The Brothers K Part 2
July 19, 2010A couple posts back, I mentioned that I had been reading a great book called The Brothers K by David Duncan. There’s a few passages in the book where I was blown away by the author’s grasp of baseball’s inner workings. The first one dealt with catcher’s framing the ball, and this next one deals with a ball player’s thought process.
To set this passage up, the author is trying to describe the impact that his father had when he got a chance to pitch on his minor league team. His dad was older, had no aspirations of moving up to the big leagues, and was more or less playing just for the joy of playing.
Watching Pap have his fun, many of the young players began to have trouble recalling just where their anxieties and personal crises had been located. Their body language would change. They’d begin to make wisecracks and dumb cracks and old-fashioned novocaine-brained baseball chatter. Then as far as Hultz (their manager) or anyone else could tell, they’s stop thinking entirely and just play ball for the pleasure of it — and it is a well known fact that when entire teams stop thinking and start playing for fun, wonderful things happen.
It’s hard to overemphasize the importance of this kind of thought-stopping influence, so let’s consider it from another angle. A pitcher throws a baseball eighty or ninety miles per hour at a hitter standing just twenty yards away. This means the hitter has about the same amount of time to decide what to do with a pitch as a chestnut-backed chickadee needs to take a crap. As any good birder will tell you, this is very little time. Nevertheless, ballplayers spend it in a wide variety of ways. One of the common options, and possibly the worst, is to spend it thinking. In the time it takes a pitch to reach the plate, a really quick-minded hitter can get in as many as five syllables’ worth of baseball thoughts. Here are three typical examples:
1. “Inside…ooops!…strike.”
2. “Change-up…shit!…fastball.”
3. “Fastball…oh damn!…change-up.”
The obvious moral here is that once a pitch is released, there are very few baseball thoughts worth thinking. This is why the preferred option of most good hitters is to spend pitch-to-plate time not thinking at all. “No-Think” is the name Peter gave to his mental state while awaiting a pitch — because a harrowing complication in this option is that even the thought “Don’t think!” is a thought. No-Think means: the ball comes: react. No decision-making, no reasoning. A pure, carefully trained, hopefully inspired reflex is all that’s wanted. And the difficulty of achieving No-Think — the paradoxically effortless effort required to gain access to this realm of pure reflex — is the explanation of virtually all the quirkiest quirks of ballplayers the world over. It’s what leads them to chew the unseemly substances, scratch the unseemly body parts, chant the gibberish, browbeat the Lord, sleep with their bats, pop mystery pills, worship everything from Shiva’s lingam to dead chicken parts, and so on…
So the Tugs’ inexplicable transformation, with Papa on the mound from a bevy of uptight young ballthinkers into a loose team of No-Think ballplayers was no small thing. On the contrary, it was the kind of inexplicable blessing that smart managers will hire, fire, lie, cheat, pray, beg and steal for — because more often than not it leads to a third predictable result: wins.
Alright, hope you got that and it wasn’t too much. It sure rang true to me. Here’s a few more images from the All Star game that rolled in from Michael Zagaris.
Kevin Long, A-Rod, and myself around the cage at the All-Star game.
Michael "Z-Man" Zagaris and I ham it up.
Danny Field and I before the game.
