MLB: Just Like We Are, Ballplayers Are Mortal Human Beings, Too
As fans of baseball, actually being a part of “The Show” is something that probably fascinates most of us. Many of us may even have had dreams of becoming an MLB player. But behind what we see is often a world filled with uncertainty, failure and regret… just like the one you and I live in.
We have a tendency to forget sometimes that the men who play this game are mortal just as all of us are. And to emphasize that, we only have to look at the sudden passing of a 24-year-old pitching star in Miami.
Ballplayers have feelings, desires, and regrets just as we all do. The only difference though is that they operate in a bubble that is sometimes called the “public eye.”
So it becomes somewhat shocking when a major league ballplayer suddenly looks human. Wilmer Flores taught us that last year when he was “caught” crying on the field. The story immediately became a national sensation and Flores himself became a folk hero for Mets fans who “adopted” him as their son.
Wilmer Flores cried because he believed at the moment that his life was being turned upside down, and that he had been uprooted from the Mets and was being sent off to Milwaukee. Milwaukee? And you can just imagine this kid from Valentia, Venezuela wondering to himself, “Where in the hell is Milwaukee?” So heck yeah, he was crying.
Hollywood has stepped in, too. The scene from “A League of Their Own” where Tom Hanks tells his women’s team, “There’s no crying in baseball” is indicative of how we view these players. Clearly, the message is that sissies don’t play in the majors. Just go out there and play ball!
The fallacy that ballplayers are superhuman and robotic automatons who show up for work every day, make a ton of money playing a boy’s game, and don’t have a care in the world is a fantasy.
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Unfortunately, though, that fantasy is reinforced daily when we watch Mike Trout leap tall walls in a single bound to rob a hitter of a home run time and time again. It’s like the “if it walks like a duck and it talks like a duck, then it is a duck” thing. He looks superhuman, so therefore he is.
In the same way, when Darryl Strawberry, who had his own set of drug-related issues, calls out his friend Doc Gooden for being a “complete junkie addict”, we are reminded of the fact that ballplayers are not immune to the issues that millions of Americans deal with every day.
The only difference, though, is that in the case of a major league ballplayer, we tend to think, “Come on, man, with all that you have at your fingertips, you need drugs?” And the other difference of course is that their problems get played out in big headlines on the back pages of newspapers.
How often do we think about major leaguers suffering from a mental illness? Do we even realize, for example, that Zach Greinke struggles with a case of social anxiety disorder. Add Josh Hamilton, who was recently released by the Texas Rangers, and Dontrelle Willis, whose career seemed to have evaporated overnight and was forced to retire, to that list as well.
Next: Tragic Deaths That Shocked Baseball
Just as we do every day, Jose Fernandez woke up on the morning of his death with a whole list of “to dos,” and some of them probably never got done. And his death grabbed our attention as it should have. But his passing comes in the same year as the deaths of lesser known players like Choo Choo Coleman, Mike Brumley, and Virgil Jester (see the full list here).
And they all played the game. Just like you and me.