Thursday’s announced settlement of an end to the
second-longest work stoppage in major-league baseball history helped owners and
players avert a near-catastrophe that would have been entirely avoidable and
due to their own greed.
The two sides treated the sport as a business. The
players forgot—and the owners never learned—what fans could have told them long
ago: America’s Pastime is an act of faith, a belief that, in an oasis of grass
within the confines of a city, participants and onlookers could briefly return
to Eden.
That is why Susan Sarandon’s superfan Annie Savoy hailed
“The Church of Baseball” in the opening monologue of the 1988 rom-com, Bull
Durham. Like the church that so many traditionalists like me continue to
belong to, the Church of Baseball sorely tested our faith over the last 99 days
of the lockout.
But now, fans can once again escape from the problems
of the world, and ask ourselves, as we wonder how a handsomely compensated
player can strike out, misplay a base in the field, or simply do something
staggeringly stupid: “What was he thinking?”
Which brings me to today’s quote—hilarious and true—by
Harvey Dorfman. I came across a Men’s Journal profile of this
late “sports psychologist” in the last few weeks, and knew that I would use it
the first chance I had.
So maybe the end of the lockout is a flimsy excuse for
the quote, particularly since its subject, Rickey Henderson, has not
only been out of the major leagues since 2003, but will be eligible for Social
Security in just a few years.
Nevertheless, this first-ballot Hall of Famer is a
useful stand-in for the kind of grand eccentrics who made Bull Durham so
enjoyable, as well as for so many of today’s players.
Dorfman’s comment struck right at the heart of how so
many of us, watching Henderson play for nine big-league teams in 25 seasons,
could shake our heads at this awesome combination of speed and power and question
why, often in the same game, he could be wonderful and woolly-minded.
A relative of mine saw that latter quality firsthand
when he took his young son to a game played by the Newark Bears, a now-defunct
minor-league baseball team that the 44-year-old Henderson had joined, for a
mere $3,000 a month, in 2003, in the hope that it would be his springboard back
to “The Show.”
So, at this one game, all the Bears starting nine had taken up their positions and were listening as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played just before the start of the
contest—except for one. Then suddenly, from the
Bears dugout, a player came out sprinting, frantically trying to tuck in his
shirt and button his pants as he made for the vacant left-field corner. It was Henderson.
My relative didn’t ask what had been keeping the
player. He merely laughed, “Typical Rickey!”
Over the years, many watchers of the game would agree
with my brother—and with Dorfman’s observation that Henderson had “rocks in his
head.”
The stories about Rickey’s ego, moodiness, and
zaniness (recounted in Jacob Thompson’s hysterical “Bleacher Report” post from 2009) are almost as numerous as those associated with Yogi Berra, and
as with the great Yankee catcher you have to wonder how many are true. (For
instance, did he really ask a teammate how long it would take him to
drive to the Dominican Republic?)
And yet, there’s a reason why Rickey’s had a plaque in
Cooperstown since 2009.
You don’t get to being universally described as the
greatest leadoff hitter in baseball history without a commitment to maintaining
your physique well into your 40s, without believing that your opponents were
powerless to stop you from stealing or taking an extra base, without loving the
game so much that you were still willing to trudge through a couple of seasons
in Podunk towns in independent leagues when your calls were no longer being returned
at the big-league level.
Dorfman, hired as a “mental-training consultant” for
the Oakland A’s in 1984, worked with the likes of Dave Stewart, Dennis Eckersley,
Bob Welch, Rick Honeycutt, Mark McGwire, and Jose Canseco but not with
Henderson, still on the team at that point. That surely accounted for much of the consultant's sarcasm in the quote I’ve used today.
But Dorfman’s remark also revealed a grudging respect for the outfielder.
The speedster—who had already eclipsed Lou Brock’s
single-season record for stolen bases—may have been unorthodox, even plain nuts
at times. But he believed unconditionally in himself. You also couldn’t mess
with his approach, because it worked.
Dorfman—a former teacher and freelance baseball
writer—went on to work with a number of other famous players throughout his
career, including Greg Maddux, Roy Halladay, Jamie Moyer, Carlos Pena, and Raul
Ibanez.
In both his influential books (e.g., The Mental
Game of Baseball) and one-on-one counseling sessions with players, he was
nothing like the comic, bow tie-wearing shrink who tells the slumping New York
Knights in the Robert Redford film The Natural, “Losing is a disease, as
contagious as polio … as contagious as bubonic plague, attacking one but
infecting all.”
Instead, Dorfman, believing that distractions lay at
the heart of the nervous big-league players felt in big moments, got those who sought his advice to concentrate on the basics.
It sounds simple, but it meant, as Taro-Greenfield
summed it up in his profile, that Dorfman had to “meld the then-fashionable
ideas of visualization and actualization, of human growth and potential, some
aspects of the various Zen-as-sports and Tao-of-sports ideas that were swirling
around, with baseball.”
In other words, by learning the skills of a synthesizer
and proselytizer, he became the consummate baseball whisperer, the sport’s guru
of high-performance consciousness.
One of Dorfman’s clients, according to the Men’s
Journal piece, was Alex Rodriguez. This must have been one of the greatest
challenges of the consultant’s career, for the slugger was so insecure that The
Onion cracked, at the height of the 2006 American League East race,
that the Yankee had been “placed on the 15-day emotionally disabled list.”
You could almost imagine the thoughts that could flood
A-Rod’s mind when he came to bat at a key moment in the game: Why did my father
leave our family? Why did Cynthia have to go and take our two girls with her?
Why does Derek Jeter hate me? Why didn’t that blonde in the bar last night
think I was hotter than Jeter? Why did Jose Canseco write all that nasty stuff
about me in “Vindicated”? Why doesn’t Cousin Yuri get here sooner with those ‘roids?
Why does nobody like me?
We all know by now how juiced A-Rod was. But, with all
the stuff racing through his head, it was a wonder that he got to the plate at
all, let alone that he hit so many home runs.
Though Dorfman never spilled the bean on his clients, I
can’t help but think that A-Rod benefited from their sessions—and might never
have been tempted to go to those performance-enhancing drugs if he had only used
Dorfman’s services even more.
Baseball is so much about belief in one’s self. A-Rod,
with all his physical gifts and keen analysis of the game, didn’t have it. Henderson,
with all those “rocks in his head,” did. Let's see who else has it this season.
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