Is Sobriety About Hitting Singles?

I’m grateful for a plate appearance. I’m grateful for believing that the things that are supposed to happen generally do happen. I’m grateful for pink, sunrise-tinted clouds. I’m grateful for a messy desk and good coffee. I’m grateful to be sober today.

It turns out that I may not have been the first one to try to popularize the “Mystery Button.” I will say that the implementation here is relatively benign. I give you my word that pressing the “Mystery Button” here will likely never involve any actual physical consequences or a need for a shower.

We’re brief today, owing to the fact that I’ve got a relatively important future-determinative type of meeting very soon. I’ve come to think of these as being like plate appearances in baseball. In my over-romantic version of my own life, I very much like the image of the aging veteran coming out of the dugout, his team very badly needing a hit, hoping he can pull it off, one more time.

I watched a lot of baseball as a kid, a lot of Cubs and Cardinals games, and with the advent of cable tv, there were another 162 Atlanta Braves games a season available (not a Braves fan). I liked flashy outfielders, like Willie Wilson for the Royals, of course Willie Mays (I treasured that baseball card), and Willie McGee of the Cardinals. Wait, are all the good outfielders from the 1970’s named Willie? But the guys I really loved watching, I can even still remember some of their at-bats, were two kind of marginal players of the 1970s. They were real-life versions of the Crash Davis character in “Bull Durham,” once-flashy prospects, now fading careers, playing out the string, but in a gloriously epic way.¹

I’m talking about Dave “Kong” Kingman and Jack “the Ripper” Clark. Later in their careers, when they came to the plate as pinch hitters, they carried super anemic batting averages, but man, they came up with the clutch hits. In Dave Kingman’s case, monstrous, unexpected home runs. Neither guy is in the Hall of Fame. Kingman ended up 4th on the all-time strikeout list with more than 1800 in his career. “Jack the Ripper,” not far behind, with 1400 career strikeouts. Those guys were the reason that coaches would always counsel “making good contact,” hitting singles as the way to prosperity and success.

I was pretty fascinated with Japanese baseball, too. It was the era of Sadaharu Oh—who hit a shit-ton of home runs for the Yomiuri Giants. But Japanese baseball was very fixated on singles and running out bunts. I was much more taken with Jack Clark coming out of the dugout, trying to keep the 8th Inning, bottom of the order rally going, and the Cardinals down a couple of runs. There’s a guy on second and one out, and you know he’s got someone telling him to shorten his swing, make contact, just put it in play, hit behind the runner and move him over. “Single as good as a double, baby.” These being all of the time-tested ways of advancing runners and winning baseball games. He knows all that, digs in a little at the plate, he’s not looking at short right field. That first pitch comes in tight, away from the barrel of the bat and to prevent him from extending his arms on the swing. It’s a test, is he looking to dump the ball in right field? No, you can feel the breeze in the outfield from that swing. He’s staring at the wall behind the power gap in left field the whole f****** time.

Statistics are a funny thing, sometimes. I can remember Dave Kingman coming to bat late in his career, carrying a batting average of like .197. How was he still wearing a major league uniform? Because when things were dicey and you really needed a hit, this was a guy who knew how to do that and in big-time situations. I guess I very much identify with the Quixote-esque veteran emerging from the dugout, lots more of these situations in the past than in the future. The voices in the dugout chorus are all extolling the virtues of just a single in this instance. My plan involves arriving at Second Base, standing up.

That’s the fantasy at least.

As I was writing yesterday, I realized that one of the critical parts of the Third Step is also acceptance. My drinking was largely an effort to avoid accepting what actually was my life, or what my life had become. The process of recovery has involved exploring myself pretty diligently, using the tools of the 4th and 5th Steps to help come up with an accurate picture of myself. The task, once this project is complete-ish and the final product is undraped, is to accept whatever emerges. There are plenty of things to change, but I think it’s more about accepting and understanding those foibles, focusing more on loving and accepting myself than changing myself.

I am who I am. I’ve had to learn a lot of hard lessons, and given who I am, I’ve insisted on learning a lot of them the hard way. I don’t see recovery as something I cling to, like a life preserver after a shipwreck. I see recovery as that moment when I walk out of the dugout, knowing exactly who I am and what I need to do. Having the courage to go up there, take my cuts and live with the results. That is often referred to as “living life on life’s terms.” Whatever. That’s what I’ve had to do with my actual life and today is one of the days that I worked very hard for; the chance to make a metaphorical plate appearance.²

I’ll be super-focused, I’ve been in these situations before. A little nervousness, a touch of stickiness to the hands, but that can be used to sharpen the focus a bit. Great hitters make a decision to swing or not within milliseconds of the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand. Great hitters can actually see the spin on the ball and process the aerodynamical information, calculate where the bat needs to be, all in those few milliseconds. And if they can manage a hit one out of three times, they are promised immortality.

For the aging pinch hitter, the laws of large numbers mean that there isn’t much upward or downward mobility in the statistics. After this many plate appearances, a hit won’t change his career batting average. There is only this one moment. He needs a hit. He’s looking at that wall…

1. I don’t mean to be a film critic today, but the ouevre of Kevin Costner has not aged well. “Bull Durham” was a much, much better book called “Shoeless Joe,” written by, of course, a one-time resident of Iowa City.

2. Actually, today’s festivities are not in a stadium or arena, but in an office building near Bryant Park.