For a Minute There I Lost Myself--Part II

But after the game most of the team went to a bar and drank for a little while. I was getting picked on for liking Genny from every direction, a discussion of the game began and from there conversation was all around.

I was in the corner talking to one of the quieter players and we somehow fell onto the topic of Ted Williams having been the last .400 hitter; how he willingly played on the last day of the year and went 6 for 8; and all the guys who have since come close but still just didn’t quite hit .400.

Ted Williams himself hit .388 in 1957.

But as the conversation finally came to pass, I sat back and noticed how nice the moment was, how content everyone felt in that small bar, and how freely the 9-5’ers—both workers and those who worked for themselves—were buying pitchers of beers for everyone. Maybe it was the beer I had drank, or maybe it was the overwhelming argument in the moment itself, but for a minute there I thought I understood why people are willing to work their whole lives, and it was for moments like these.

Rod Carew hit .388 in 1977

And in that moment, like moments that often come to me, I thought maybe it wasn’t so bad. After all, everyone was in the same ship: safety in numbers, right? And that work let moments like this happen: it’s the little things, right?

George Brett hit .390 in 1980

For so long I grew up almost instinctively believing that I would go to college, graduate, get a good job with good pay and that would be that; that was the pay off and that was all that was needed. And in thinking that so long, no matter how strenuously I now claim to believe the opposite, there still is a long process of deprogramming filled with constant second-guessing that I always find myself going through in my pursuit of my idea of doing nothing.

That Tony Gwynn hit .394 in 1994 wasn’t mentioned, probably because it was a strike-shortened season.

But the belief is easy. It’s the action that is that hardest. And in seeing those guys—great guys—enjoying themselves, it seemed so easy, even worthwhile to do. I fell back to short daydreams of going back to school to get a degree to become a professor or anything else that would provide stability and good pay: by no means is my determination never distracted, sidetracked or second-guessed. Far too easily we fall back on our conditioning and I still have yet to overcome that completely.

Then the fact that Ted Williams also won two triple crowns was mentioned (and that he didn’t win MVP in either of those seasons) and talk went onto the previous winners of that.

But I eventually did come to my senses and knew that if the price of those moments was a life time of work the price was too high because those moments can be experienced without the work, without the money. I was there in that moment too. Was it just as a mooch or as an equal, if not in money being spent, but in the more valuable (and perhaps rarer?) commodity of friendship?

Joe Medwick was the last to win in the NL in 1937.

Experience and the emotions that come from it are free. The pay off isn’t the paycheck or the things you can pay for, it’s the play in the moments themselves. Even if I don’t go on a bike ride and take a million pictures everyday; if I don’t finish at least a book a week; if I don’t make four posts a day on this page; if all I have to show for my day is a few hours on the porch laughing with friends—and, oh yeah, I still haven’t started drawing again—watching a baseball game, or anything best experienced rather than described and recreated in some creative way, that is enough to show for the day. And since I from time to time find myself bummed out if I don't accomplish all these things I must continue to strive to remain confident in that belief and do away with any doubts effortlessly.

Frank Robinson won it in 1966.

But because doing something even slightly different requires dealing with a certain level of difficulty—and because we are encouraged to be like water and follow the easiest path—such doubts and second-guessing thoughts are always close by.

Then Carl Yastrzemski, who was the last to win it, did it the following year in 1967.

And in that, I remembered a passage from Woody Guthrie’s Bound For Glory:

“…so you lie, you lie to your ownself, and you say ‘Everybody else in the whole world is all haywire, all wrong, I hate their pretty world, because I can’t find a hole to break into it!’ and every breath you’re a liar. Maybe a good guy, and maybe I love you, but still a liar.” She put her face on my shoulder….
“Yeah. I know. I am a liar. I know th’ real things I’m a-lookin’ fer. Workin’. makin’ money. Building’ up something’. Little house with ever’thing in it. An’ you there. I knew what I wanted. But I couldn’t have none of it if I didn’t find my work. I wanted ta pick out my own kinda work. I’ll work like a Goddam dog, but I aim ta pick out my work...so I been a-lyin’ at my own self now fer a good long time, sayin’ I didn’t want no little house an’ all that.”

And I thought how, while I was no different from anybody in that it was these moments like sitting in a bar and talking baseball that I wanted too; that I wasn’t against the people I was sharing them with or even the way they went about to having them, I was still determined to go about having them in my own ways too.

Then the following year he hit .301, the lowest average ever to win the batting title.

Even if that means having nothing more than an enjoyable conversation about otherwise meaningless and impersonal baseball stats I have somehow retained in my memory.