The Way of Baseball

by Shawn Green

  That’s not how it worked.

  Instead, I’d grown resentful. I began to feel superior to players who pulled themselves out of the lineup due to minor injuries. I took pride in the fact that I’d never gone on the disabled list, not even when Andy Pettite broke that bone in my wrist with a fastball back in ’99. Plenty of players get sore backs when they’re coming up against a Randy Johnson–quality pitcher or when they’re swinging poorly. I never did that. And so I came to believe I was better than those other players because I thought I didn’t have an ego big enough to concern itself with things like slumps or ducking pitchers.

  But wait … I thought I was better than others?

  Isn’t that ego, too?

  It suddenly became clear to me. Over the past few years, I’d succumbed to an image of myself as an antisuperstar. I’d always been self-consciously careful to suppress my emotions during the great times and to unapologetically face the music during the bad times. I’d shunned many opportunities for endorsements and increased fame that being a sports star in Los Angeles offered. I’d taken pride in showing up to spring training much thinner than other power hitters, many of whom were later revealed to be steroid users, because I knew that my relative lightness highlighted the fact that I still could hit the ball farther than almost all of them. Sitting by myself in that training room office, it finally dawned on me: I was just as caught up in the image of myself as a humble, antisuperstar as other players were caught up in their images of themselves as traditional superstars!

  How could I not have seen this?

  I had chosen to tolerate the disillusionment of management, the media, and fans, rather than simply to acknowledge my shoulder injury because I had believed that a tolerance for painful criticism illustrated the conquering of my ego’s need to be a top hitter in baseball. What I didn’t realize, however, was that by doing these things I was actually feeding a new identity that my ego had chosen for me, that of the enlightened, spiritually superior athlete. By publicly saying, “Don’t look at me,” I was in effect saying, “Look at me!” Cultivating a feeling of spiritual superiority to my steroid-juiced, tabloid-seeking colleagues, I was, in a subtler way, as fully engaged in the ego as they were. I lost touch with presence as surely as if I had dressed in a gold suit and paid to have my face on a billboard on Sunset Boulevard.

  Once again, how tricky the ego is!

  And so just as overdoing my tee work damaged my shoulder, my self-conscious attempts to combat my ego had been overdone to the point of actually creating a whole new persona (a pure exercise in ego!). My subsequent attachment to this image was no different from the player who wants to be known as the greatest of all time. Both images are mere fantasies that promise a happier and more fulfilling future, denying the precedence of the present moment. Sure, some might suggest that my aims were somehow inherently more admirable than the guy who’s after mere fame and a truck-load of money, but I disagree, as both I and the stereotypically driven athlete were looking to become something rather than simply to be.

  Life isn’t about continually getting to the next level. Too many of us view life as if it were a school in which we constantly are trying to graduate to the next grade. In 2000, I’d fallen into the ego’s trap of, “you need to be the hero,” and now that I’d injured my shoulder, I’d fallen into the ego’s new trap of being the unappreciated antisuperstar.

  The fight is never ending.

  Was my immoderate labeling of the ego as an evil enemy where I’d gone wrong? After all, the problem is not the ego itself, which is almost impossible to permanently quash, but getting lost in the ego and falsely identifying it as one’s own true essence. Might simply being aware of the ego and watching it from a place of separation and space be enough to keep oneself present?

  I realized now that I’d doubtless get lost in the ego again—many times—but that as long as I was able to wake up to the present moment I’d always find my way back. Just recognizing the ego for what it is means that you’re not completely lost in it.

  Maybe injuring my shoulder wasn’t such a bad thing after all, as it exposed me to the idea that becoming too attached to anything, even good things like my tee work and spiritual seeking, creates problems. Overdoing the tee work had torn my shoulder, and my self-conscious attempts to become egoless had served only to make my ego stronger than ever! Both missteps were the result of becoming too attached. The previous year when I was most intensely present in the zone, I hadn’t felt attached to anything but had been simply present. All sense of myself was lost in the action and so there was no separation between me, the doer, and the doing. The experience was beautiful because of this unity, which is the way of our universe. When Eastern philosophies teach of the importance of nonattachment, I believe this is what they are teaching: the way of the frayed shoulder.

