August 22, 2019: Elite Athletes are Very Different From You and Me

Even those of you who don’t care much about sports might find something interesting in this: it’s a musing over how much better at one thing some people are than the rest of us. The gaps are pretty much incredible. It absolutely extends over fields. I met tens of lawyers who instinctively had a better sense for the logic of the law than I do. How are the elite athletes so much better than the rest of us? How MUCH better are they, really? To paraphrase the Duke law professor from the immediately previous blog post, I have no idea.

I can only speak to baseball, because that’s the sport I was the best at and thus the one I can most closely relate to. Also, the other sports: basketball players are so frighteningly large and fast, and football players are, almost without exception*, completely different people altogether.

Baseball, I can see. I’m the same size as a couple of major league pitchers, at least: Buzz Capra and the far better-known Ron Guidry, from years ago. Theoretically, I could have pitched in the major leagues as my size wasn’t necessarily a hindrance.

In high school, we had a good shortstop, Tony “Nino” Giammaresi. He was the sort of person who I figured didn’t like me, but that would have required him to notice me. (He did, twice; once, in the locker room near the end of our senior year, he said how he was taking a road trip with a girl and expected it to go well. Then he glanced at me and grinning stupidly made the international symbol for a hand job.)

Tony was drafted by the Cleveland Indians after his senior year. In retrospect, it’s funny to imagine as he wasn’t the kind of player who made your eyes bug out. He hit OK, and he was a competent shortstop, but I don’t recall him making any amazing plays. Anyway, he played for several Cleveland Indians minor league teams in 1972-73, and then made an odd, brief comeback in 1976 for 20 games.

He wasn’t any good. Over the whole time, he batted only .196, which won’t keep you in the Major Leagues. A minimum is about .220, if you’re a really excellent fielder to make up for not hitting.

Also, Tony was an awful fielder as a pro: his fielding average in the low minor leagues was .882, which means that he made an error once every 10 chances. A good major league shortstop, like Andrelton Simmons, is a hundred points higher.

One thing I hear in the many games I watch on TV is that players just arriving at the major leagues have trouble sometimes because the game moves so fast for them. The coaches suggest not rushing but instead making the game come to you, whatever that means. But it’s telling; even the elite who make it to the major leagues face a series of adjustments for the speed of the game.

Poor Tony. How fast must the game have seemed to him? How hard were the balls hit, how fast did he have to move? Those of you who read the early post “Baseball, Baseball” know that Tony didn’t exactly have the best high school coach. One father said, “You just have to hope to come through the year without him damaging you.” I know for a fact Tony didn’t learn anything.

In those days, we didn’t have travel teams, expensive agglomerations of boys who may even take plane flights to play in tournaments. We just had all-star tournaments. I wonder at times when a scout saw Tony; it must have been at our high school games. Maybe there was some super secret travel team that he played on, but I never heard of it. So he probably wasn’t getting any extraordinary coaching.

All right, it’s time to wonder a little. Tony was the best player on our team, minus yours truly, of course. (I did get Tony out four times in an all-star game where we faced off. But one of his outs was the highest pop fly anyone has ever hit, and another was a line drive to the third baseman.) So then he goes to a rookie league and then Class A, and can’t really perform at all.

Who got promoted to Class Double A from his team? Triple A? Who made the majors? I took a look at the roster of the 1976 Class A Beeville*** Bees, and no name looked remotely familiar. All those dreams squashed like east Texas cockroaches.

But wow, all of those guys were better than I was, and better than Tony. But they didn’t make it. What the heck are actual major leaguers like? They’re like the rich; they’re very different from you and me.

And their gradations of difference are numerous and enormous, and we have no idea what it’s like. Poor Tony didn’t survive it. Google doesn’t reveal what he’s doing now, but, given his personality, it can’t be pretty. He didn’t come to our 20th reunion. No wonder. Someone would have asked him what happened, and, for him like for the rest of us in our own worlds, it would have been too much to answer.

*I had an Auburn University running back, Lionel “Little Train” James, in my freshman composition class. He was all of 5’6” and my weight, about 170 back then. He was a running back on the football team, and later had a notable pro football career with the San Diego Chargers. How he survived is a good question. Sitting in the back of my class and staring at me, he looked scared to death. He, who faced defensive backs twice his size, scared of me? He was a good writer and earned his B.

**Beeville, Texas, population 13,290. I bet Tony wasn’t getting any hand jobs there. Fortunately, he didn’t have to stay too long.