Before the summer of 2012, I couldn’t have told you jack-crap about the sport of baseball. I had played in rec leagues back in middle school, but never really caught the fever. You can probably imagine I was a little anxious when I was asked to emcee local single-A ball games in front of my whole community.
It was a seriously sweet gig. I signed people up to play games in between innings, orchestrated pre-game events down on the field, and generally ran around having the time of my life performing for an average crowd of 3,000 people. I was never really in it for the sport. Like any good performer, I was in it for the crowd, for the people. However, the people at the ballpark who would most profoundly affect my summer weren’t those in the stands.
I expected to ignore the players on the field, and focus all of my attention on those in the crowd, but instead wound up caring more about how those in the crowd were treating the players down on the field. It only took a few games in the stands for me to realize how quickly sports fans can get so caught up in numbers and analysis, that they sometimes forget those playing the game are human beings.
During my first few days on the mic, I quickly learned that no one shows up to single-A games to see if a team wins or loses. Instead, coaches and fans alike are more focused on how certain individuals are performing. Every single-A team is affiliated with an MLB franchise and if players do well, they move up to double-A, then triple-A, and finally the big time. Today’s lower league rookies are tomorrow’s major league all-stars.
Every time one of the players stepped into the batter’s box, or onto the mound, his numbers were put up onto the big television screen above center field. As soon as those slides were displayed on the jumbo-tron, the crowd would erupt into chatter. Everyone talked like they knew where players had been, and where they were going. I watched and listened as these young men were reduced to digits and decimals.
After I finished helping clean up after the games, I would walk back to my car out behind left field. As I rounded the outfield fence to where my aging Saab was parked, I had to pass by the visiting team’s bus. The opposing team was always sitting around outside on stumps, barricades, or against the outfield fence. Without fail, almost every single one of them would be on their cellphone.
These weren’t happy calls. Hands were attached to foreheads, ardently rubbing temples. Some of them just sat, listened, and stared off into space. Some of them paced up and down the fence, obviously agitated. These weren’t triumphant victors, or the great participants of America’s pastime. These were kids, only a little older than me, who were chasing their dreams on the road, far away from their loved ones. I was always shocked to see the same weary look on everyone’s face regardless of their number of hits or errors.
I’ll never forget the look on Mookie Betts’ face after a game in 2012. Betts was a shortstop that played for the Lowell Spinners, the single-A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox. All of Vermont Red Sox nation showed up to the ballpark when the Spinners came to town to see Betts take the field. He was supposedly their future shortstop, and as such, he was under close scrutiny all night.
Betts had a really solid game. He put up good numbers all night, avoiding errors, and batting well. At the end of the game, Sox fans left the park satisfied. But, when I got out to the back of the park to leave, Betts didn’t look like a future MLB shortstop. He looked more like what he really was: a 20-year-old kid from Tennessee, trying to make his dreams come true far away from his home and his family. Accordingly, he was posted up next to the stadium pylon, on his phone.
Sports are supposed to be an escape. They’re supposed to make things simple. One team wins, and one team loses. A player’s value in such a context is based solely off of his performance on the field. Sure, sometimes we peek into the private lives of major athletes, but usually it’s through the lens of reality TV, or advertising. In the minds of the masses, athletes are moneymaking machines who take home more in a year than a small underdeveloped nation’s GDP. That’s not to say those guys don’t exist, but for every one of them, 40 more are fighting the reality that they’ve got a set amount of time they’re relevant to their profession, and that those in their profession are really only relevant for their stats, not their stories.
What I got to see in those moments behind left field late at night, after the fans had left and the jumbo-tron turned off, was that there were no winners or losers. There were only people just trying to get by one of the only ways they knew how.
