by Shawn Green
And I was still learning all about frustration.
During the 2004 season, I’d felt frustrated when management and media seemed unreasonably impatient with my recovery from the surgery. It seemed as if everyone expected me to be 100 percent the day I put my uniform back on. The truth was that it was bound to take time for me not only to strengthen my shoulder and get through some lingering aches and pains, but also to repair a few bad habits in my swing that I’d developed while playing hurt. Additionally, I felt frustrated when I was bounced around the lineup, even as I was trying to find consistency in my game. I felt frustrated when our first-place team was dismantled at the midseason trading deadline. I knew that these frustrations had arisen out of my own preconceptions that were based more on how I thought the world should be than on how it actually was. Yes, I’d grown more adept at refraining from trying to live up to an idealistic image of how I should be, but I still held to concepts of how the world should be. An imperfect spiritual perspective, yes, but I’d learned to no longer deny my imperfections at the cost of expressing my true feelings. And so, for better or worse, there was a lot about the 2004 season that fell short of my expectations about Dodgerland; one thing about allowing yourself to acknowledge your emotions as they arise: Sometimes, it hurts.
At a low point, I sat in the car of my agent, Jeff Moorad, in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium. He was leaving the agent business to become an owner. I confided to him that I had grown so frustrated with the baseball world that I was contemplating retirement. He advised against it strongly; but having opened myself up to my own feelings, I couldn’t deny the pain. Walking away from all of it seemed to promise relief, though it saddened me to think that my baseball journey might conclude at a place of negativity.
After the season, new owner Frank McCourt asked to schedule a meeting. I knew he’d ask me if I’d be willing to waive the no-trade clause in my contract. Management already had traded away much of the heart of the team and I knew they were unlikely to re-sign Adrian Beltre, a close friend who’d just completed the greatest season of any teammate I ever played with, batting .334 with 48 home runs and 121 RBIs. He carried us to the division title. But the team was being led by a young general manager whose mind was crowded with theories and ambitions, focused on building his own team and making his mark, rather than by a seasoned baseball executive’s patience and wisdom. Our division championship team, which had taken several years to build, was being dismantled. I’d always wanted to finish my career in my hometown, but I knew it was time for me to move on.
Or perhaps time to call it quits. I didn’t know.
Was my frustration turning to such bitterness that I could actually leave a game I still loved?
Baseball and bitterness …
The combination made me think of my old idol, Ted Williams, who’d died less than three months before. Ted had played for years through his bitterness, never once even tipping his cap to his hometown crowd. But is that any way to be? I wondered whether Ted would do it all over again in the same manner if he were given another chance. I’d met him a couple of times, but those times I hadn’t really known what to ask him. Now, I wished I could speak to him again.
The night before my meeting with McCourt I had a dream, which I recall as follows.
Q & A WITH TED WILLIAMS ASKING ME QUESTIONS
TW: You think you know something about bitterness, kid? You feel the organization has let you and your teammates down, right? You feel the media and the fans misunderstand what you’ve been struggling through the last couple of years, right?
SG: It’s not just the organization or the media or the fans …
TW: It’s you, too?
SG: Yeah, I have to admit that despite everything I’ve worked so hard to grasp these last few years … you know, about the ego. Well, I still wish I’d got more done out there. But the front office …
TW: (interrupting) I know, Shawn. You’re frustrated with championships squandered, roster changes, overbearing media coverage, incompetent ownership, management, this team or that team.
SG: Exactly, Ted.
TW: Tell me what any of that’s actually got to do with baseball.
SG: (silence)
TW: Tell me, Shawn, why did a whole stadium of kids want to play catch with you all those years ago in Seattle? You weren’t yet an All-Star. You hadn’t ever hit twenty home runs in a season, let alone forty. No Gold Glove. No Silver Slugger. That was all in your future.
SG: They wanted to play catch with me just because I was a big league ballplayer.
TW: That’s right. And it’s a damn good reason. Hasn’t everything you’ve been seeking to learn these past years taught you this much? It’s all just a game. All of it! But it’s a damn beautiful one. And it’s all about playing.
SG: Yeah, and what could be better than playing the game, right?
TW: Let’s not get carried away, Shawn. There’s one thing that’s better.
SG: What?
TW: Playing the game while also being a Marine Corps fighter pilot in World War II and the last man to hit .400.
SG: Okay, I can’t argue with that. But then, not everybody can be Ted Williams.
TW: That’s right, kid. And not everybody has to be Ted Williams because I got that covered.
SG: So, I don’t have to be Ted Williams …
TW: Of course not. Isn’t that already settled by now? How many times are you going to regress on all that business of what you’re supposed to be? It’s simple. You just have to be yourself, whatever the hell that is at any given moment.
SG: So, if you had it to do all over?
TW: Yeah, my bitterness may have been the only real mistake I ever made in the majors. Who knows? It’s too late for me, now. But as for you … Relax, kid. Just open your eyes and take it all in.
