When 'giving it your all' is giving too much

In an all too predictable scene from last night's Blue Jays game, Brett Lawrie leaped over a guard-rail, Superman-like, to catch a fly ball in Yankee stadium, banging his leg on a smaller railing as he came crashing back to the Earth. (Not that it really matters, but he didn't make the catch.) It doesn't look particularly ugly at first. And then it does with the benefit of a slowed replay and a better angle:


 


To quote the YES network commentators, Lawrie is one of those guys who "gives it their all". And according to Kevin Kaduk with Yahoo Sports, Lawrie "came away with...the respect of those who happened to be watching". But from all the comments I've read, Dirk Hayhurst comes closest to hitting the nail on the head...:

If there is a phone call it will probably be to Gomes. Maybe Hachavarria. Lawrie is a victim of his own intense, all-out play, god bless him.
— Dirk Hayhurst (@TheGarfoose) July 18, 2012

Let's make sure that this is perfectly clear: it isn't a coincidence that Lawrie is both a guy who 'gives it his all' and that he hurt himself, nor should we bemoan how unfortunate it is that such an accident and injury would befall someone who plays so recklessly. (Much less pay him respect for doing so.) It is, in fact, entirely foreseeable, and the injury is the direct result of his overly-intense style of play. And it shouldn't be encouraged.

Because it was also entirely avoidable. What's lacking from the discourse surrounding the injury is any discussion of, frankly, Lawrie's stupidity. Jumping into a concrete camera bay - a concrete camera pit, no less, because it looks like it's recessed from field-level by about 2 feet - is an undeniably stupid thing to do. And we shouldn't lament his accident, praise his vigour, or give him our "respect" when he does things that are unnecessarily dangerous. Instead, we need to hold him accountable, because in hurting himself he also hurts his teammates.

I'll admit that this looks cool, but, seriously,
it's also just completely unnecessary. Photo by the AP.

It's customary, when players are accused of the opposite problem - of playing too lackadaisically, of not running-out a ground ball, not playing hard when the game isn't close - to bench them. (Sometimes, this strategy is misused - like when a player fails to run on a play that's an automatic-out 99% of the time in an 8-0 game. But, sometimes, it makes a lot of sense.) And Lawrie, as a result of his own carelessness, is very likely to miss a game or two. That's maybe something, a de facto suspension, if you will.

But I'm not sure that's good enough. Players get benched for hurting the team because they don't try hard enough - why not bench Lawrie because he hurt the team by trying too hard? (No, seriously.) For his own good, even. Because if someone isn't able to convince him that, occasionally, it's just fine to ease up, he's not going to be long for this sport. And that's bad news for anyone and everyone who's associated with or simply likes the Toronto Blue Jays

Diving, crying, and the masculinity of international football

During either the last World Cup or the one prior to it, a soccer fan tried to recuperate the game for me on the basis that it valued a different kind of masculinity. He argued that my disdain for diving came from a particular kind of North American masculine ethic that valued 'sucking it up' and 'taking it like a man', where injury needs to be hidden rather than expressed. On that front, he was probably right. As critical as I might be of the self-destructive masochism that underlies the way boys are taught to play sports, I also slip into it very easily - in the last two years, I've finished games in which I've broken a bone in my foot and bruised my ribs. (Not in the same game, mind you.)

The kind of masculinity being performed on the pitch, he suggested, was a much more theatrical one that didn't shy away from being emotive and demonstrative, even hysterical. I'm not exactly convinced, because I'm not sure that's exploiting/celebrating an injury or an opponent's miscue - because, technically, a foul is incurred if a player touches his opponent before touching the ball, but the kind of foul is often dependent on how dramatically the fouled player goes down - is really all that laudable. Or, for that matter, that the kind of demonstration required of a dive is something we want to encourage:

This dive is actually pretty hilarious - not only is he leaping, whilst ostensibly
being tripped, but he did so well before the contact (which didn't happen)
could have happened.. No credit available.

I was reminded of how much dives annoy me during Euro 2012, when a player in one of the closing Group round matches (I think it was during England-Ukraine, but I don't actually remember...) was touched - arguably, he was also lightly pushed - on the shoulder and collapsed in a heap, grimacing and clutching his lower back. Amazingly, this dive was so egregious and shameless that it was also one of the rare instances where the commentators saw fit to criticize its obviousness.

That said, Euro 2012 has also reminded me that some good comes with the bad, and that this freedom to emote also means that players are able to behave in ways like this:

Polish players after their elimination from Euro 2012.
Photo from European Pressphoto Agency.

