Baseball players aren’t bad people. Tony Gwynn is probably my favorite person—not athlete, but person—in all the years I’ve spent in sports. But in general, baseball players are some of the most difficult and brittle athletes I’ve come across. They’re different from guys in other sports. They exist in an insular world that revolves around a series of individual battles, and it’s inevitable that some of that will seep into the personalities of its players.
Look at the trends. Domestically, baseball is becoming less and less of a high school sport. There are very few successful urban initiatives in baseball. The best players in this country are being produced by travel baseball programs, where parents and kids travel all over the country to play game after game in front of scouts and college coaches and other parents. It’s expensive, and it’s a closed society. Nobody outside of it cares about it, or even knows it’s happening. Kids used to play ball with other kids in their neighborhood, but now a growing number of them play on teams that draw players from a huge region. There’s very little camaraderie in that world, since every parent and every kid is chasing either a scholarship or a spot in the major-league draft. They’re always looking over their shoulders wondering who’s watching them and who’s gaining on them. Some of the fiercest competition comes from within the team.
As this system has flourished, it’s no surprise that baseball in the United States has become a wealthy, white suburban sport. It’s women’s soccer in spikes.
Nearly every kid in this country follows the same path: from travel baseball to either college baseball or the minor leagues. College baseball is almost uniformly white, a direct extension of the suburban travel-ball programs. Minor league baseball is as insular a world as exists in professional sports. Players hang out together, but they hang with their own kind. White American players hang out together, Latin players hang out together, Asian players hang out together.
In the major leagues, nothing really changes. It’s very cliquey in a big league clubhouse. There are language barriers, so some of the cliqueishness is understandable. But there’s also something inherent in the nature of the game that tends to create a certain type of personality: a series of individual battles.
Players are given remarkable freedom once they’ve established where they fit into the hierarchy. It would be outrageous—utterly unthinkable—for a manager to ask Josh Hamilton to bunt. Hamilton is a power hitter, and power hitters don’t bunt regardless of the situation. It could be the most obvious bunting situation, a spot where bunting is by far the smartest option to help the team, and it still wouldn’t happen. Same holds true for Albert Pujols, Adam Dunn, Miguel Cabrera, Robinson Cano. It’s simply out of the question.
It’s a year-round sport, which makes it extremely difficult for professional players to further their education. They go from year-round travel baseball in high school to year-round minor-league baseball, where they’re around only other baseball players, to major-league baseball, where it’s a clique-y sport centered on individual battles.
What’s the opposite of this? Take a look at football. The recruiting is done through the high schools. There is no such thing as travel football for high school kids. High school football is often the most galvanizing element of a high school community. The student body, cheerleaders, band—it’s truly a communal event. The competition is team vs. team, city vs. city, region vs. region. There’s a huge amount of collective pride involved. Football players are a part of that greater community, and they are more likely to play another sport than baseball players who have devoted themselves to a year-round, singular pursuit.
Football is not the year-round sport baseball has become, which puts football players into contact with more people—parents, coaches, teammates—with different interests and personalities. When they get to college, football players once again become part of a diverse student body. Their games, once again, are communal. Pride in your school—something greater than you—is often a bigger deal than it was in high school.
And look at education: by rule, football players have to take classes for a minimum of three years. Even if they’re not scholars, they’re still exposed to renowned professors and supersmart peers and levels of thought they wouldn’t have achieved on their own. Even in the biggest football factory they’re receiving some semblance of an education. They’re not just playing Xbox in an apartment in some podunk minor-league town with guys who come from the same upper-middle-class suburban background and play a sport whose schedule makes it nearly impossible to further an education in the off-season.
An NFL locker room is home to a high percentage of college graduates. A professional football player is, in general, more worldly and media savvy and well rounded than a major-league baseball player. It’s not necessarily a criticism; these are simply characteristics that are bred into the culture of the respective sports.
As of 2012, just 4.3 percent of baseball’s nine hundred major-leaguers had a college degree. It’s the lowest of any major sport, and it absolutely has to have an impact on the people who play the game.
There are differences intrinsic to the game as well. Football is not an individual sport. It’s a choreographed sport. Snap counts, audibles—I depend on you for my safety on a set of specific rules based on teamwork. Think about that: it’s an awesome responsibility.
Unlike baseball, where it’s outrageous to take the bat out of the hands of Pujols, football is filled with situations where the individual is suppressed for the sake of the team. Peyton Manning, arguably the best quarterback of a generation, is told at the end of the divisional playoff game against Baltimore in 2012, You will take a knee and not throw a pass.
What does the football paradigm create? Humility.
Let’s compare the two:
Baseball is played by suburban and rural young men who are less educated, living in an insular world, driven by individual battles. The insularity of that world is obvious every time an outsider attempts to gain access. Unless you played baseball or cover it for a living, the “outsider” is treated like an alien. There is very little patience for the newcomer. Oh, and one other thing: once a player gets to the big leagues, his contract is guaranteed. There’s a certain level of invincibility that comes with that kind of security.
