Away From The Lights, Humanity

The first thing I noticed was how big they were. I’m not a short person—5-foot-11 on a good day, 5-foot-10 on a bad one—but I felt small as Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, and Clayton Richard pushed past me, carrying with them styrofoam plates of food, joking with one another as they headed to tables scattered throughout the clubhouse. Baseball players are big men, and they’re strong, and you notice their presence even when they’re on the other side of the room. Even Trevor Cahill, who, with all due respect, doesn’t look particularly athletic when you see him on television, has a certain physicality that comes through when you’re standing right next to him.

The second thing I noticed was stupid. It’s so obvious that even thinking the thought makes you want to go full Homer Simpson and D’oh! yourself right in the face. It’s the kind of thing you know, looking back, that you were aware of for years but never considered fully. And it’s this: baseball players are just people, too. And they’re doing a very hard, very physical thing day after day. It hit me first while I was talking with David Ross, next to his locker at the base of the small flight of stairs that leads from the clubhouse to the main concourse. Ross was changing into his workout clothes as he spoke to me, and between my question and his answer stripped off his “K for Cancer” t-shirt to reveal a torso covered in dark yellow bruises.

I don’t know if I paid full attention to the answer. I know I’m glad I was recording the interview on my phone, because I can’t remember a word Ross said. I was fixated on those bruises. Don’t let anyone tell you that baseball isn’t a physical game, that it doesn’t hurt—really hurt—when you slide into second, or when you crash past the catcher at home plate. Don’t let them tell you that crouching behind the plate doesn’t take a real physical toll on you every day, or that a foul ball off the shin only hurts for the few moments you, the viewer, see the player shake it off and limp to first. Don’t let them tell you that, because that shin is going to sting and bruise for days, and only when the player unwraps their leg in the clubhouse will the full physical toll of the game show.

It’s a hard mental game, too. Rizzo, Bryant, and Richard were joking. But others were quiet: Javier Baez, with the weight of his whole world on him, and a season of hoped-for redemption still yet to fully come, methodically went about his business at his locker. Quintin Berry, who has just one job on this team—to run fast from first to second—was left by himself, head in hands, to contemplate his inability to do so against the Cardinals on Sunday. And Jonathan Herrera, who is fast losing his place on the team to other, later entrants, carried himself with the air of a man who knows that events have already passed him by.

Even the players whose roles on the team are still, for now, secure, pay the mental price. I watched Kyle Hendricks talking to my colleague Sahadev Sharma about the adjustments he was trying to make in his pitching mechanics, and while his words were clear and his voice steady as his right hand traced the motions he was trying to achieve, I was watching his left hand: it was behind his back, fingers rubbing together frenetically as it twitched with a nervous energy. His right hand was confident—that’s the face we see on television—but his left hand carried with it the knowledge that failure to deliver on his promises might mean that his career wouldn’t move forward. That left hand told me a lot.

To be fair, I could be reading these dynamics all wrong. I’m only guessing here, and the simple observation that players are human allows equally for the behavior I observed to be the product of the quotidian and the mundane. In Berry’s case, his posture could be the result of that caught stealing, yes, but it could also be due to a frustrating conversation with a loved one, or a particularly disagreeable burrito. Baez could be worried about his season, of course, but also about getting an Uber home at something less than surge prices. And Hendricks might have been nervous about his pitching, or about seeing an old college flame in the stands later on. I don’t know. It could be those things, it could be baseball, or it could be nothing.

If it is baseball—as I’m sure it often is—it’s worth remembering that the game hands out heavy burdens to bear, and they’re carried in this game every day by men who we are all too happy to see as pixels on a screen or words on a page. We read their numbers on our computers, watch their triumphs and devastations on our televisions, and think we know them. I learned in the clubhouse that we don’t know them at all. Baseball is a hard game, and these men are playing it at the highest level, while still burdened with all the flaws and sins that each of us shares as consequence of our common humanity. I learned a lot of things about baseball during my two days in the Cubs’ clubhouse this week, but the lesson that will stick with me is the simple one: baseball players are people, too. Let us forgive them their sins on the field, for their humanity is on greatest display only outside the lines.

Lead photo courtesy Caylor Arnold—USA Today Sports.