Was Knowing Your Weakness What Made You Strong?

Having started following baseball just as the New York Mets' run of excellence from the 1980s was winding down, I stepped into a fandom that saw my favorite team go from a major contender in 1990 to sub-.500 in the 1991 and 1992 seasons to not even winning 60 games in 1993. The lattermost of those clubs were comprised of many of the individuals who were featured in The Worst Team Money Could Buy, a book that chronicled the many layers of dysfunction that led to a team loaded with major talent floundering in ways that often strained credulity. While the "Bonilla-era" Mets teams were and still are deemed to have been laughing stocks, I still consider their efforts to remain a major contender admirable from a fan's perspective. Given that the majority of Major League Baseball teams are among the far too many entities in our current culture that most often operate from a viewpoint solely focused on extracting as much profit as possible, it has become increasingly common to see clubs with more than ample means eschew acquiring potentially valuable players who could increase their chance of winning. "Payroll flexibility" has become to sports what "trickle-down economics" is to politics and economics - a nice carrot to dangle in front of the masses that makes it seem like things will be done to make their experiences/lives better, only for money to remain firmly in the pockets of the obscenely wealthy.

1995 Topps Traded - Ryan Jaroncyk

To that end, with the careers of Gary Carter and Keith Hernandez winding down, Darryl Strawberry leaving for Los Angeles, and other key components of the team's successes in the 1980s heading elsewhere, there was not much more for which a fan could ask than for a team of means to use it in an attempt to retool the squad by acquiring a bevy of former all-stars - most of whom were coming off of successful seasons. Unfortunately, as noted, these efforts failed in a blaze of ignominy, leading the Mets to finally face the reality of having to rebuild. While seeing a run of perennial contention (or at least expected contention) come to an end stings, there is also an allure to the opportunity to create a new team from relative scratch. The mid-1990s Mets' path to potential future success looked to be as bright as it could be in spite of the major league squad's consistent struggles. Most notably, the trio of young hurlers dubbed "Generation K" (Jason Isringhausen, Bill Pulsipher, and Paul Wilson) were likened to the Atlanta Braves dominant starting rotation, Rico Brogna and Jeff Kent flashed the potential of being long-term mainstays in the middle of the order, and Cuban signee Rey Ordoñez garnered comparisons to legendary shortstop Ozzie Smith (unfortunately, while Ordoñez's glove was great, his offense never came close to improving in the manner that Ozzie's did).

As is often the case with multi-year plans, most of those aforementioned expectations were not necessarily met, although major strides made by others like Edgardo Alfonzo and Todd Hundley would help power the team back into contention at the end of the decade. Another player expected to be in the mix by that point was the team's top draft pick in 1995, high school shortstop Ryan Jaroncyk. Although pretty much any highly-regarded player will pique the interest of a young fan, I recall nothing but effusive praise for Jaroncyk's ability and potential when reading baseball magazines, a sentiment echoed within this 2017 piece from Sports Illustrated. It certainly sounded as though Jaroncyk was destined for stardom, which scouts and team executives continued to believe even as the young shortstop struggled to excel in his first few professional seasons.

Ryan Jaroncyk, of course, did not become a star in the major leagues. Not only did he not play at the sport's highest level, he did not reach AA ball. Due in large part to having been pushed to succeed in an unhealthy fashion by his overbearing father and not fitting in with the majority of his teammates, Jaroncyk's love for the sport of baseball quickly eroded, leading to an abrupt retirement when he was just 20 years old. As the SI piece outlines, Jaroncyk attempted to make this known to team executives, but it really feels as though his efforts were not taken seriously or believed until Jaroncyk indeed made good on his desire to discard all of his baseball equipment. As a baseball-obsessed 13-year-old, I was similarly stunned. After all, how could someone so awesomely skilled and lucky to play for the best team in the world ever want to stop playing? I was never upset at Jaroncyk; rather, I simply did not yet possess the perspective to understand his viewpoint.

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I am really not sure why many of the reactions from Andrew Luck's abrupt retirement on Saturday night bothered me so much, other than that it feels like an all too familiar tale in which society's expectations of people manage to include everything aside from consideration of an individual's needs. I stopped watching the NFL several years ago for a myriad of reasons, which will no doubt become the crux of a future post, although Luck's entry into the NFL preceded that date. While the NFL is a den of toxic masculinity, Luck seemed to be a welcome respite from the often harsh culture that permeates the sport, as he often seemed to actively steer interviews toward his outside interests. This led to interesting discussions on topics such as architecture and classic literature, with the former being Luck's major at Stanford and one that most college coaches would have likely pushed him to eschew in favor of a less-taxing courseload had Luck's father, Oliver, not been a major figure in the college sports landscape.

