Saturday, March 12, 2022

Quote of the Day (Harvey Dorfman, on a Case Study of Baseball as a State of Mind)

“Certain guys don’t need my help. Rickey [Henderson] has rocks in his head. You can’t mess with his approach.”— Baseball psychologist Harvey Dorfman (1935-2011), quoted in Karl Taro-Greenfield, “Stay in the Moment (With Doctor Baseball),”Men’s Journal, February 2009

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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