Men at Work by George F. Will

Author:George F. Will [Will, George F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

After Lee Smith, the big relief pitcher who had many successful seasons with the Cubs, won his first game for the Red Sox, he gave credit to a little boy in the bleachers. Smith said that as he was leaving the bull pen a boy about seven years old leaned over the rail and shouted, “Lee, stay within yourself.” Smith said that was the secret of his success that day. Does that seem implausible? Not to me it doesn’t. Any properly raised American child would have said the same thing. “Stay within yourself” is baseball’s first commandment. It means: Do not try to do things that strain your capacities and distort the smooth working of your parts—what players call “mechanics.” Polonius could have been a baseball coach. Of all his bromides, “To thine own self be true” is the most memorable. It means what baseball players mean when they mutter to themselves “stay within yourself.” Players, at least at the major league level, are severe realists about themselves. They have been playing this difficult game for so long—even the 22-year-olds have—that they know there are players better than they are. Or, to be precise, they know there are many players who can do many things better than they can. Baseball has many roles, plays, skills and situations. Major league players know that they have mastered enough of them, often barely enough of them, to be in the major leagues for a while. They know what they can do and what they can not. To “stay within yourself” is to keep your balance. A player’s reach should not exceed his grasp.

But at one point in his career Gwynn was tempted to overreach. When after his sensational 1987 season he finished only eighth in the National League MVP voting, he succumbed, if only briefly, to bitter thoughts. He began to think that in order to get the respect that any artist worth his salt craves, he would have to truckle to contemporary prejudices and vulgar tastes—he would have to start hitting home runs. (It was either that or tow San Diego around the Cape of Good Hope and tether it to Manhattan, where the media might notice him.) In fact, he could become much more of a power hitter by changing his stroke. He has the strength to hit for distance, and other players have made mid-career changes in the way they swing.

When Kirk Gibson went from the Tigers to the Dodgers in 1988, he shortened his swing slightly, making it more compact and quicker. He knew he was going to see more fastballs in his new league. This is in part because it is a league with parks that reward a running game, and the quicker the pitcher gets the ball to the catcher, the quicker the catcher can get it on its way to second base. But the large number of fastballs in the National League also has something to do with the fact that by 1988 that league’s umpires had produced a strike zone even smaller than the one in the American League.

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