baseball

For a long time, I never had a hero.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. I had many growing up. Ballplayers, mostly. My parents like to joke that I was born holding a baseball glove, which isn’t too far from the truth. Even now, years after I played my last game, I often dream I’m hitting a baseball. Those dreams are so convincing that my body will turn in my sleep to swing at a pitch that exists only in my mind. I always wake not knowing if I’d missed or put one in the seats.

Baseball was a part of me. It still is.

Which is why I often turn to the game for solace during those long and dark months of winter. My shelves are lined with tomes of baseball history. I recently added another.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advance copy of Pujols: More than the Game, by Scott Lamb and Tim Ellsworth, courtesy of a friend who thought I might enjoy it.

I did. So much so that it’s gotten me thinking.

For those of you who don’t know, Albert Pujols is a professional baseball player for the St. Louis Cardinals. A good one. So good, in fact, that at the tender age of thirty-one, he’s already considered among the best to ever play the game.

I knew that.

He is a nine-time All-star, a three-time MVP, a batting champion, a Silver Slugger, and the National League Rookie of the Year in 2001.

I knew that, too.

What I didn’t know before reading this book was the man behind the uniform, the Clark Kent to his proverbial Superman. Honestly, the prospect of that left me cynical. Remember, I’d spent years without a hero, and for good reason. When a boy grows up admiring athletes who turn out to be gamblers and drug addicts, it’s the play on the field that becomes most important. What happens off it is usually reduced to boys being boys.

But not Albert.

I didn’t know that.

I could tell you the stories I read in those pages. Of how Albert was born in a neglected neighborhood in the Dominican Republic and raised by an alcoholic father he adored nonetheless. Of how he said, “Sometimes we didn’t have anything to eat for breakfast, but if we could eat lunch and dinner, we weren’t poor.” Or how his family moved to New York when Albert was sixteen, but then left for Missouri weeks later when he witnessed a shooting.

I could tell you of his rise to the major leagues or his love for Deidre, his wife. I could tell you of Buddy Walk in the Park Day, “when children with Down syndrome went on field during pregame ceremonies, rubbing shoulders and running the bases with big leaguers.” Two boys asked Albert to hit home runs for him that day. He hit three.

I could tell you that and more. But I won’t. Because that’s not Albert Pujols.

Albert Pujols is the man who says, “Every time I go out there, it’s to glorify God.”

He is the man who considers his faith to be a verb instead of a noun. Who, along with his wife, started the Pujols Family Foundation to “benefit people with Down syndrome, disabilities and/or life threatening illnesses, and children and families living in impoverished conditions in the Dominican Republic.”

He is the man who said, “What people don’t understand is that this work is what I’ve been put on earth to do, and when baseball’s gone and I’m not famous, I’m still going to be doing this work because this is what God’s called me to do.”

Albert Pujols is the only baseball player I’ve ever heard of who thinks he’s not called to play baseball. He’s called to help people.

Sounds strange, doesn’t it? Almost impossible to believe. That a famous, multi-millionaire athlete could see his life in such a manner.

What was even more impossible was how I felt when the book was over—that Albert’s Clark Kent was even better than his Superman.

In an age of steroids and lurid tales and unbridled pessimism, not just of celebrities but of everyone, what we need is not more transparency, but more honesty. More light in the dark places.

More heroes.

Yes, even grown men need heroes. Maybe grown men most of all.

Sports Illustrated ran a cover story on Albert in March 2009. The cover shows him staring into the camera with a bat on his shoulder. The headline read, “Albert Pujols Has a Message: Don’t Be Afraid to Believe in Me.”

It was my high school science teacher who got me interested in people’s trash. If you would’ve known him, you would understand. The man was a lunatic. Imagine a cross between Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Emmitt Brown from the Back to the Future movies, and you’d have a pretty good description.

He was the one who stood in front of me and about twenty other students one day and said that from a scientific perspective, garbage was the most important thing in the world. To him, archaeologists and anthropologists didn’t get much of their information from the things ancient civilizations had left behind, but from the things they threw away. From their garbage.

That little fact may well be the only thing I remember from high school science. It’s managed to stick like a burr in my brain for twenty years. Maybe that’s why I get such a kick about taking the family’s garbage to the dump. I get to see what other people are throwing out. It tells me who they are and what they care about. And, maybe more importantly, what they care about no longer.

I was at the dump the other day when a truck backed in beside mine. The man climbed into the back and began tossing bags over the railing and into the dumpster. I tossed a few of mine.

“How ya doin’?” he asked me.

I tossed a few bags of my own while we made small talk about the weather. I finished unloading before he did, so I leaned against his truck as our conversation wore on.

The man had finished with the garbage bags and was now tossing in other castoffs. A Tiger Woods poster that had come unrolled in transit. Four tiny golf clubs and an even tinier pair of golf shoes. A Nike golf hat.

I was beginning to see a pattern.

“You got a kid who’s a golfer?” I asked him.

“Was,” he said. “Not anymore.”

I nodded. I knew too well the fickle nature of a child’s attention. What he or she is inseparable from one day is landfill fodder the next.

But that wasn’t exactly the reason in his child’s case, because just then he held up another crumpled poster and said, “It was his fault.”

“Tiger Woods?”

“My kid loved golf, and he loved that guy,” he said. “We’d go down to the par-3 almost twice a week. He’s only seven, but he’s pretty good, you know? But then all…that…happened, and even though he can’t understand much of it, he hears stuff other people say. The other day I was out mowing, and I saw all this stuff in the trash. Said he didn’t want to play anymore.”

“Really?”

“I tried talking him out of it,” he said, tossing the poster into the dumpster with the anger and hiss of a fastball. “But I couldn’t. He just said he didn’t care anymore. But I can’t blame him. I did the same thing once.”

“Oh yeah?” I said.

“Yep, back in the 80s. I was in Little League. Loved Pete Rose.”

Oh.

“Let me tell you something, buddy,” he said. “There ain’t no heroes anymore.”

He jumped from the bed of his truck and waved goodbye, leaving me to ponder his last words.

There ain’t no heroes anymore.

Was that true?

I thought back to the heroes of my yesterdays, surprised that I had so many. I was equally surprised to remember that all of them had at some point let me down, whether through their poor choices or the realization that the person they portrayed to their fans and the media wasn’t the person they truly were.

I guess that’s what happens when we put someone on a pedestal. We try to be like them and forget they’re often trying to be someone else. We see the ideal, but not the reality.

The pessimist in me says that anytime we put our faith in another person, we’re sowing the seeds of disappointment. Because it doesn’t matter who you are or what you do or how famous you are, in the end you’re nothing but a person. A fragile, weak, fallen person. No different from anyone else.

But the optimist in me says different. He says that we all need someone to look up to. We all need someone who lights the fire of a dream and sets an example. And I believe that. I really do.

But was that man right? Are there really no more heroes?

Pujols: More than the Game

Heroes

Connect