by Shawn Green
He’d called me into his office to discuss my playing time.
“Greenie, we’re going to be giving more starts to [Lastings] Milledge over the remaining portion of the season,” he said. “We need to see what the young guy can do. But don’t get me wrong. You’re a great asset to this team, so you’ll still get plenty of action.”
I flashed back to the meetings I’d had in Cito’s office more than a decade before. In those days, it had been explained to me that I was losing playing time so that more experienced guys could play. Now, with the Mets in a pennant race, they wanted to conduct a sort of tryout for a younger, inexperienced guy. Because of economics, the entire game was shifting toward youth. Previously, the game had favored veterans, from crusty old scouts and GMs on down to the players, but, by the late nineties, many executives were barely out of college and the whole mindset was shifting toward youth. Fortunately, I knew better now than to resist change, which is one of life’s constants
As a young player in Toronto, I had responded to frustrations with anger and pride, completely absorbed in my ego. I’d fought to prove Cito and his staff wrong, driven to succeed. That drive had led me to grab the batting tee and set off on my own way and it had been the right thing to do at that time. Maybe that’s why youth and pride so often go hand in hand; we need that push at that time to send us off to create our “personal legends,” as described by Paulo Coehlo in his wonderful novel, The Alchemist.
Now, things felt different. I’d already lived the baseball portion of my personal legend. I’d had a colorful career as a major leaguer, one that, at this point, could end or could continue. It was up to me. I was only thirty-four years old and had a lot left in the tank. Surely, I loved baseball, but there were other things I loved, too. I missed my girls when I was away. Whatever I decided about retirement, I knew I’d already fulfilled my baseball dream, and then some.
Now, reclined on the bus, I drifted back to my meeting with Willie Randolph. “Okay,” I told him in his office, friendly but not wholly resigned. “You’re the skipper. I’ll do whatever you ask of me. A shot at a ring matters to me more than my playing time. But this team is better with me on the field.”
“You may be right, Shawn,” he said, “but I’ve got to trust my instincts. Thanks for being such a pro about this.”
Yes, I could have objected more vehemently.
But I no longer had the intense drive to show everyone what I could do, to prove them all wrong.
What did this mean? I wondered. Had I already let go, moved on?
When everyone was settled, the bus jerked from park into drive, and we all started moving forward. I stretched out my legs, not uncomfortable with the uncertainty of my situation.
The big leagues on the one hand, more time with my family on the other … not easy.
But what a fortunate man I was to have such options in the first place!
• • •
I made my decision about retirement a few weeks later aboard a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to New York, where Lindsay and the girls were living in our summer apartment. Each year, the team took one or two of these coast-to-coast, nighttime jaunts. Our game that night at Dodger Stadium had ended at about nine forty-five and the wheels of the plane were off the ground at LAX by 11:30. That’s how quickly teams scramble out of a stadium on getaway day, thanks in large part to everyone’s bags being already packed and waiting immediately after the last out. It’s all very efficient—the clubhouses are also run by pros.
When I first glanced at my watch aboard the plane it read four forty-five (I hadn’t bothered to reset it for the three days we’d been away from the East Coast). We were almost halfway home, thirty-five thousand feet above the heartland of America. I’d just finished an hour-long card game with David Wright, preceded by a couple of chess matches against John Maine. Every team has different games of choice for the flights. When I was with the Blue Jays, we’d played a lot of cards. Sometimes, coaches and other staff members played as well, though we had to kick one coach out of our game for cheating! Then Jose Cruz got Alex Gonzalez, Ed Sprague, and me all fired up on chess. With the Dodgers, I’d played cards with Adrian Beltre, Paul Lo Duca, and Jose Lima, which made for hilarious, nonstop, trash-talking sessions. During my final year in Los Angeles, Texas Hold ’em became popular and half the team played tournament style. It was good for team chemistry. My brief time with the Diamondbacks had been spent flying with some of the most intellectual guys I’ve played with: Craig Counsell, Andy Green, Shawn Estes, Jose Cruz, and coaches Mike Aldrete and Jay Bell. We got hooked on bridge one year and Scrabble the next. This Mets team had a strong chess contingency, initiated the previous year by catcher Mike DiFelice. I liked just about any game. I didn’t care too much about winning, but enjoyed the camaraderie and light-hearted talk. After my friend Darrin Fletcher retired from the Blue Jays a few years before, I asked him what he missed most about baseball. His answer surprised me. Now, it didn’t surprise me so much. “I miss the flights,” he said.