Unlike nearly every major American team sport, soccer players routinely cry - tears of joy, tears of frustration - after games. And with the possible exception of players who are known to dive - like Cristiano Ronaldo - no one makes a particularly big deal out of it. It's treated as if it's normal and natural. Because, well, it is.

I'm not sure if that's enough to balance my hate for diving. But it's something.

Is it okay for stars to be jerks?

Years ago - so long ago, in fact, that I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't remember - I got in an argument with Nathan about Tiger Woods. I told him that I didn't like Tiger because he was a jerk, with respect, specifically, to how he gets mopey and petulant when he does poorly, as if he wants to pick up his ball and go home. I don't remember the details of his response, exactly, but he disagreed. [Nate might want to clarify this a bit.]

Tiger looking despondent after a bad shot. (Or, rather, The New Normal.) Photo from Agence-France Presse.

Anyway, I'm mentioning this because Lance Armstrong has been in the news a couple times in the last month for, of course, being a jerk. If you didn't know, he's now an Iron Man Triathlete - a race length that's roughly four times that of the Olympic length. But he's still the same poor-sport that he was renowned for being whilst doing the cyclying thing.


In the stories that I've linked, Lance is criticized for doing a number of jerky things:

• refusing to shake hands with the winner of a race, after Lance came in second
• refusing to shake hands with the guy who passed Lance at the finish-line of another race (but this was only for sixth place) and, subsequently, ignoring his 10 year-old daughter as she tried to give him a participant medal

Snubbing his daughter. Classy. Screen cap by cafemom.com.

• mocking Olympic triathlon as a "shampoo, blow dry & 10k run" (singling out the "drafting" strategy of having a teammate sacrifice himself in order to help the team's star conserve energy - which, hilariously, is a strategy that every team uses in the Tour de France) and thus offending a bunch of his ostensible peers.

Nice. But this is where the Woods and Armstrong examples converge, for me - is there something about the single-minded focus and intensity that's required to be The Best that can explain (or justify?) that kind of behavior. If you need to dial it up to eleven in order to be The Best, does it in fact make perfect sense that you would take losing - or being embarrassed, as in that second example from Armstrong - really poorly? If you're that invested in the outcome, personally, should you not be really upset when it doesn't work out? But even if that's true, is it justifiable or excusable? And am I simply trying to rationalize some problematic effect of masculine machismo?

Honestly, I'm not sure.

Guest-blog!: Response to the Joel Ward blog

(Victoria Kannen responds to Neil's recent blog about the Joel Ward Twitter-controversy. Victoria may not choose to watch sports, but she does choose to watch The Jersey Shore, and is a doctor of sociology.)

While I agree with Neil's apt assessment that what Joel Ward experienced following his series-winning goal was fueled by systemic racism, I also believe that the responses by these "fans" speak to larger and more complex issues occurring within popular sport as of late. I, as an admittedly non-sports fan, have begun to recently consider the ways in which "fans" are responding to those who they seemingly idolize, support, and "employ." 

Upon reading Neil's discussion, I was reminded of David Beckham's visit to Toronto in early March, where "Beckham was far from a fan favourite from the opening whistle". The "fans" booed, threw streamers and, eventually, hurled a beer can at him. The resulting commentary on this incident was discussed in terms of "the few" who ruined the experience of seeing Beckham for "the many."

Photo by Steve Russell, Toronto Star

So, where does this aggression come from? In Beckham's case, unlike Ward's, the violent reactions were unlikely to be racially-focused, yet they were similar in tone. Attempts by "fans" to demean and humiliate those who excel at the sport they are supposedly fans of cannot be easily dismissed as strictly related to team loyalty.  I feel that the ways in which masculinity, class, and race are working together are particularly important when trying to think through these reactions. 

The complexity of being a fan for sports positions the viewer as one who is both powerful and powerless. Powerful for, as I implied earlier, "employing" the teams that one is watching - buying tickets to their games, donning their gear, blogging about them, etc. which all create the existence of professional sports teams to begin with. But, fans are simultaneously positioned as "less than" - unlikely to have the prestige, ability, or earning power of those that they habitually watch play these games. 

In Ward's case, hurling violent and racist comments was easily achieved by these "fans," as hockey is a primarily white-dominated sport. For Beckham, his beauty and fame could be symbolically tarnished by those who (momentarily) were above him (in the stands). As these sports reactions exist within a cult of incoherent masculinity, it becomes clear that the most basic way to engage with feeling of cultural and social inadequacy is to take it out on those you most resent - the hero for the other team.

Brett Lawrie and 'playing the game the right way'

When the Oakland A's Eric Byrnes finally managed to stick with the big league team in 2003, it was with some serious concerns about his durability. Sure enough, Byrnes did a lot of The Right Things: when Fangraphs last deemed him worth writing about - in 2010 - they noted that he was both beloved and mocked for his "grit", and even his Wikipedia page notes that he was known primarily for his "hustle". Which is to say that he demonstrably tried really hard.

