Tinker Bell Is Dead

At the heart of all professional sports is a willful delusion.  There has to be.  It's the only thing that keeps it going.

The athletes we root for don't play for dear old State.  They don't hail from our hometown, they aren't people we grew up knowing.  The stadiums where they play aren't even the ones we went to as kids.  As Jerry Seinfeld likes to say, we're really rooting for the laundry.

And more and more, the guys who wear the right laundry make more money in a year than most of us will in a lifetime.  Increasingly, even getting to the game once a season is a nearly intolerable expense, especially for a family.

But that doesn't matter.  Because the players buy into the delusion, too, most of them.  Most of the time.  They push their bodies to the limit.  Run into walls, concuss themselves, tear up their hamstrings.

Some of them go even further, and enhance their performance with substances that can cause untold damage, now or down the road.  We don't ask them to do that—but we don't really complain, either, as long as they produce.

The one thing we can't abide?  When they won't abide by the delusion.

Oh, sure, nobody gives their very top game over the whole of the long season.  It's not possible.  Even the most committed to the game, the greatest gamers and hustlers, get too dinged up or exhausted, or occasionally hung over or just mentally tired to ever quite give their all, everyday, every play.

And yet.  And yet.  To openly throw away the delusion, as Gary Sanchez did last night,  ruins everything.

I can't say what's going on with him.  Not fully healed from the injuries that have plagued him this year?  Upset over some perfectly understandable personal problem?  Withdrawing, maybe, from whatever PEDs fueled his "stardom" in the first place?  A "bad attitude"—way too often the default problem attributed to players of color?

Just a searing lack of confidence that has turned into a runaway neurosis?  That's been known to happen, too, in our game.

But whatever the reason, if he's not going to try, this is not going to work.

ALL-CAPS mentioned the glory days of Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson, Billy Martin, and George Steinbrenner.  None of the four would exactly be considered a model of emotional health.

Mostly, I suppose, they were pouring into the game what they lacked in other parts of their lives, thanks to one thing or another, probably having to do with monstrous and unappeasable fathers.  But whatever the reason, they devoted themselves to winning.  Sometimes stupidly and counter-productively, to be sure.  But they never lacked that passion for the game that makes the delusion possible.

It's silly, really.  Running around the country, dressed in these outfits, playing a boy's game.  But that's the contract:  upholding the delusion.

It's like that part in Peter Pan, where everyone has to clap their hands to bring Tinker Bell back to life.  Is it stupid and childish?  Hell, yeah.

But that's why we're all here.