I’ll miss the flights, too, I thought now.
Yes, some people were bound to say it was crazy for me to walk away from the game before my thirty-fifth birthday. I’d made plenty of money, but retirement still meant passing on healthy paychecks. Also, I was only a few home runs behind Hank Greenberg, the all-time Jewish home run leader, and I wasn’t likely to catch him with what was left of this season. With the right situation on the right team, I knew I could rediscover my groove and put up big numbers, and such a renewal could put me on a Hall of Fame track. But I couldn’t help asking myself: at what cost? Didn’t more baseball mean I’d miss that much more of my growing family? In a year, Presley would start kindergarten and, since the day she was born, I’d envisioned being there to walk her into school that first day. In that light, career achievements didn’t matter very much.
Most of my teammates were asleep, iPod buds in their ears and blankets covering them as they lay across their three seats. (Everyone but a few rookies got his own row). But one unmistakably large, bald head remained upright, lit from the glow of the computer screen before him. I got up and walked over to my old friend Carlos. He was messing around with pictures of his baby boy on iPhoto. As I stopped at his row, I felt as if I’d gone back twelve or thirteen years to when we were young players for the Blue Jays. In those days, Carlos, Alex Gonzalez, and I were inseparable, the three amigos. We’d come up through the minor leagues together and had entered the big leagues together. Back then, we had to share a row on the plane: The Blue Jay veterans were strict with the young players; these days, the Mets vets took it easier on the kids.
We three amigos had had long careers. Alex had just recently retired. He’d been the first to get married and to have kids, and he was the first to leave the game. I’d been the next to marry and have kids and would be the next to go. Carlos’s son was still only a few months old. Besides, Carlos was approaching 500 home runs, a monumental achievement. I hoped he’d get there. Of the three of us, he was the one who could still get into the Hall.
“Flaco, what’s going on?” he asked as I sat beside him.
“How many miles do you think we’ve flown together over the years?” I asked him.
“A lot. Crazy how fast it goes, huh?”
“The flying days are over for me,” I told him. “I wanted you to be the first to know. This’ll be my last cross-country red-eye with you jokers.”
“You’ve made up your mind?”
“Yes.”
“Good for you, Flaco. You’ve had a great career. I don’t blame you for wanting to be home. In a few years, I’ll ride off into the Puerto Rican sunset as well. ’Course, I still got a little work to do. Tell me one thing though, how does it feel?”
“What do you mean?”
“How does it feel when you know you’re done?”
Carlos had always been like my big brother, and yet here he was asking me a question about his own future. In this way, at least, I was suddenly farther down
the line than he was.
“Actually, it feels a lot like when you first put on a big league uniform. You might not think it would. But love brings you into this game as a kid and now, for me, love is taking me out. It’s exciting.” I didn’t have to elaborate on how I felt about Lindsay and the girls—he knew.
“It’s been quite a ride for us, eh, Flaco?”
I agreed. Carlos and I had both had stellar seasons and disappointing seasons. We’d gone through countless hot streaks and countless slumps. We’d both struck out four times in games, and we each had had a four home run game (being only the fourteenth and fifteenth players in MLB history to do so). We’d changed teams and leagues, and we’d watched our teammates and friends shuffle in and out of clubhouses overnight. “Lots of ups and downs, comings and goings,” I said. “Lots of changes.”
He nodded. “That’s the way it is, Flaco.”
“The way of baseball,” I said.