  I left the training room after about twenty minutes alone.

  There was such an ironic duality in my tee work. Even years ago, during my best stretches as an up-and-coming star with Toronto, my daily tee work was quietly chewing up my shoulder. All those good swings had not only made my success a certainty, but also my future failures. This realization helped me to understand a quote from Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse, “The world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided … never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.”

  Shortly thereafter, I allowed Dr. Jobe to give me a cortisone shot for the first time in my career. If I needed his prescription to help ease the pain of my shoulder down the stretch run (provided it wasn’t going to cause further damage), then I’d do it. If the team fell out of contention over the next couple of weeks and doctors wanted me to get surgery before the season ended then I’d do that as well. I was done fighting my ego’s fight, done trying to prove something by enduring pain.

  Within a couple of days, the shot took effect and my pain was much relieved and much of my power returned. In the remaining twenty-four games of the season, I had twenty-three RBIs and seven homers and ended the season with a .280 average, 19 home runs, 85 RBIs, and a league-leading 49 doubles. While those numbers were a far cry from the 40-plus homers I’d hit in each of the previous two years, this season was among the most significant of my career, not because of numbers, but because it had exposed to me yet another layer of my ego—a layer that I likely would never have noticed without the injury—and taught me that the more I self-consciously resisted its pull, the more I became attached to the suspect identity that formed in the resistance. I learned acceptance of what is.

  A place of no judgment, no goals … the place where actual life happens.

  And that is a much better place to be.

  Within weeks of the completion of the season, I went in for the only surgery of my career. Drs. Ralph Gambardella and Frank Jobe performed the work and all went as planned. Doctors told me I should be ready to go for spring training 2004. However, I would have to change my off-season workouts. I could no longer practice yoga, and I would have to forsake much of the upper-body lifting that I normally did. I wouldn’t start swinging a bat until January, and that would be done under the supervision of the team’s training staff. My focus that winter was different than it had been for every other winter of my career. Rather than working to get into top shape, I spent my time just getting healthy.

  I played through spring training and into the first couple months of the regular season with my shoulder less than fully healed. The rotator cuff around the labrum was stronger than ever (thanks to the Jobe exercises that I performed on a daily basis), and I was free of the smarting pain I’d experienced on each swing in 2003. But now I felt the duller pain of an injury that’s on the mend. And that wasn’t the only complication to the first months of the 2004 season—I’d agreed to moving from the outfield to first base if it meant the team might acquire a strong new bat.

  For the previous fourteen seasons, I’d only played in the outfield. In spring training I worked only part-time on the new position, as it was uncertain if the move would ac
tually occur. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until the day before our first regular game of the season that I learned I was actually going to be playing first base.

  The move was no small thing (particularly on such short notice)!

  The game is so much faster standing 100 feet from the batter as opposed to 275 feet away in the outfield. Playing in the outfield was second nature to me. I knew where to play all the hitters and where to throw the ball in any possible situation. I didn’t need to use my mind at all. But, as a new first baseman, I had to remind myself to do even the most elementary things, such as to run to the bag to take a throw. Before every play, thoughts swirled in my head: “Okay, on a hit to either center or right field, I’m the relay man on the throw to the plate … on a bunt, I’m charging … on a ball in the gap I’m the trailer to the relay man …” Suddenly, I was forced to think my way through the games, at least when I was playing defense.

  Analyzing and thinking is stressful, but I had no choice. And complicating matters was that during those first few weeks of the season I was frankly scared to death playing so close to left-handed power hitters. And even the glove was different! I’d used the same outfield glove for the past eight years and it had become like an extension of my hand. The leather was patched, but I’d never found another glove with such a perfect pocket. And now I was using a new first baseman’s glove that was only partially broken in.

