and ask her to get you through an ordeal?

You mean other than last week when Gonzales broke his ankle pinch hitting for Lopez?

Well, that’s not exactly—

—Cause let me tell you, I was nearly in tears.

Yeah, but, what about—

I’m sitting right here, in this chair, and even the play-by-play guys got his mouth shut for a change, the camera zoomed in on Gonzales while we wait for the skipper to trot on out there. And you could see it, in his eyes, him thinking he’s two years past retirement as it is, maybe he gets a place in Arizona, or Miami. And Loretta walks in, and she goes Dale, you’re awful quiet, and I look at her, she ain’t the gal she used to be, but she’s still a decent broad, and I’m just lookin’ at her, like I’m that damned manager, and this chair and my sunken chest and how my knees hurt when I get up in the morning and it takes longer to chew on a steak than it used to, and you can’t smile at people on the bus causer they’ll either mace ya or ask ya to sign some petition to save the baby seals from getting evicted, or whatever, and Loretta’s not the kinda dame you ask to do menial things, I mean, I’m the man of the house but I can get up to get my own beer, you know, but there I am, and there she is, and she’s closer to the ice box anyway, so maybe this one time I ask her and she can hear it in my voice how sad I am, and maybe we have a moment, and it’s nothing like when we were kids but it’s something, and then later in the middle of the night she’ll lean over and she’ll whisper, let’s move to Phoenix and I won’t think it’s a stupid idea this time, I’ll think its her way of trying to take care of me, make sure I’m okay.

Uh, oh. Um. Yeah. So, uh… did you?

Did I what?

Ask her for the beer?

Nah. She’s my wife, not my maid.

I see.

Besides, I ask her to get me one, she starts counting them. I don’t need that kinda help, do I, buck-o?

No, I guess not.

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You Don’t Have to be a Fanatic to be a Fan

The name’s Stan. I don’t know what it says on my birth certificate, or even how long I’ve been on God’s Green. But people call me Stan and treat me like a guy pushing 60, so I guess that’s who I am.

I work in the Lost and Found at Safeco Field, home of the Mariners. Been working forever, it feels like. I got a calendar on the wall (lost but never found) that says it’s been 40 years. Which is odd since Safeco was only built 16 years ago, in 1999 and the Mariners themselves have only been around since 1977.

But nevermind that. Down here in Lost and Found, logic isn’t really all that important. I mean, people lose things, and they come here to find them again, and sometimes they do even if it don’t make sense to.

Like the time this fella shows up, looking for his dad. Says his old man passed-away a week before, and he’s not sure what he’s supposed to do now. So I look through one of the boxes and there’s this old beat up hat. Hand it to the guy and he starts tellin’ me about how when he was a kid his old man would take him to ball games. They’d sit there up in some sky-scratchin’ upper-deck, all the players on the field small as ants. Eat boiled hot dogs and if it was rare sunny day his old man would even let him have a sip of his watered-down beer. I ask him, you got any kids, and he says yeah. And I tell him, supposed to be sunny next Wednesday, and Anaheim’s in town. Then he smiles and walks off.

We got all kinds of stuff down here. Hats, like I said. Lots of sweat shirts and jackets cause maybe it’s a little bit cold when you get here and then King Felix gets fired up and pitches a one-hitter through seven innings and you’re on your feet hollerin’ the whole time. Then Seager or Ackley busts things open and the bull pen cleans things up and you’re so high you don’t remember your wind breaker.

Gloves, necklaces, bracelets. Sunglasses. Did you know Seattle sells more sunglasses than pretty much any other city in America? Cause we don’t got enough days of sun in a row to remember where you put your last pair I guess!

There’s a few stuffed animals down here, too. An old chewed-up Mariner’s moose. That one makes me a little bit sad, I can admit. I mean, some kid probably got that when he was here, dragged it back a few times maybe. It became a good luck charm, and then one day the Ms do their usual one-run showing and the kid sets the moose down and doesn’t bother to pick it up. Someone brings it to me. Sits here until, what, 2001 happens again? Probably not.

