As you might be able to tell from the title above, I've been watching "Scrubs" a lot lately. It's been holding me over until baseball starts, when I can spend no fewer than three hours each day watching MLB.tv -- and once I get home, YES Network. With the season just days away, I've been spending some time thinking about baseball and -- in the overly sappy and sentimental style of "Scrubs" -- what the game means to me. And I think my relationship with the sport can be boiled down to one memory.
Before everybody hit puberty, I was pretty good at sports. I ran a little track, was the starting point guard on an AAU team and even played in a couple USTA junior tennis tournaments. But my sport -- the one I dreamed of playing in college (I was a realist) -- was always baseball. As soon as T-ball ended, cleats were actually needed, parents started getting crazy and I was the guy on the mound. I never was that great at the plate or in the field, but my arm won me my Little League street cred. I wasn't one of the big kids in the league -- the 11-year-olds who rocked moustaches and smelled like Turkish bathhouses -- so I had to get by with good control and decent velocity.
When I was in fifth grade, I led my team to the championship game. I remember the feeling on the drive over to Randall's Island, a little plot of land under this giant bridge that connects Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx and is home to a good 20 baseball diamonds. (See, we don't have backyards in New York. Our games aren't held on the greenest of fields in quiet towns. They happen on converted landfills with traffic thundering along on overpasses above.) I was and am generally a mild-mannered kid who doesn't get too nervous or anxious about things. But sitting in the backseat of our minivan, I could barely sit still.
But I got off to a good start, striking out two of the first three batters. I settled in and started to relax. By the bottom of the sixth and final inning, the game was tied at 0-0, and all of sudden, I started to get wild. After a couple walks and an error, the bases were loaded with two outs. I took a deep breath, turned around and saw the only girl in the entire league stepping into the batter's box: my buddy Hayley. She was incredibly cool, a total tomboy, but I knew she couldn't hit. All I had to do was throw three strikes. Problem was, I had a "Helga loves Arnold" crush on this girl.
I tried to slow things down, basically lobbing the ball over the plate. The count eventually went full and the crowd was going nuts. And I remember having this conscious moment when I realized how little this game really mattered. I realized that after this was over, all I would really want was for Hayley to like me.
I threw the full-count pitch with no weight on my shoulders; a strike would mean a win and a ball would mean that my crush wins. The pitch sailed high, the other team rushed the field, and I was OK. Fine, really. I had a decent arm and a love for the game, but I just couldn't convince myself that nothing was more important than a win. I couldn't make myself believe that winning wasn't just a possible outcome but as necessary as breathing. I didn't think the way great competitors think. I was too distracted by the girl.
It was a defining moment for me. At a young age I learned that while I love sports unconditionally, I don't have the competitive streak to play them at a high level. That's why I truly admire the people that do. It's also the reason I sit on the sidelines writing instead of standing on the field playing. And I'm totally happy with that.
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