  Thirty minutes before every game, my palms would get sweaty as I envisioned playing the new position. I felt like an actor trying to learn his lines before going on stage every night. Naturally, I tried to separate my stressful defensive situation from my batting, but it was impossible to avoid the mental exhaustion that accompanied all that intense and anxious thinking.

  And so my offensive struggles of ’03 continued through the first half of the ’04 season. Nonetheless, I did the best I could, though I wasn’t going to habitually keep my mouth shut anymore about the challenges, clinging to the illusion that my being silent made me better than other, more ego-motivated athletes. My shoulder still bothered me, sore from the healing process. Time was the only thing that could make it pain-free. As my workouts had been limited in the spring, my strength was compromised. Also, I’d had to limit my cage work. I could still hit off the tee, but I took only about half the swings I once had. Struggling at the plate, I’d have loved to perform my drill of hitting to exhaustion, but that would have done further damage to my shoulder. All I could do was dig in and battle through the difficult, early months of the season.

  At least now I allowed myself to express my emotions. If I was angry, then I would be present in my anger. If I was anxious playing first base with Barry Bonds just ninety feet away at the plate, then I would be present in that tension. If I was excited after getting a big hit or after our team won a close game, then I would fully experience the emotion. I was finished trying to live up to an image of who I wanted to be or who I thought I was. It is all too easy for any of us to get lost in such manufactured images. Often, the perceptions and expectations of those around us strengthen the weighty images of ourselves we already carry around. Habitually, we label ourselves and others, and before long these labels create a false sense of identity that we spend far too much of our energy trying to justify. Sometimes we habitually identify ourselves with our jobs, our possessions, our goals; other times we habitually identify ourselves with our problems, our frustrations, our illnesses, our weaknesses.

  Better to just be where you are, to just feel what you feel.

  In early June I headed back to the place where my big league journey began—the SkyDome in Toronto. This was the first time I’d gone back to play a regular season game there. Walking into the stadium, I felt like an alum going back to see his former school; everything looked both exactly the same and entirely different. Many, from among the security guards to the ushers to the clubhouse staff to the fans to the handful of players with whom I’d played as a Blue Jay, brought back memories. One of the first things I did was grab my tee and head to the cage—the place where the seeds of my maturity had been planted years before.

  I walked into that cage with a different perspective than that with which I’d entered it before. Eastern philosophy proposes that you can never step into the same stream twice. I was no longer a player on the rise, full of swagger. Now, I was trying to recover from both a frayed labrum in the shoulder and a frayed ego, both products of having pushed positive work ethics to immoderate levels. I sat on an old foldout chair in the cage, smiling as I noticed a Tanner Tee sitting at home plate. I recalled my battles here for independence with Willie and Cito as they’d tried to change me into a pull hitter. I recalled the soulful meditations I’d experienced here as I grew into a power hitter. I re-experienced the joy I’d felt here with the Sarge and all my close friends on the old team. As I stood and set my Tanner Tee up and put the bucket of balls on top of its base for extra support, my eyes welled up. I was glad that no one else was in there—my teammates would have thought I was nuts. I hit for an extended length of time, making an exception to my new set of rules for the tee work.

  Afterward, I headed into the clubhouse invigorated.

  Still, my slow start continued fostering doubt and harsh criticism from media and disapproving fans; worse, it resulted in my being bounced around the batting order. As a Dodger, I’d always batted third or fourth, but now Jim Tracy began moving me all over the lineup. He said he wanted to help me find my groove. But moving in the order merely brought more attention to my struggle, resulting in yet another mini news conference at my locker.

  Throughout this turmoil, I avoided getting too caught up in surface waves by no longer clinging to the misperception that I had to be the antisuperstar or enlightened ballplayer; I could be more forgiving of myself. And expressing my emotions in these difficult times helped. I still didn’t throw equipment after a strikeout or yell at prodding reporters, but neither did I suppress my feelings. In the process, my emotions ran through me quickly as I watched them from a place of presence, and then they were gone.

