Like many American males, I’ve spent a lot of my life wishing I could be a baseball player. Some of my earliest memories include swinging a red plastic bat at a rubber ball in my front yard, pretending to be Rico Petrocelli. I was lucky enough to be able to play in organized leagues until I was 16, and even luckier to have my only really good year at age 14 (when it meant a lot more to me). My success at that age probably can be attributed more to my having reached my full adult size earlier than many kids than to any innate talent for baseball.
For that short time, I lived and loved what I imagined the life of a baseball player to be: sleeping in, getting to the ballpark in late afternoon, taking batting practice and infield, playing the game, coming home and peeling off my sweat-drenched uniform, showering and going to bed, and then getting up and doing it all over again. This really only lasted for one summer, and pretty quickly I went from being one of the bigger kids on the field to being one of the smaller ones. Shortly thereafter, my baseball dreams were over.
For a while, I didn’t think as much about baseball. Other things piqued my interest. As I once heard Bruce Springsteen describe it –when you’re standing in right field and you find yourself more interested in the girl walking by the ball field than the batter at home plate, it’s time to move on from baseball.
But as I began and progressed in my professional career, I took new notice of baseball players.Virtually every profession boils down to decision-making, and your success in your profession depends on your ability to make good decisions on the fly. Baseball is no different, except for the prodigious physical gifts that are required to turn decisions made into meaningful outcomes.
If you’ve ever heard Tony Gwynn talk about what’s going on in his mind during a hit-and-run, you have some idea of what I’m talking about. Gwynn was a physical freak in terms of vision and bat control, but he also was a great thinker about his craft. And so, once more, as a young professional, I found myself envying baseball players, albeit in a different way. The best ones were really good at their jobs; their craft; their profession. Heaven forbid my job performance should ever be measured by a standard as unforgiving as VORP.
Finally, this week, my baseball player envy took a new turn. I was listening to an interview with long-time Atlanta Braves third baseman, Chipper Jones, who has announced that this year will be his last year in the major leagues. During the interview, Jones explained that he had been playing baseball professionally for 23 years, had kids in middle school, and had decided that, after this year, it would be time to focus more on his family.
That really did it for me. Forget about the joy of the game, or honing your skills to the point where you can hit a 2-0 slider to any part of the ballpark, I want the retirement gig that baseball players have. You work hard developing your skills, give it all you have for 20 years or so, and then you get to take a break to watch your kids grow up, and if you want, you can take a crack at a second career. That’s the really great part of the deal.
Forget about the chance to come to the plate with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 9th in the seventh game of the World Series, I don't want to be Chipper Jones the ballplayer; I want to be Chipper Jones the retired ballplayer. And I’d take the spot without the money.
Most of us complete our educations and, with a little luck, head off to work doing something for which we have a lot of enthusiasm, some talent, and the desire to develop our professional skills. But why should that work be the only thing we get to do with our lives? After 23 years or so, shouldn’t we actually want to try something else? All I know is that I’m with Chipper Jones on this one.
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