Byrnes, making a play on a routine fly ball. Because that's just how he rolls.

Of course, pushing yourself and hustling non-stop can certainly be a bad thing. (On a personal note: I play really hard, and I only play rec-league softball. Last year, I pulled my rib cage; the year before, I broke a bone in my foot.) Those concerns - made prophetically by scouts and analysts during his breakout in '03, when he was still hitting .350 and leaping for every ball in the outfield - had mostly to do with the fact that he tried too hard, played too recklessly, and couldn't last an entire season. And they were right: Byrnes hit .334 and was 50% better than league average on offense - according to Tom Tango's wOBA - in the first half of the year, which is superstar-calibre hitting; he hit .146 and was 50% below average the rest of the way, which probably isn't even deserving of a spot on the bench. (Though the split isn't as extreme over the length of his career, it remains: his best months were May and June, where he was about consistently about 10% above-average, and his worst were August and September, where he was about 25% below.) As for his durability, he would only once play more than 143 games, and in the eight years between his breakout and retirement - he retired at 34, which is very young for a once-star player with speed and fielding skills - he only averaged 120 games a year, or about 75% of a full-season.

But Brett Lawrie's name appears in the title of this post, doesn't it? And here I am, wasting hundreds of words on Eric Byrnes.

Now, granted, I haven't watched every Blue Jays broadcast so far this year. But when I have, one of Pat and Buck will inevitably make reference to how hard Lawrie plays - often invoking the cliché of "he plays the game the right way". And if you're really lucky, they'll say it repeatedly!

I would ask "what the fuck does that even mean?", but that would be disingenuous - because I do know what it means, and you know that I know what it means, if only because I just went through that whole Eric Byrnes story. (Also, you probably know what it means!) What it means, even if they're incapable of clearly articulating this, is that he runs hard on every ground-ball, he dives for everything remotely near him, and he slides hard into every base. Just like Eric Byrnes.

Lawrie, following an intentional-walk. Seriously, you should see this guy run out a ground-ball.

I actually have a surprisingly clear memory of Lawrie's first Major League triple. He hit it at home (against the Angels - I had to look that up) and it could have easily been a stand-up, because he's that fast. But, because he was probably too pumped up to notice that there was no play, he dove into the base, head-first and hard. Which seems pretty innocuous, but - and maybe you shouldn't take my word for this, because Lawrie has about 10x the pectoral muscle-mass that I have - holy shit, does sliding on your chest across dirt ever bang up your body. It was completely unnecessary. And it certainly wasn't the only time he's done it without having to.

And while all this might sound laudable, it really isn't. It doesn't actually make sense for an MLB player to run their hardest on every grounder, because 99% of the routine ones will be fielded, thrown, and caught cleanly. Likewise, it may make sense to ease up on fielding a difficult ball in a low-leverage situation, or choose to slide feet-first rather than the considerably more dangerous (but more controllable and possibly faster) head-first. Injury is probably the most important factor, here, (lemme say it again: Eric Byrnes) but common sense should come into play, too - don't use all your bullets unless/until you need to. Because, make no mistake, your body only has so many dives, slides, and full-speed sprints locked inside of it.*

But back to "playing the game the right way", and the full implications of what it means to say that. David Savran once wrote that masculinity is an accomplishment, but a particularly masochistic one - a constant struggle to measure up to an impossibly high standard, one where your failures and their accompanying pain are themselves the mark of normative manhood. It's not about "mastery" but "the act of being subjected, abused, even tortured". (I think there's space, here, for a totally different but entirely interesting discussion about why we like to celebrate the plucky guys who live on the fringe and hate/resent the guys who make it look too easy.)

So, part of what it means to "play the right way" is, in fact, to subject your body to unreasonable amounts of stress and risk injury - and to prove your worth and suitability through the accumulation of injuries. And while his career ended early, this style of play ultimately proved to be a pretty good investment for Eric Byrnes. How's that? Well, he parlayed his best season and reputation for grittiness into a $30 million contract, a contract that he would never come even close to making good on. But, obviously, what's good for your masculine credibility is bad for your body. (And bad for the team.) It would just be nice for the people within baseball, cheering on the masochism, to acknowledge that more often.


* I realize that this might sound contradictory or hypocritical, because in my first live-blog I criticized Pat Tabler for suggesting that guys "concentrate more" when the game is on the line. But this isn't a concentration thing - if anything, it's the opposite, because I'm saying that players like Lawrie lose their concentration and seem to let their adrenaline dictate their pace of play.