Football, on the other hand, is played by young men who are from all walks—suburban, rural, urban. It’s not insular; it’s broad based. They come up being part of a campus, a member of a diverse and open community. They play a choreographed sport based on efficiency and teamwork. Their contracts are not guaranteed, and they can be cut at any time.
As a football player, you have less freedom. You have an assignment, and your job is to do your assignment and your assignment only. You are scolded if you go out of your lane or miss an assignment. Despite the stereotype of the football player as a big, muscle-bound aggressive beast, I find football players very easy to deal with. They’re humbled constantly. Their careers are cut short by injuries all the time; the threat is like the sword of Damocles hanging over their every move.
It seems counterintuitive to suggest that athletes whose careers depend on violence are the more civil species, especially in light of the Aaron Hernandez situation. However, I find people whose livelihoods are associated with violence—from football players to police officers to paratroopers—tend to be more humble. They need other people for their safety, and that one sentence—I depend on you—is strong medicine.
Nothing against baseball players—they just don’t exist in the same hypercharged environment. Their world is more insulated and bound by tradition and custom. They can’t help themselves; they’re made that way.
Luck, Meet Genius
Take a look at the biggest guy in the room. He’s about 6 foot 5 inches and 240, which gives off an intimidating scent. But does big always equal tough? For all we know, he could have just inherited really good DNA from his large, muscular Norwegian father. He could be deathly afraid of carpenter ants. He could bawl his eyes out at C
eline Dion concerts. He could have less courage than your average senator. You see his size as an advantage in life. He could see it as a curse.
Which is another way of saying this: sometimes you get the benefit of the doubt in life, even when you don’t deserve it.
It just so happens that I have something in common with the biggest guy in the room. In my case, the perceived advantage concerns sports gambling. I don’t know where my aura comes from, but it’s there. Maybe it’s because I lived in Las Vegas for seven years. Maybe it’s because I once rubbed out a guy who gave me lousy information on a Lions game. Or maybe it’s because I set some sort of world record for correctly picking NFL games in 2012. Whatever the case, there are some people out there who think I really know my stuff.
The truth is … no, wait. Let me back up for a minute. The partial truth is that I was pretty freaking amazing with my NFL picks last year. However, the larger truth is this: beyond me being amazing, there was some blind luck involved.
I have some advantages. I have a little better access to former players and coaches than you do. I might get a slight edge by using tidbits of information gleaned organically throughout the week, scouring some free scouting report services offered by ESPN and other media outlets, and monitoring a handful of different betting services. I also bet without an ounce of emotion or loyalty. So yeah—those factors might provide an edge.
A slight edge. Slight as in “I’m slightly better than your cousin Larry ‘The Velvet Touch’ Lassaro but probably not as good as Larry’s good friend, Tony ‘The Golden Retirement Plan’ Valdosetti.”
Here’s all you need to know about betting on professional football games: if you asked the actual head coaches, the guys who have built game plans all week and slaved over game tape with their assistants, they’d tell you they couldn’t and wouldn’t regularly pick winners against the spread. How do I know this? Easy—I’ve paid attention to the former coaches who broadcast games. They watch tape all the time. They get inside juice from their buddies who are still coaching.
And these guys—these smart guys who know the game and have inside information—couldn’t pick out drapes to match a couch.
It is nothing more than educated guesswork. Any wise guy will tell you it’s when you bet that helps you make the profit. The real sharps bet games as early as Monday morning when the lines are usually posted first. That should tell you one thing: if you’re waiting until Friday for my picks—or the picks of some radio goober—you’ve already missed the best lines of the week. You can’t get the freshest produce if you’re shopping four days after it’s been delivered.
The real pros also bet several times on the same game as a means of protecting their slim annual profits. Fans can fail to fully understand the nature of the game. You’re betting against odds-makers’ lines. In other words, you’re betting against professionals who sit in a room and say, “Let’s create a number to bet against for this game that makes it virtually impossible to make a living predicting who wins.”
Yes, Pundit Tracker—a website that follows media picks—named me the most accurate forecaster for politics or sports in 2012.
And yes, two weeks into 2013—based on the same polling—I trailed stray cats on Animal Planet.
Occasionally fans ask me if I bet my own picks. That never makes any sense to me. Why would you care?
Would I only use a respected doctor to save my daughter’s life if and only if he’d saved his own daughter with the same procedure?
Can I never use a marriage counselor who’s had troubles in his own marriage? Does a bankruptcy attorney merit respect only if he, too, had to file for bankruptcy? Must a dermatologist have perfect skin?
Advice comes from all over. If you feel it’s quality information, use it. Even the so-called mavens in the world of sports gambling have off-weeks and even down years. Billy Walters, profiled on 60 Minutes and recognized as the industry’s sharpest and wealthiest bettor, was not having a particularly memorable 2012 with his NFL picks.