Everything on the surface of life is flux. As a young player, I related only to that superficial level, and so the circumstances of my life dictated my sense of happiness. But as my awareness broadened, I realized that reality runs much deeper.
“The way of baseball …” Carlos mused. “That’s good, Flaco.”
“The way of life.”
Carlos grinned. “It looks like my work here is done.”
“Mine, too.”
“I’m happy for you,” he said.
I started to my seat a few rows behind his.
He called back to me with a wry grin. “I don’t think I’ll be too far behind you, big brother.”
Once back in my seat, I looked around the plane. It was strange to feel so fully awake when almost everyone else was fast asleep. Maybe I was growing delirious as the hour neared six in the morning. Or maybe this energetic feeling arose because I had come to a decision to disengage from a path I’d trodden my whole life. Was I feeling the promise of the unknown? I scanned the plane and saw my teammates and good friends, and I realized that the full aliveness I felt was actually no different from what I’d felt five years before on my record-setting day in Milwaukee. It was presence, no different from what I’d felt when I first held Lindsay’s hand or my newborn daughters.
Life is filled with moments that seem to just pass us by, indeed, moments that we rush through in order to get to other, bigger moments. What a waste! Why isn’t every moment treated as sacred and beautiful? Circling the bases or sitting on a red-eye flight … what makes one moment more important than another? Maybe life is really just one beautiful moment constantly changing shape. Sure, we sometimes notice the world: crashing waves, a starry night, the majesty of a rainstorm, but we miss most moments. My out of the ordinary public life was about to end. Yet I was excited to embrace the prospect of finding as heightened a state of awareness in my new life as I’d ever known when hitting a ninety-five miles per hour fastball with the sweet spot of my bat.
When we disembarked at JFK, descending the portable stairs that lead to the tarmac, I saw the sun rising over the city where Lindsay and the girls were still sleeping. Before the sun got much higher I’d be home and I’d wake them all for the new day.
EPILOGUE
My game flowered from spiritual roots planted in the dingy underbellies of stadiums even more than on the well-manicured grass under the bright lights. Before I could play with grace and peace in front of fifty thousand people at the old Yankee Stadium, I had to discover stillness deep below the stands in the stadium’s batting dungeon, which was located between first base and the right-field foul pole. There, beneath a low ceiling pocked with exposed asbestos, a couple of cages had been thrown together some time after Babe Ruth called this ballpark his office. Other old stadiums, such as Wrigley Field and the old Tiger Stadium, required a hike from the dugout to the outfield wall to even find their cages, which consisted only of musty, rigged-up nets inside the bleachers. Wrigley’s cage, which is located in the wall beyond the ivy in right field, isn’t even big enough for someone to sit inside and wait for his turn to hit. Instead, visiting players have to stand out on the warning track and listen to the soon-to-be-drunk fans tell them how much they suck. At Fenway Park, the cage is located inside the famous Green Monster in left field, near the grounds crew equipment. Much like the stadium, the cage has a quirky shape to work in an awkward space, but what matters is never so much the place as the attitude and mind-set you bring to it. Fenway’s cage was among my favorites. After all, where else can you meditate and find peace inside a monster?
From time to time, we all need to get inside the monster in our lives before we can emerge into the bright lights.
Not long ago I walked into my childhood friend Ben’s tiny hitting school, located beside the Newport Freeway in Southern California just a few miles from where I played my high school ball. Accompanied by four nine-year-old Little Leaguers from my daughters’ elementary school, I carried my Tanner Tee as a samurai carries his sword (okay, maybe not quite so majestically). The uniformed kids—a Yankee, a Blue Jay, a Brewer, and a Tiger—had won a charity raffle and were to be my students for the day. I greeted Ben, grabbed two big buckets of balls, and led my enthusiastic contingent to the well-worn cage.
After setting up the tee, I turned to my assembly of four. “The first thing you all have to remember is that the game is about one thing,” I said.
“Winning?” asked one of the boys.
