Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Baseball for a job

Thought this was a good article on ESPN, that talks about as athletes get to do something we all love for a living, it still is a job. This is my 5th year of working as a baseball player, and technically if you count college where we get scholarship money to play baseball, it's also kind of like a full-time job as well. I also feel like with all the time spent in high school, devoted to practicing, playing, traveling, everything for baseball... at some point you can lose the "child's like fun for the sport" and it really takes on the feeling of a "job." It's good to remind oneself that it is a child's game, more than just a job, but also how lucky I am to be able to "work" at something I love to do....

For love, for money

When do the games we loved playing as children become jobs?

MacGregorBy Jeff MacGregor
ESPN.com
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The thing about a big league batting cage an hour before a 1:05 Sunday start is that everyone within 100 feet of you looks hungover. Everyone. Puffy, sour-mouthed, red-eyed. A little rueful. Under that harsh midday light, sharp contact is as likely to bring a wince as a smile. Players, coaches, cops, reporters. Even the children leaning over the dugout for an autograph could use a shave and some Visine.

[+] EnlargeEli Manning
AP Photo/Bill KostrounMaybe games become a job when there's nobody from the coaching staff watching, like when Giants QB Eli Manning, left, and WR Samuel Giguere practiced recently.

I came to the stadium to answer a question: What happens when your play becomes your work? When a game becomes your job?

My bosses and I had been put in mind of all this by the NFL draft. What happens to these young men? What does it mean to make a profession of your passion? So a couple of weekends ago I tried to get uptown for that big NFL job fair at Radio City Music Hall. But I was already booked solid and with one thing and another by the time I got past the stage door all I could find were some of the shorter Rockettes, a leaguewide lockout and an abandoned office chair bearing a set of deep impressions from Mel Kiper's sit bones.

So I rode on up to Yankee Stadium instead.

As most Americans do, I'm going to use the words "job" and "work" interchangeably. And the truth of work it seems to me is that a few of us work at jobs we love and a few of us work at jobs we truly hate, but most of us work our adult lives away at jobs we bear with goodness or patience or humor or something approaching grace. The work itself is not what drags us out of bed day after day and year after year. Rather, we do what we must to feed and shelter ourselves and to make a safe, happy life for our families. The job is only what it is -- an income, a revenue stream, a sufferable means to a much better and more important end.

Even then, in ways large and small, as Americans, our work defines us. (Lately, sadly the loss of our work defines us, too.)

For some very lucky few, though -- and I count myself one of them -- a living can be made from a passion. From a talent or a preference or an inclination. From a gift. From a calling.

Poets and painters and nose tackles are lucky in this way, as are actors and lyric tenors and shortstops. It is a privilege to make your way in the world doing the thing you were born to do. And this is as true at 6-foot-5, 325 pounds with a 4.6 40 as it is for Yo-Yo Ma at 5-10, maybe 150 with Bach's "Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello."

For further, very much smarter, thoughts on work and working and America, I send the reader first to Philip Levine and his poem "What Work Is" …

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is -- If you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is …

… then on to Chicago's late Emersonian spirit daddy and recorder of the ordinary, Studs Terkel, and his genius book of oral history, "Working."

[+] EnlargeBriefcase drill team
AP Photo/Charles SykesOccasionally, as with the Fred Hill Briefcase Drill Team, the trappings of work are actually used for play.

In fact, the greater arc of American literature from Nathaniel Hawthorne forward is taken up by work and how we shape it and how it shapes us in turn. Bartleby or Gatsby, we're all about the cost of getting and spending; the price of setting our price. Because weirdly, while everyone in America wants to have a lot of money, nobody wants to be thought of as "rich." We hate the rich. Thus the modern American novel is often enough a tale of our classless class struggle, and a kind of long-form job description.

And just now I look up to see Derek Jeteron the big screen describing his: "Our job is to come out here and try to win a championship." Which is altogether harder than it looks or sounds, I imagine. Because I know too well how hard it is to be any good at anything, even the thing you're meant for, and to suffer the whims and disappearances of inspiration. Sometimes all you have is craft or practice to fall back on, and even then, you stink. Oh man, you just stink. Slumped, at your worst, the only reason to show up is pride. Or the fear you'll lose the paycheck.

Maybe that's when your calling becomes your job, when you gut out a slump. When the love goes out of it altogether and you discover that punching the clock means the clock can punch back.

There's Joba Chamberlain signing autographs for those dugout kids, and that's part of his job too: the glad-handing and baby kissing and front-of-the-house public relations. Every kid looks to be in a kind of ecstatic daze. They might remember this day forever. Joba, though, wears the expression of a man operating an industrial press, or of the shift manager at a Mumbai call center. He's at work.

In the cage, Toronto's Jose Bautista, grim-faced and unshaven and briefly leading the league in every category, is spanking the ball as if it had stolen from him.

Up in the press box Paul O'Neill, 48, heart of the heart of the Yankees in the golden '90s, readies himself for his work as a commentator. He is still tall and fit and earnest, clean-shaven above a wide full-Windsor knot, and looks you in the eye when you ask him when the game becomes a job.

[+] EnlargePatrick Peterson
Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesPatrick Peterson, the Cardinals' first-round pick, sports the uniform of a more traditional job.

"You never lose the passion for competing. It starts at 5 years old and doesn't end until you retire. The 'work' part of it comes in rookie ball, I think, your first year, playing every single day, the long bus rides, the bad hotels. Seeing that you don't succeed every time. That disappointment day in and day out is what becomes work."

So maybe that's the moment it turns into a job, in the instant when your fantasy collides with your reality.

Down in the dugout, Kyle Drabek of the Blue Jays will tell you likewise. The 23-year-old son of Cy Young winner Doug Drabek has a smile on him like the Mayor of Baseball, even though the day before he'd been wild and shelled and pulled in the third.

"Pitching's been my job since high school," he says, "but it sure felt like work yesterday."

Then he laughed and jogged up the tunnel to the clubhouse.

It was such a beautiful day. I wanted to stay for the game. But I had to work.

Jeff MacGregor is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. You can email him at jeff_macgregor@hotmail.com, or follow his Twitter.com feed @MacGregorESPN.

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