In 1992, I spent a week at the minor league spring training camp of the California Angels in Mesa, Ariz.
I was there to do a story about three young Russian players the Angels had signed who would become the first players from that country to play professionally in the U.S. I brought my glove and spikes with me. If I signed a waiver saying I wouldn't sue anyone if I got hurt, the Angels said they might let me play catch with their players.
For a couple of weeks before I went to Mesa, I spent time in coin-op batting cages and working out with Paul Rubin, a friend who had been a world-class fast-pitch softball player. When we went to take our cuts, Paul would set the pitching machine to deliver the fastest pitches and stand a couple of feet in front of the plate.
He had a quick left-handed chop that looked like a tennis player's volley, but I don't think he missed a pitch. He lined just about everything straight back at the machine, more than once sending the ball right back through the hole cut in the netting to allow the machine to deliver the pitch.
Sometimes when people ask me the greatest athletic feat I have ever witnessed, I am tempted to bring up this performance, if only to remind others that not everything happens on television. Though I was impressed, Paul told me it wasn't anything that a lot of the guys he played with and against couldn't do. He was nothing special as a hitter; he just put the ball in play.
While I didn't get to train with the players in the camp, there are few things more relaxed than minor league spring training. I basically had an all-access pass, sitting in the dugout with manager Bill Lachemann during games and keeping score. I got to see the easy grace of the athletes up close.
The Arizona League Angels were the lowest of the low minor leagues, a team made up of kids just out of high school. While there were a couple of more experienced players who were trying to come back from injuries, the overwhelming majority of those in the league were in their first season of professional baseball. For a lot of them, it would also be their last season of professional baseball.
Lachemann--who at 87 is a roving instructor with the Angels, working with the organization's catchers--told me that he didn't expect more than one or two of his players to ever see the inside of a big league locker room.
He was right; the Russians were out of baseball within a couple of years, and the only player on that team to play a game in the majors was John Snyder, who at 17 was the team's youngest player.
Snyder made the roster of the Chicago White Sox in 1998, and for a time in 1999 was one of the best pitchers in the American League. He won 13 of his first 15 decisions. A Chicago writer compared him to a real-life Sidd Finch, the fictional Mets phenom who played French horn and could throw a baseball 168 miles an hour. (Finch was an April Fool's joke concocted by George Plimpton.)
But Snyder's 1999 season ended with surgery on his elbow to remove bone chips. The next year he was traded to the Milwaukee Brewers, where he was one of the worst starters in the league until he was sent down to the minors. He never pitched in the big leagues again and was out of baseball before he was 30, ending his MLB career with 19 wins and 24 losses and a 6.01 ERA.
Which might make him a forgettable footnote except that some of us remember him, and the promise and the talent that he flashed.
I think most people--most men, anyway--who have played at sports underestimate the distance between themselves and those who compete at the highest levels. Lachemann could watch me play catch with a Russian shortstop and know instantly that neither one of us had a chance to be anything more than an "organization player," which is a nice term baseball people apply to total stiffs who might be useful as blocking dummies.
Talent isn't exactly rare, but it is different, and it cannot be willed into existence simply by wanting it more than the other guy. Nature is cruel, and knowing one's limitations is not the same as accepting them.
There was no one on that team who would have admitted to doubting their ability to play in the majors. And if things had broken differently for them, some of them might have made it.
Just as there's not a player on the Travelers who would look out of place on a major league roster if they could get there, everyone on that rookie league team--even the Russians who had started late and had been recruited by bureaucrats to become baseball players after spending their youths training as tennis players and kayakers--at least had the athletic wherewithal to play at the highest level.
Most of us don't.
When I used to play a lot of golf, it wasn't unusual to run into guys who thought that once they turned 50 they might have a chance to compete what was then called the Senior PGA Tour (and now is called the PGA Tour Champions). Some of them seemed to really believe this, and that their only problem was that the tour (being a TV show) made qualifying for events difficult for those who hadn't first established themselves on the regular PGA tour.
Some of these guys were simply delusional, but others were really good players who carried plus handicaps--to vastly oversimplify, a plus handicap indicates that you would be expected to shoot under par on an average golf course--who didn't understand how good the best players in the world actually are.
In high school, I played golf against Hal Sutton. On the range, all of us could tell he was different. There was a quality to how his shots sounded, how they climbed, how they came down. Hal Sutton did not win every high school tournament he ever played in, but nobody who played against him doubted he was in a higher league. You might make the same score as he did on a given hole, but there was another facet to his play that you could not match.
There is no shame in not being good enough to achieve your dreams. But it is hard to learn you were never what you wish you were. The highest and best use for sports is as a way to sound and map our limitations, and to learn with and within them.
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