  On the first of July in a home game against the Giants, my hitting at last came together. In my final two at-bats of the closing game of the series, I hit a home run and a game-winning double. More important, I’d found my swing, which had been missing since 2002.

  It had been a challenging fifteen months. And the challenges were not over.

  In the previous nine years, I’d had only one game that conflicted with Yom Kippur. In 2001, I sat out that game and broke my consecutive games streak. Now, in the heat of the 2004 pennant race, the league had scheduled not one but two games on Yom Kippur (which spans sundown to sundown). With a slim lead over the Giants, we’d be playing a Friday night game followed by a Saturday day game; clearly, the most crucial series of the season. I was swinging a hot bat, and so the media pressed hard to learn how I was going to handle the situation. My eventual decision provoked much debate on talk shows and in articles. I would play the Friday night game and sit out the Saturday game. The middle path. Some people felt this was the worst possible solution, demanding that I either stand for one thing or stand for the other. But I had moved past my ego’s need to do the right thing in the eyes of the world. Instead, I did what was most consistent with what I felt was right, which was to acknowledge the holiday to show my respect for my Jewish heritage and, at the same time, to be there for my team and the Dodger fans as we strived to reach the playoffs. In the Friday night game I hit a two-run homer in a 3–2 win, which proved crucial in a pennant race that went down to the second to last game of the season. It felt good to hit that homer, but it felt even better to make a decision that was aligned with my heart rather than with my ego.

  We won the team’s first division title since 1995. My second half—on par with my very best seasons—went virtually unnoticed by the Dodger world, as my struggles at the plate the previous year-and-a-half had tarnished my status as one of the top power hitters in the game. Fully healthy, I had regained my form
. But if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it …

  Even more frustrating was that the Dodger front office wasn’t focused on team chemistry. By the July 31 trade deadline, the new ownership’s recently appointed General Manager, Paul DePodesta, traded away much of our team, despite our three-game lead in the National League West Division. He dealt fan favorite and All-Star catcher Paul Lo Duca, who was not only a key player on the field but also a team leader. Two-thirds of our starting outfield, Juan Encarnacion, and my closest friend on the team, Dave Roberts, were also sent packing. Our bullpen had been our team’s greatest strength, but this didn’t keep veteran relief pitchers Tom Martin and Guillermo Mota from being shipped out during the crazy, two-day whirlwind. No one in the baseball world could believe that a first-place team would make such drastic moves midseason. All the players were taken by surprise, having expected that we’d merely add a key player or two, as contending teams typically do at the trade deadline.

  The playoffs came and went for us very quickly.

  We played the best team in the National League, the St. Louis Cardinals, and lost the series three games to one. Even so, that playoff week was a highlight of my career, as it was my first opportunity to play in the postseason. We lost the first two games in St. Louis before returning to Los Angeles to play in front of the home crowd. As I started around the bases after hitting my second home run of game three (which we won 4–0 behind the pitching of Jose Lima), I allowed myself to be fully present in my emotions, giving the only fist pump of my career as I rounded first base. I could feel the elation of the Dodger fans, who hadn’t much approved of my play since 2002. Somehow, the cheers of the fans seemed to express a more personal tone that day, as if they were saying to me, “We’re cheering you now for more than what you’ve done in this one game.” Did they sense that I would never again circle the bases in a Dodger uniform? Maybe I sensed the same thing (we players all suspected that the new regime planned to overhaul the organization). But, here and now, I’d given the fans a reason to love me again, which was actually all they really ever wanted to do. Sure, they had an image of who I was supposed to be, just as for years I had carried around such an image. And whenever there was a gap between what they thought I was supposed to be and what I was, they felt frustration. Well, I’d been there too. Who was I to judge them?