Roth ERA

Baseball managers aren’t known for saying profound or even particularly interesting things. They tend to talk a lot about how the team needs to avoid distractions and play one game at a time, or how this or that player consistently gives his teammates 110%--the laws of physics be damned. Lately I’ve noticed that every time Washington Nationals manager Davey Johnson is asked some predictably benign question, the first words out of his mouth are, “There’s no question about it.” Which seems to me another way of saying, “I see your banality and raise you one.”

I used to think there was at least one managerial quotation that was both memorable and amusing: when, one time, some crusty old skipper, having been asked what he thought about his team’s poor execution on the field, looked squarely into the TV camera and quipped, “I’m in favor of it.” Meaning, their literal execution. But when I searched for the source of that line earlier today, I discovered that a football coach—John McKay, then of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, had uttered it. (He’d actually called mass homicide “a good idea,” but, same message.)

At any rate, precisely because baseball managers never say anything of note, I was caught off guard earlier this week when a member of that fraternity said something that truly resonated with me. And that even alluded to a critically acclaimed film.

The speaker was Clint Hurdle, manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. He was speaking in the aftermath of his team’s 11-0 pounding that night by the Los Angeles Dodgers, the latest loss in a precipitous August swoon by a ballclub that by nearly all measures vastly outperformed expectations throughout the 2012 season’s first four months. For the past fortnight, however, the team’s offensive output has been sinking steadily while the pitchers' earned run average (ERA) has been just as quickly rising.

Here’s what Hurdle said:

“What does that guy say in The Godfather? ‘This is the life we’ve chosen’? This is the life we’ve chosen. It’s hard right now. Figure it out. We’ve got to play better.”

Never mind that he got both the movie and the quote wrong. The film was The Godfather Part II, and the line was, “This is the business we’ve chosen.” Never mind, too, that by vaguely identifying the quote’s source as, simply, “that guy,” Hurdle did vast injustice to a brilliantly drawn character—Hyman Roth, the steely onetime business partner of Vito Corleone, as conceived by the novelist Mario Puzo—and to the man who portrayed Roth in the Oscar-winning 1974 film. Never was the adage “those who can’t do, teach” so utterly disproven than when the eminent acting coach Lee Strasberg turned Roth into one of the more indelible screen presences of any film year—most notably in the scene Hurdle inexactly referenced.

In that scene, a seething but controlled Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino) wants to know who ordered the hit on a mobster who’d been a Corleone ally. He knows full well that Roth gave the order, and Roth knows that he knows. But rather than confirming his role in the murder, Roth—sitting wearily on the couch, looking well past his prime in his unbuttoned shirt, his old-man chest spilling out—responds with the story of how, when Roth’s mobster friend Moe Green had been gunned down many years before—a hit that both Roth and Michael know damn well had been the handiwork of Michael’s father, “I let it go. And I said to myself,” Roth adds, “this is the business we’ve chosen. I didn’t ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business!”

First of all, go find that scene on YouTube. It’s awesome. Second of all, I don’t blame you if you deem the connection to baseball obscure. I mean, who ever ordered a hit on anybody on the baseball diamond? And, steroids aside, where’s the criminal connection? Yet I completely got what Hurdle was trying to say. Which was this: Baseball is the life—the business—to which Hurdle signed up. It can be an uplifting life, as it was through the month of July, when the Pirates were threatening to overtake the division-leading Cincinnati Reds and seemed likely to cap their first winning season in 20 years with a playoff spot. Or, it can be a crappy life, as has been the case lately, with the team playing so poorly and its breakdown so complete that even a winning record no longer seems a lock.

Interestingly, too, Hurdle, a former player, arrived in the big leagues in the 1970s as a can’t-miss prospect, but he never achieved anything close to stardom. So, he has double-dipped when it comes to the peaks and valleys of his chosen life—or business, if you prefer.

What viscerally struck me about Hurdle’s muddled reference to Hyman Roth, and idea of accepting one’s lot, might be apparent to anyone who remembers my blog post of April 8, 2011. Which of course you don’t. Why would you? Among the dozen or so people (forgive that optimism) who regularly visit this blog, most aren’t baseball fans. In fact, I’ll be lucky if three or four people read this post all the way through, given that “baseball” is its first word. But, to refresh your memory (or to inform you, if you quickly switched Web sites last April or fell asleep at your computer), that post , headlined “The Boys of Bummer,” laid out in excruciating detail my then-41-year obsession with the same Pittsburgh Pirates who lately have been tanking like Panzers under Allied bombing during World War II.

In that post, I described how what had begun as casual fandom at age 12, born of antipathy toward the New York Mets, quickly and cancerously grew into a sick obsession in its own right, characterized by and manifested in all manner of OCD behaviors and laughably over the-top mood swings. Except that I’ve seldom laughed, and rather have mostly been miserable, given the Pirates' aggregation over the years of (as I put it then) “on-field mediocrity, front-office incompetence and hope-draining budgetary miserliness.”

So, enter the 2012 season, which has thrown a big twist into the Six Stages of Grief I typically experience during any given Pittsburgh Pirates campaign. Actually, most years are dominated by Acceptance—resignation that the team is dreadful and has zero chance at a winning record. (Not that I don't Bargain for better, regardless, or Grieve when better never comes.) This year, however, per my earlier allusion, the Pirates played four full months of pretty solid baseball. Even at this writing, after the horrendous events of the last couple of weeks, they still stand a better than even chance of beating that sub-.500 curse and concluding the season with more wins than losses. This is where such grief stages as Shock (“They’re winning?”), Denial (“It can’t last, right?”), and, lately, Anger (“Damn you for suckering me!") all figure prominently.

But you know, I think Hyman Roth—or was it Clint Hurdle?—said it best when he observed, “This is the business”—the life, whatever—“we’ve chosen.” By “we,” I mean obsessive sports fans like me, whatever our particular poison might be in terms of sport or team. By “chosen,” I really mean something closer to “temperamentally or perhaps chemically devoted to.” It’s a consuming thing. It’s almost operatic, like the Grand Guignol of the Godfather saga—except that the stage isn’t quite so grand. It's more rock-operatic, perhaps.

Whatever, we can’t really help ourselves. Or at least I can’t. As Michael Corleone himself exclaimed much later his criminal career, in a sequel, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” I spend each baseball offseason swearing I will change, and sometimes, in the cold light of January, I feel as if I have. Even at my lowest ebbs, I try to be a mature and reasonable adult. I really do. Just last night, at Lynn’s very strong urging (shall we say) I bit back my sorrow and fury over a blown 3-0 Pirates lead for long enough to truly enjoy a film and reception we attended in Washington.

But tonight I’ll again be a bundle of nerves. The Pirates face off in St Louis against a Cardinals team that looks all too certain to leapfrog them in the National League Central Division standings and to claim the wild card playoff spot that once seemed theirs for the taking. More important to me, there will be no winning record without at least 17 more triumphs. Will that rather modest goal, at least, be achieved?

Unfortunately, disinterest isn’t an option for me. As always, the Boys of Bummer have got me by the, well, you know what they've got me by. Because this, you see, is the business I’ve chosen.