Too many Under Armour and Gatorade commercials … I shook my head no. “It’s about fun.”
“Oh, good,” the four kids muttered, relieved to be spared a hard-driving adult.
I tapped the Tanner Tee with my bat. “A tee like this is a very special thing,” I said.
The Tiger shrugged. “But we finished with those things back in tee ball.”
“Yeah, what’s so great about a tee?” the Brewer pressed.
“Well, it’s not necessarily the tee itself, but the way you attend to it.” I turned and placed a ball on the tee. I took my stance. Then I took a breath. I swung: crack, and whoosh, into the net. It still felt great, as if no time had passed since my last swing as a pro.
“Wow,” a couple of kids said.
I picked up another ball, placed it on the tee, took a breath, and swung: crack, and whoosh into the net.
The kids liked my swing (some general managers still like it, too, and opportunities have come up to play again, but I’m happy with my life as it is; with new business ventures, speaking engagements, and the writing of this book, there’s plenty for now).
“How’d you hit it so hard, Mr. Green?” the Yankee asked me.
“Weight-lifting?” the Blue Jay inquired.
I shook my head no. “It starts just by picking up the ball, and knowing you’re picking it up as you’re doing it. See, it’s about paying attention to whatever you do. Want to try?”
The kids scrambled into a line to take their cuts.
On the far side of the cage another kid had caught my eye, a cheerful boy of about eleven whom I thought I recognized. Was he a friend’s son or maybe a student at the girls’ school? No. Was he from the local Little League? No. Then it hit me.
He was the boy I’d seen in my parents’ hitting school back in 2000! Yes, he was the one whose carefree approach to baseball I had envied just before I left for Japan, the Little Leaguer who’d asked for my autograph even as I was thinking I should be asking for his, the boy who wanted to be like me, even as I was desperate to find a way to be more like him. Amazing! I wanted to talk to him.
Then it hit me: That was ten years ago, which meant that the actual boy from my recollection would be a college student by now, unrecognizable to me.
So, who was this?
Maybe a younger brother? Surely, a different boy.
Everything changes.
And yet, in a way, he was the same boy I’d seen ten years ago, in the joyful manner he went about playing the game. Likewise, he was the same boy I had been myself, more than a quarter century before. We are
all so different from one another, and yet we are all so much the same. I watched him sort attentively through the rack of bats to find just the right one. One hundred percent focus. I felt confident that whichever bat he chose would work out great for him.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writers, filmmakers, and even T-shirt manufacturers have depicted baseball as a metaphor for life. There’s the rebirth every spring as the season begins, the ending every fall, and the hibernation during the winter months. For me, however, baseball was not a mere metaphor—it was also my passion and livelihood. It brought me pleasure and pain, and it became the vehicle for spiritual growth that arose unexpectedly.
The writing of this book has been an additionally constructive, eye-opening endeavor. The process provided a deepening of the lessons I learned over my baseball career and thus served to reinforce my understanding that life wisdom truly is universal.
My experiences in baseball are what they are because of many people. In the baseball world, I want to thank the players I both competed with and against, my coaches, and the numerous people who filled the diverse roles of the baseball organizations for which I played (everyone from the trainers and clubhouse guys to the front-office personnel). I also want to thank the fans (of both friendly and hostile natures) as well as the media. These two groups attached a sense of importance and urgency to what would otherwise have been just a “meaningless” child’s game, providing the necessary environment for my personal growth to occur.
As for the writing of this book, I have to begin with a huge thanks to my very talented coauthor Gordon McAlpine (and to his wife, Julie, and their three sons for “loaning him” to me for so many hours as we put this book together). I couldn’t have had a better teammate throughout the process. I would also like to thank our wonderful editor Kerri Kolen and the other people who helped this project come to fruition: Stephanie Carew, Andrea Bobinski, Linda Loewenthal, David Black, Kelly Sonnack, Marysue Rucci, Kate Ankofski, David Rosenthal, and Jonathan Karp.