• • •
At the conclusion of my meeting with McCourt, I agreed to let the Dodgers trade me to the Arizona Diamondbacks, where I resolved to make another fresh start. This time I’d play the game with my eyes wide open, simply appreciating all the beauty that the game of baseball (and the bigger game of existence) might throw my way.
Not a bad prospect.
GRATITUDE
When you peel away the layers of the ego and subdue your expectations regarding how the world should be, then what’s left?
Only life itself.
Today, I recall the last three years of my career as a single block of vivid experiences. Split between two very different teams and cities, the Arizona Diamondbacks and the New York Mets, I was at last living with my eyes wide open, simply taking life in rather than always striving toward a more perfect self or resenting the imperfections of the world around me. Absent a need to critique the baseball world and my situation in it, I rediscovered the exuberant Little Leaguer who played the game for love. Looking back now, it might all have been a single, fine day—a morning, afternoon, evening, and night, filled with the ups and downs of ordinary life—during which my open eyes allowed me to love deeply enough even to let go of this world I loved.
• • •
By the midpoint of my first spring training with the Diamondbacks, I was already well adjusted to my new teammates and surroundings. The transition to the first new team you play for is the most difficult; after that, it’s just a matter of different faces in the locker room and different uniforms on the field. I enjoyed my morning drives to the training facility in Tucson. There’s nothing like the beauty of the desert sky just after sunrise; it was the highlight of early trips to the office in the Cactus League. Still, I couldn’t help wondering how I’d feel about the desert by the end of summer. I suspected the heat would be even more challenging for Lindsay than for me, as I’d be spending most of my time under the roof of Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix, while she’d not only have to keep our two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Presley occupied in 115 degree heat, but would also be very pregnant with our second daughter, due in late August.
Arriving each morning by eig
ht at the facility, I’d wave to the security guard at the players’ parking lot and to the smattering of fans along the fence with their binders of cards and Sharpies. I always signed for the new kids, but just waved to the adult regulars, the ones we saw day after day and year after year. It didn’t bother me if they sold my autographs on eBay, but I didn’t feel the same obligation to stop for them. They were always around: at the hotels, waiting by the players’ parking lots, hanging over the dugout. Some players found them annoying. But I saw them differently. They loved baseball, even if they were profiting from our autographs. They promoted us and the game. In the end, fans are at least as important a part of our national pastime as are any of the players.
And among the fans there was one who stood out.
Her name was Susan, and she was legendary in Arizona for her simple and undemanding dedication. I’d noticed her even when I was a visiting player. Middle-aged and pleasant, she never missed a game or workout. She arrived at the stadium before any of the players and welcomed us all with individualized shoutouts. During batting practice, she’d stand over the dugout and watch every swing intensely. She required nothing from players but an occasional hello, and, even though a few of the guys didn’t even bother with that, she still supported us all every day. She was a warm-hearted woman who filled a void in her life with baseball. We all have voids in our lives. What makes the world interesting and fun are the often eccentric and always diverse ways we fill those voids. What a beautiful tapestry this makes of life.
I’d wave to Susan and finish signing autographs before walking through the clubhouse door. As I looked at the different lockers, I’d be reminded how the players in this camp, and every big league camp, also made up a tapestry of diverse strands. Every team consists of players of different nationalities who speak numerous languages, players of different races from every possible economic background, players in their late thirties with growing families who are putting the finishing touches on their long careers, players who are not yet old enough to buy a beer, pranksters, and quiet, reserved guys. Of the sixty or so players at any spring training camp, many never get to the Major Leagues. Others hang on for a few years and only get a taste of their dreams. Few ever actually experience the wealth and fame that those on the outside assume is the norm for those on the inside. Still, in the clubhouse, differences between players weren’t the most important thing. What always mattered most was that we wore the same uniform and played the same game.
Where my teammates were five years ago was as irrelevant as where they’d be five years from now. What mattered was that we were teammates in the present. True, the outcomes of spring exhibition games are usually regarded as insignificant—people come just to see ballplayers they know play a game they love to watch—and yet, whatever these games lack in competitive intensity, they more than make up for in simple playfulness. In fact, it may be that fans and players connect more deeply to the pure joy and beauty of baseball in a setting like this, where results don’t matter so much.
Spring training ballparks aren’t crowded and dominated by message boards and Jumbotrons. Instead, they’re designed for fans to relax in the sun and experience a game without the frills and constant marketing and entertainment-oriented distractions of the big stadiums. Spring training takes us all back several decades, to a time when the empty spaces between the pitches and the swings of the bat were just as important as the pitching and hitting itself, where the space between the actions is just as beautiful as the action itself.
As the regular season began in Phoenix, I came to appreciate the mornings not only because of their coolness, but also because morning was when I got to be with my family. Unlike most folks who look forward to evening because that’s when they return home from work and get to toss the ball around in the backyard with their kids, the opposite was true for me. My working day usually began in the afternoon. Only in the late mornings did I get to play with my daughter Presley and hang out with Lindsay, whose life was about to become more complicated than ever with the coming birth of our second daughter in August. She had her hands full, enabling me to be at the stadium.