It’s not a bad job, though. I get to come to most of the home games, get to watch sometimes if I want. Other times I’m down under the concrete, sorting and arranging, taking calls, sending notes up to the box seats. Players lose things too, and I’m in charge of that.  Derek Holland lost his stuff in that game a few years ago, and the Ms got 8 runs off of him. I wrapped it up and put it in the mail for him, and he got it back, eventually.

But one thing they got me doin’, lately, is to hunt around for the Ms mojo. It’s been lost for a while now. They have me searchin’ high and low for it, all over the place. Last season they kept finding it in other ball parks, which is great, but I don’t workin those, I work here. And I just can’t find it. Mariner’s lost again last night, this time to the Twins, which isn’t shameful or anything, but still. Givin’ up 12 runs in two games? No wonder they got me lookin’ for it.

Anyway, that’s what I got on my plate, most of today. The Ms are on the road for a while, Rangers, Astros, Angels. I’m hopin’ I can find something by the time they get back for the As in the middle of May.

Cause you see, I’m not what you’d call jaded. I’m not a cynic. I’ve been around for a long time, and expect to be for a long time still. People talk about “fair weather” fans, and in a place like Seattle where it rains a lot, that metaphor’s got some weight to it. But I don’t judge. Baseball’s for everybody, season ticket holders and once-a-season folks alike. Everybody deserves to find what they’re lookin’ for: a nice day at the ballpark. A win, now and again.

So I’ll keep huntin’, I guess.

Hey, you know what? LoSTANdfound. That’s why they call me Stan! I just thought of that!

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Finding Myself in (Sports) Losses

I worked as a consultant for a $40 billion-a-year company, 12 years, and then they hired me full-time. Less than a year later, I was laid off, and then about 8 months after that, I was brought back as a consultant again. At a better pay rate than before. During that “sabbatical” I worked at a small start-up that made brain-training games. Part of my job was to read brain-blogs all day long, on all sorts of subjects, from biology to psychology to philosophy. By this deeply personal and circuitous route, I bring you to my discovery of “mindfulness,” which has been a pretty hot topic in brain science for a few years now.

The relevance of mindfulness to the above, of course, is being aware that end results are always only the very smallest part of a journey. It’s a more complicated way of suggesting one not sweat the small stuff. So the Mariners lost AGAIN last night. How can mindfulness help me deal with this sports anxiety?

I mean, thinking about it, new-age philosophy and sports fandom go together like peas and chocolate. Indeed, the only place they would ever meet is in the head of a self-indulgent, middle-aged, upper middle class, privileged white male living in Seattle in the new-millennia teens. Nevertheless, here I am.

The Mariners, after 14 games, are five and nine. They have to win four games in a row just to break even. They have to do better than they’ve done, so far, just to be considered mediocre. There’s an irony there. Hard work is supposed to be its own reward, but here’s what I’m finding in all of this: no it’s not.

If the journey is the thing, then the current record doesn’t matter. And we hear this in sports all the time. Athletes will tell you they don’t think about the last game, they only think about the next one. They don’t think about the play-offs, they just think about the next game. And when they’re playing, they only think about the game they’re in.

Turns out, good athletes are expert practitioners of mindfulness. And that’s the reward: not needing a reward. “It isn’t whether you win or lose; it’s how you play the game.” So, ignoring the winning and the losing of my home-town team, how am I playing this game?

All I can do is try to find something in this game I’m playing, this ridiculously close examination of my feelings vis-à-vis the losing record of one of the highest paid teams in baseball. My discovery: mindfulness. Being self-aware. Knowing that I’m darn lucky to even have access to the misery of watching my team lose. Being grateful for my existence.

And laughter— the look on the average fans face if/when I tried to explain all of the above. “Every loss is a gift,” I would say. “So is every beer,” they’d reply. Sounds like a win-win to me.

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