Although the dynamic is most prominent in the NFL among the major professional sports, it is a common aspect of American life to define a person by their work and expect that to be where their focus most often lies. Aside from that constant dedication at the expense of actual healthy life-work balance, having independent thoughts and utilizing that skill is quizzically considered to be a weakness in an athlete/employee rather than a strength. Current Boston Celtics star Jaylen Brown was anonymously criticized in the lead-up to the 2016 NBA Draft. "For what?," you might ask. For being "so smart" and "questioning authority" in the form of *gasp* asking questions of his coaches so as to understand why certain strategies or decisions were made. While the executive cited in the linked piece claims to not have considered Brown's curiosity to be a bad thing, Benjen Stark's quote (attributed to Ned) about "nothing that someone says before the word "but" really counts" would seem to hold true given that the slagging of Brown's inquisitiveness continued unabated after the weak denial.

To a lesser degree, Luck's outside interests were held against him within certain NFL circles and his ridiculous critics have made their presence known when given an opportunity. There is a certain irony to claiming that Luck lacked dedication to both the sport and his team, particularly given the lengths to which he went to continue playing even after suffering through a litany of injuries so brutal that even one would be life-defining to most people. With the season on the horizon and Luck having worked hard to again rehabilitate from injury, Occam's Razor should lead one to take Luck at his word that the mental and physical toll that playing the sport had taken was indeed too much to bear.

And yet rather than demonstrate any semblance of empathy or sympathy, there still remains too many people who will jump to decry anyone's decision to perform self-care as being an act of weakness. This was first evidenced by the news-breaking tweet that termed Luck as having 'checked out,' a dogwhistle term designed to frame the call as an act of desertion rather than necessity. Former quarterback Steve Beuerlein added to the pile of ironic messages by noting that he underwent 19 surgeries over the course of his career, an effort to minimize the personal pain that Luck has endured rather than considering his experience to be a fate that Luck and others should want to avoid. Noted terrible human Dan Dakich attempted to post a bingo by calling out Luck's supposed lack of toughness while also unnecessarily touting the virtues of cops and calling out the quarterback's salary compared to that of "ordinary people" (as though that denies Luck or anyone else the right to make personal decisions). Again, this all comes back to wanting to portray athletes as being weak when they do anything other than run headlong into a wall over and over without having the temerity to ask why. The fact that the Indianapolis Colts are left without a legitimate signalcaller so close to the start of the season is, in a vacuum, certainly less than ideal. That, however, is completely different discussion than whether Andrew Luck has a right to determine whether what his life should be, yet there is a reason why the former is being used to override consideration of the latter.

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I have coached with/for several coaches who, if they had their way, would have preferred for their players to have nothing in the way of outside interests, with several actually attempting to dissuade (to put it nicely) kids from playing other sports and signing up for activities. To these coaches, baseball - more specifically our baseball teams - was of greater importance than any of this supposed external noise. The fact that these coaches played other sports when they were young was often totally ignored, as pushing players to solely focus on the team for which the coaches were then in charge took precedence over what the kids wanted to do with their lives and time. This type of pressure is difficult for anyone, let alone minors who desperately want to impress and often pay fealty to authority, which led to many kids bypassing activities that might have brought them more enjoyment than did additional rounds of indoor batting practice during the winter. Along these lines, it was hardly uncommon to see players not want to be a part of the uncaring and sometimes toxic sports cultures that I have had the misfortune of observing. Almost to the number, these players would be termed as "not being able to hack it," yet another euphemism for alleged mental weakness.

It is hard to define why the choices made by the likes of Jaroncyk, Luck, Brown, and the youth players are often framed as instances of "weakness" past the fact that control over other people is important to the retention of power and people having a difficult time in rationalizing that others can have priorities that differ from their own interests. For me, these actions are not ones of weakness, but of courage and strength. It is hard to feel like you are letting others down, to stand up to authority when it applies pressure, to value your spiritual well-being over money or perceived glory. There have certainly been times in which I have made a tough call to recognize that I was not emotionally or physically able handle certain tasks, as well as far more occasions in which I have done what many want Luck to do and sucked it up to my own detriment. Growing up in a sports and societal structure that is centered around owing something to groups/teams, it is hard to divorce those feelings of obligation from the processes used to recognize what will actually be best for oneself.

I can guarantee that Ryan Jaroncyk did not want to retire in the middle of his team's season, that Luck wanted no part of making his club feel like it was left holding the bag days before their season starts, and that the kids I know had hoped to keep playing a sport that they loved until placed in an unhealthy situation. That these individuals and anyone else who faces a similar situation are able to recognize that what they needed was to no longer be a part of such harmful cultures and took steps to care about their well-being is not weakness - it is a strength.