The lifestyle of a major-league baseball wife offers the comforts that come with money and fame, but it also brings particular challenges. Lindsay and I learned that no matter how idyllic a situation may seem, there are always difficulties. Such is life. I feel a sad empathy for anyone whose life is driven to extremes because he or she falsely believes that by becoming rich and famous problems will miraculously vanish. Happiness is not a mere byproduct of success or acquisition. Fortunately, Lindsay and I were both content before we achieved material success, so we remained content after our lifestyle changed, but I saw colleagues every day who were miserable before they signed big deals and who remained just as miserable (if not more so) after they got the big bucks. Media and marketing campaigns insist that you’ll be happy when you make it big. But they’re selling a fallacy, the promise of a better future, when in reality the opposite is true: contentment arises only out of engagement in the present moment. And even though I loved my mornings with Lindsay and Presley, my present moment always eventually involved getting packed up to go to work at the ballpark.
The competition side of my job, the actual ball games, was never my favorite part. Competition fuels the ego, which insists that we always be better than others; it’s the part of us that’s never satisfied and yet is revered, not only in sports but in business and politics. Top athletes get kudos for being fierce competitors. Yet, when I looked at the most accomplished players in sports, I rarely saw wise, happy people. Instead, I more often saw insecure and miserable egos. I watched players come up to the big leagues filled with a joy and zest for life and, then, as they became superstars, turn grouchy and resentful, lost in their numbers and how they were measuring up to other players. I didn’t blame them. After all, I’d battled with the ego myself during those years in Los Angeles. But now in Arizona that battle was over for me, not because I’d achieved enlightenment or transcended the ego, but because I’d chosen to no longer fight it. The best approach to the game of baseball is just to play it; the same is true of life. The most fulfilled people are the ones who are always playing, the ones who don’t take life too seriously. I always enjoyed my interactions with the guys—cards, games, shooting the bull, practical jokes—but with the Dodgers, I’d been too busy being the highly burdened superstar to fully engage. Now, I felt free to join in the fun. And this Diamondbacks team was an interesting group of guys, consisting as it did of either fresh-faced rookies or long-time veterans.
The Diamondbacks’ Luis Gonzalez was a superstar who always maintained a playful attitude and was a positive influence on all of us. Once, he parked relief pitcher Mike Kop-love’s car on the warning track of the field before batting practice. Koppy had to race into the clubhouse to retrieve his keys to move his car before it was peppered with batted balls (and every batter was aiming for it). A couple months later, I got revenge for Koppy by changing some of the settings on Gonzo’s new laptop so that we could take control of his mouse while he was on it. For a few days, every time he got on his computer after BP, we’d go to iTunes and buy Britney Spears’ and other teeny-boppers’ albums. He’d call me over to his locker to help him, and someone else would man the mouse from my computer. The joke ended when he almost bought a new laptop and had the I.T. expert at the stadium ready to shut down all of the ports because a hacker was taking over the ballpark.
We veterans, along with coaches such as Mike Aldrete and Jay Bell, had great baseball conversations while on flights, in the clubhouse, and in the weight room. That’s not unusual on Major League teams. What made this team unique in my experience, was how often these conversations evolved into mentoring sessions for our rookies. There was such a range of experience between us that it was almost as if the veterans were serving as both players and coaches. It seemed to me as if only yesterday I was learning in Toronto from veterans Paul Molitor, John Olerud, Roberto Alomar, Ed Sp
rague, Joe Carter, and Pat Hentgen, and here I was now teaching a new generation.
Still, as much as I enjoyed my role as mentor to the younger players and colleague to the other veterans, my favorite part of my day at the office remained my time at the tee. There, I still honed my swing and found peace and stillness. I didn’t hit with the incessant drive that had frayed my shoulder. Instead, I took half as many swings, then spent the remaining time either joking around with the guys or sharing some of my experiences with the next generation. I approached the game with the same appreciative and playful mentality that I felt when I sprayed little Presley with the hose as she laughed and ran around the yard. My life had never been richer. The city of Phoenix, named for a mythological bird that rose to a new life from the ashes of what came before, proved to be just the right setting for me, just the right place for a kind of rebirth.
Fourteen months later, in August 2006, I found myself sitting in the passenger seat while my new teammate and old friend, Carlos Delgado, drove us through the afternoon traffic on the crowded streets of Manhattan. Just two days before I’d been a member of the Diamondbacks, and now I was the newest player on the New York Mets, the best team in the National League. When the D-Backs’ new owner Jeff Moorad (formerly my agent) asked me if I’d waive my partial no-trade clause to move east, I agreed. With the D-Backs out of contention, there was little point in keeping veterans around, better to get the young guys up and give them experience. Meantime, contenders always want another reliable bat for the stretch drive. And so here I was, sitting in the car next to my big brother, Carlos, with whom I’d spent the first eight years of my career, first in A-Ball in Dunedin, Florida, then Double-A in Knoxville, then Triple-A in Syracuse, then the majors in Toronto, and finally even barnstorming in Japan. And now, in New York, I’d be finishing my career with him.