Buster Posey is retiring and I feel... fine
Sometimes an athlete comes along who makes you feel like a kid and think like an adult
Twelve-year-olds make the best sports fans. At that age, you have the capacity for just the right amount of knowledge about a favourite player. At that age, your ratio of abundant free time to minuscule responsibilities grants you carte blanche to obsess over outcomes and results of the team you support. At that age, there’s no embarrassment in having your identity wrapped up in something that’s only as meaningful as you want to make it.
If you’re lucky enough to have had a somewhat sheltered childhood, there’s a purity, an innocence to being 12 and cheering for someone who is great at what they do. Because what they do, the part of their life that’s visible to you, is all you require to understand who they are: Player A is great at playing, therefore he is great.
Later, you come to understand that athletes and trainers and managers are all fallible human beings. They make decisions based on what’s best for them. Your comprehension of sport evolves, and you see its seemingly seedier aspects: how it’s run like a business, the confrontational and sometimes exploitive relationship between owners and players, the enduring risks of physical harm to athletes, the interminable stress and pressure and otherworldly toxicity of expectations put on performers, the scandals, the authority figures who abuse their power.
There is no industry on earth you can’t liken to a hot dog factory: once you see how the sausage is made, the wiener’s appeal is reduced. But somehow, our dissonance related to the sports-industrial complex is better shrouded than it is with others.
I write “our dissonance,” but what I really mean is “my dissonance.” Living and dying vicariously with every pitch, kick, pedal stroke, stride and shot is acceptable — maybe even a little bit adorable — when you’re 12, but a 38 year old, dressed in his favourite team’s kit, head in hand at his friend’s bar with salty, back-of-throat tears forcing their way out of his red eyes after his side lost in the semifinals of the Champions League (a personal low-point)… well, it’s a little less becoming.
I began writing this to express how Buster Posey, who is expected to announce his retirement from Major League Baseball today, made me feel like a 12-year-old sports fan again. He was so frequently successful and easy to like and symbolic of everything you think athletes are when you’re younger that it seemed natural for even a hardened adult to find themselves cheering him on like he was a superhero and they were a child.
While this remains true to me, somewhere in my rambling about searching for a healthier relationship with sports, it’s dawned on me that Posey, who took the 2020 season off and is leaving the game while still able to perform at an elite level, is proving himself to have had not just a Hall of Fame career but a healthier sense of priorities and values than most athletes and fans could ever hope for themselves.
He walks away from a competitive team, $22 million dollars in salary and an upcoming season in which he likely would have featured in the less demanding designated hitter position. And while, initially, it made me sad that I’d never again be able to see his batting stance in the batter’s box or hope for one of his trademarked hugs of a battery mate after the last out of a major win, I find myself filled with an unexpected joy that he’d leave the game on his own terms. He’s chosen his own specific exit instead of following anyone else’s template.
I think part of what makes being a 12-year-old fan so special, or at least makes the vicarious relationship you have for sports so engrossing, is that you can convince yourself you are your favourite player. When I was that age, my favourite hockey player was Boston Bruins defenseman Ray Bourque. Playing ball hockey on the street with friends, we’d each shout out what identity we were assuming. When I said “I’m Ray Bourque,” I’d play with an extra intensity as though it were no longer merely my team’s or my own reputation on the line in this otherwise meaningless game, but also Ray Bourque’s.
Of course, this disappears over time, and it would now be distinctly strange to show up for a 35+ recreational soccer league match shouting “I’m Dusan Tadic!” But given Posey’s decision, there is a realistic aspirational side to it for schlubs like me. I want to have the clarity of thought and the firm grasp of priorities to make important life decisions based not on what should be done or what others have done, but what suits me and my family best.
That’s heroic to fans of any age, and I have as much admiration for Posey today as I have had for anything else he’s achieved in his career. I’ll never be Buster Posey behind the plate, but I still want to be Buster Posey in life.
Feature Image by Ian D'Andrea, via Wikimedia Commons
Great read, and also great to see another edition of P & S in my inbox today.