Pitch Math
On Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season past their prime men everywhere remember when they first fell in love with the game. Misty replays of little men running after balls and away from windows in the long hours of the day fill our waking dreams. I can still picture myself in the far corner of an ill-sodden enclosure hoping to catch the fly, or at least prevent it from rolling into the crack house’s yard next door. Letting my memories play through to the credits, the end of this mythical scene is always marked by the piercing sound a middle aged woman demanding my immediate return to reality.
In reality my mother was doing what responsible middle class parents are supposed to do. Playing at sports is a fun and appropriate diversion for children. Most parents believe that sports can teach their kids important social skills. Sports marketers invest millions of dollars convincing us that watching overgrown men resolve conflict through controlled violence is the very best sort of family entertainment. However, it is the job of the responsible parent to teach their children that sports are at best an extracurricular experience, secondary in all ways to important work of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Even children who show exceptional talent in an athletic pursuit are encouraged to have a “fall back” option, in case they blow out a knee or get too old to play competitively. Success on the field garners attention, self-esteem, and as often as not more sex than a spring salmon, but parents are supposed to tell children that success in the classroom is what really matters. To paraphrase a great Washingtonian character: parents, “you’ve been had, hoodwinked, run amuck, led astray.”
Athletic prowess is the far better pathway to success, happiness, and boatloads of cash than felicity with multivariable organic sonnets. Sports, not higher education, are the quickest and safest way to raise your station in life. Poor people and their children figured this out long ago. Elites tend to criticize the modern professional athlete, accuse them of being lazy and sneer at their lack of education. This surprisingly hateful reaction can best be viewed as rank jealousy. We envy those who started with less then nothing yet still found a way to make money playing games, whilst we make less money doing things we can’t stand. It’s ridiculous to call an athlete lazy when you look at the time it takes to keep your body in such an unnatural state of fitness. As far as their education, they made a choice at an early age to forgo such niceties as syntax in favor of practicing their 15 foot turnaround jump shot 500 times. In high school the kids who were outside practicing their spiral were much cooler than the kids who were inside practicing their S.A.T. flashcards. Now … the kids who get paid to play quarterback are immeasurably cooler, richer, hotter, and generally better than the kids who get paid to play with Excel spreadsheets. I’d gladly speak in monosyllabic grunts in exchange for the ability to hit a 12-6 curve 500 feet into the wind.
The big knock on pursuing an athletic career is that it is inherently unsafe and random. People analogize it to winning the lottery while education is held out to be some kind of bankable asset. Please. Every English major in the history of the Earth has come to the cold realization that their education has prepared them to do bugger all while earning squat. It’s easy to pound on the English kids, but can you name a single college major that actually allows a 22 year old to step out of school and into a high paying well respected profession? Of course you can’t. Most students realize pretty quickly that to do anything more than collecting coffee and other people’s problems they have to go to even more school in the hopes of one day landing a job that allows them to pay off all the debt they incurred while receiving their supposedly bankable education. Higher education is the biggest scam running.
Sports on the other hand provides a cornucopia of opportunities and exit strategies, a relatively steady income, and most importantly careers where people actually enjoy what they are doing as opposed to doing what they have to. I’ll concede that being a major professional athlete is a dream that only the smallest percentage of people will actually attain. A kid who spends all his time practicing his sport can aspire to beat the overwhelming odds, but even if he falls short there are tons of things he can do with those skills. First of all, there are hundreds and hundreds of professional teams all over the world in every major sport. Maybe I wanted to play shortstop for the Mets, but my talent meant that all I could be was the backup shortstop for the Long Island Ducks (independent league baseball team). Is that really a terrible thing? I’m pretty sure that the bench guys on the Ducks are having a much better time with life than the 50 junior associate accountants at JP-Morgan Chase. Has anybody really sat down and examined how terribly unfulfilling a life you have if you spend 50 hours a week making sure stacks of paper are properly transformed into newer, different stacks of paper? You’re telling me that shooting hoops in Europe and getting paid for it is worse?
At one point I believed that after youth was ripped from my still clinging hands my education would really pay off. However that too is a formaldehyde soaked lie we tell ourselves to obfuscate the misery of our choices. After competition is no longer an option the sports lover can choose from many pursuits that build on his playing days. Coaching for instance, keeps you attached to the sport you love and keeps money in your pocket. Coaching is really the sports equivalent of teaching, which of course is the only thing most PhD’s are qualified to do. Journalism, scouting, and broadcasting are all career paths that spring directly from playing the games on the field. Simply put, you do not have to make it all the way to the major professional sports leagues to have a full and lucrative career in athletics.
Most professions require aspirants to go through some undetermined period of entry level hell while they slowly work their way up. The destination is usually a job that conveys just enough money, prestige and thin sense of fulfillment to counterbalance the mendacity of the hobbled march up the ladder. Enjoyment is never a pressing consideration and often enough is actually antithetical to the task at hand. Enjoyment is the full point of athletics. People have so much fun that even when they can’t play themselves they happily pay hard currency watch others play. If you are going to do something for 40 to 100 hours a week, shouldn’t it be something that you enjoy doing? Higher education does not even pretend to offer a life where you’ll be having fun while you earn money. Sad is the person who thinks that a quadratic equation has more intrinsic value than computing an earned run average.
If athletics doesn’t work out for you, you can always go back to school. You can always find your way back into a college and then a post-graduate institution and eventually work you way up to that treasured position as assistant Vice President for children’s marketing at Phillip Morris. Whatever benefits there are to education, that world is always open to you. In contrast, you can never go back to being 14 years old with “explosivity.” We only get one pass through our twenties, and if we spend it locked in a laboratory studying cell mitosis, we can’t reverse course in our thirties and fiddle with our slider. Right now a mother is out there forcibly removing her child from a playing field and demanding that he finish his book report on Moby-Dick. She’s telling him that successful people read books instead of playing games. I hope the kid doesn’t fall for it.
Please send me you stories of how any Nobel laureate you’ve heard of had a better life than Michael Jordan.