Me? Well, that was a different story. After hitting my eighth or ninth straight winning week, I got a call from a well-connected friend of mine in Los Angeles. He wanted to know if he could get my picks early. When I asked why, he said, “Billy’s guys told me they may just follow your lead for the next few weeks. You’re the hottest guy in the country.”
That’s one way to look at it, I suppose. Here’s another: I was probably just the luckiest.
Home Alone
Cesar Geronimo was buried near the bottom of the star-studded batting order of the Big Red Machine of the 1970s. Slender but strong, an elegant outfielder with a respected arm, he probably wouldn’t have even made the team without his defense. He had a nonchalant style, gliding more than running, and occasionally he’d wear an old-style batting helmet without an earflap. He had speed but never seemed to steal as many bases as he should have.
Everybody knew Pete Rose and Johnny Bench, but insight on Geronimo could set you apart from other kids.
One day Geronimo was behind in the count to Dodgers lefty Doug Rau, himself an overlooked guy on a roster of bigger names. The count was probably 1-2, and Geronimo put a big, swooping swing on a fastball—low and away, if I remember correctly—and pulled it over the short set of trees for a home run.
In my front yard.
I was twelve years old and coming to the realization that I was alone. All the time. Maybe this memory is embedded in my brain because Geronimo had only 51 career homers and I had finally come to understand how desperate I had become in my efforts to entertain myself.
My sister, Marlene, five years older, left junior high and high school about the time I was entering both. We shared precisely zero friends and, really, what fourteen-year-old girl wants to hang with a nine-year-old brother? She had her Beatles and Peter Frampton albums, and I had my imagination.
I didn’t just talk to myself. I talked back—even argued.
My early years were probably no different than many of yours, especially if you, like me, came from a small town. In rural areas, convincing your mom to drive you across town is the difference between riding bicycles and laughing all afternoon with a friend and playing a doubleheader in your front yard.
Alone.
And entirely in your head.
My mom once drove over my whiffle bat. It ended the season. It was June.
That was a long summer.
I’m not pleading for sympathy or suggesting I’m a victim of bad parenting. Instead, I would like to spend a few minutes defending the isolated. In fact, I’ll take it a step further: I’d like to declare myself the official spokesman for the solitary.
Loneliness is misunderstood. For me, isolation has always been a thought-provoking partner.
I’ve spent large chunks of my youth in it. It took me a while, but I eventually came to understand what a valuable friend it is. Friendship often works that way—it grows on you over time.
I define people and groups of people with one word: noise. I explain it to those who come from a different background by saying, “I prefer quiet.” It sounds like a confession, but it isn’t.
I speak for millions; we’re out there, and we’re okay.
Trust me, we really are.
We seek the out-of-the-way nooks in life, corners that most people never see or view as lonely outposts. To me, alone is not an epithet.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t always prefer to be alone. There are plenty of times when I could use a friend. I was driving home, alone, from a USC-Syracuse football game in New Jersey once. The game went long because of a stoppage for a tornado, never a good sign. Driving home, the roads were wet and covered with leaves. There was a power outage in one town, and my lonely SUV provided the only available light on one abandoned road. That felt flat-out lonely, and not in a good way. I needed to hear another human’s voice, but after several cell phone calls went unanswered, I think I called my accountant for an update on the tax ramifications of something or other. Come to think of i
t, it may have been someone else’s accountant. At the time, I didn’t really care.
For the most part, though, unless it’s my immediate family, alone wins.
I worry about the future of reflection and quiet contemplation. Will social media applications like Twitter and Facebook serve to eliminate even occasional self-examination—alone time, silence, even forty-five minutes of doing nothing more than asking yourself questions that only you can answer? It’s vital for personal improvement, even personal maintenance. But is it destined to go the way of the dinosaur?
And no, you can’t have a retweet on your birthday. Sorry, but being born isn’t original and concentrating on something unimportant is a tacit reminder that you haven’t put in the time to make any of us think, least of all yourself. When I look at all the minutiae that gets mistaken for something important—look, a photo of my food!—it seems we’ve replaced self-reflection with self-obsession.
Here’s a novel idea: spend less time trying to get popular and be noticed. Spend more time creating something that will not only get you noticed but will be substantial enough to make people stick around and watch. You know what that takes? Alone time, that’s what.
I’m not here to condemn collaboration, or the ever-popular concept of the group discussion. Bouncing ideas off people has considerable merit.
But in this nonelection year, I would like to campaign for the solitary pursuits. Jogging. A long drive without a blaring radio. Hitting golf balls. Staring out of an airplane window. Sitting on a deck and watching a distant lightning storm. Those—not crowded rooms or smart phones—are the breeding grounds for my ideas.
The question I’m asked most often about my radio career is a fairly predictable one:
How do you talk to yourself for three hours a day?
What I want to say in response is this:
You should hear the other fourteen.
I’m okay with it. Really. So is Cesar Geronimo. At least he should be. After all, he got credit for a home run he never hit.
You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will Page 21