The Human Roots: Evolution of a Kind

J.P. Arencibia,  now with the Rangers, helped contribute to one fan's schadenfreude.  (via James G.)

J.P. Arencibia, now with the Rangers, helped contribute to one fan’s schadenfreude. (via James G.)

J.P. Arencibia, a man for whom the Mendoza Line has become a cathedral ceiling, steps toward the fastball and begins to uncoil his hips, unleashing in the batter’s box, or, more accurately, the hacker’s box, what is sure to be a swing so futile that only instructional videos will find value in its outcome.

Category: Um, Kids? Don’t Do This.

An instant hence, Arencibia drops his hands and initiates his pass at the two-strike pitch from A’s closer Sean Doolittle, a man for whom the strikeout rate (12.8!) has become precious art. Inevitability has found this path before, and should soon find it here: Arencibia, offering at a pitch whose fate is a catcher’s mitt. Now, in that juncture when all possibilities – wild pitch, HBP, “just a bit inside” – are reduced to a few, Arencibia, with his K% of 28(!), directs his torque along a sturdy axis and his bat, shockingly, straight at the ball, forging an instant when potential is repositioned on the balance of a sliver’s distance. Were the viewer to pause the scene, he might expect that Arencibia whacks a double to left or fouls the pitch straight back, capping his failure with the grimace of a guy who just blew his best and last chance.

The situation: top of the ninth; score tied, 1-1; runners on first and third.

The larger situation: Here on Sept. 17 in the Year Of Our Selig 2014, the Athletics are static-clinging to an American League Wild Card spot while the last-place Rangers, in Arencibia’s words, are trying to “crush dreams.”

THWACK! In an instant, one dream is realized and another damaged in a pitch likewise crushed; the sound is as unmistakable as the trajectory, like that of a NASA rocket launched at a 40-degree angle just for giggles and kicks. Watching on TV, I leap to my feet and shout, “Yyyyeeeeaaaahhhh!!!!”

In the seats behind A’s catcher Geovany Soto, a dozen faces are promptly redirected to the left and up, and up, and away, each now drained of the dregs of optimism as they track the remorseless flight of the ball. And now the many faces are one face – that of a lover jilted or a best friend betrayed.

“Yyyyeeeeaaaahhhh!!!!” I shout once more, thrilled by the unlikely scene.

The camera shifts to left field – to the wall, the seats, and Sam Fuld, a left fielder running toward the warning track in a stride that says, “Yep, this is merely pro forma,” or, “Mmm-hmm, I’m just getting a little exercise here.”

Body language tells truths that no fan or player ever could, even if stripped of cliché. In the left-field seats, fans are standing with shoulders slumped and necks craned, tracking, with a demonstrable sense of doom, a ball hit so high and deep that it has yet to enter the frame. The top of the image, like every fan beneath it, is waiting for the ball to drop – waiting, in the way of things that record history but never change it, for the ball to complete its inevitable course. Meantime, back at home, I am engaged in my own honest idiom, jumping around while shouting in a way that would make opposing fans homicidal, “Yyyyeeeeaaaahhhh!!!!”

My shout, one of both joy and hubris, is powered further by the contrary reactions I see on TV: the arms denied their celebratory lift, the shoulders freighted with deflated dreams, the faces stripped of the joy that promised itself, or hinted at itself, at the 1-0 start of this nail-driving inning – the sadness, alas, that looms as the built-in bete noire of every partisan fan.

Delicious!

I watch, then, as the ball at last drops into the frame, bouncing off concrete and toward a fan in a suitably black shirt, funereal in its intimation. With his right hand he offers at it, stabs at it, not as one who wants a treasured keepsake but as one who hopes to erase the token of his misery, to strike it from the record, or, at the least, to catch it and throw it back. Such is his magical thinking, I think: If I throw the ball back, our butt-kicking closer can throw the pitch again! Restored to a probability weighted heavily in his favor, he will win and I won’t be so sad!

His misery is at once my Happy Meal.

A Hardball Times Update
Goodbye for now.

This is the flavor of schadenfreude.

Delicious!

Every fan has tasted it. This is what I tell myself, to make it go down with a little less shame and guilt – that every fan has devoured it, gone back for seconds and thirds. And I am tasting it now, while Arencibia rounds the bases at O.co Mausoleum, as if schadenfreude were the featured item on today’s buffet. So savory is this fine German delicacy – menu description: tasty schnitzel made from the misfortunes of others – that it has trumped the hungers of a rational mind, the desire to see my Rangers lose the game and take one more step in this lost season toward a top pick in next year’s draft.

Yes, I’d be happy – more than happy – to see my team lose.

But I am happier – more than happier – to see the A’s losing, and happier still to see it again. And so I rewind the DVR, to the instant just prior to the pitch. And I watch once more as Doolittle releases a ball whose future is now secured, in memories shared but in feelings divided. I watch, too, as Arencibia turns his hips and extends his arms, generating a force whose proof will assert itself some 400 feet away, in the gloom of the home team’s gallery, and some 1800 miles away, in the unbridled cheer of an opposing fan’s home. Then I see what I didn’t see the first time – in fact, what I’ve never seen before: A moment after making contact and just as Doolittle drops his head, Arencibia casts a glance at his defeated foe.

I know what I’m seeing here. As a man who’s just experienced an identical response, I know what this is: He wants to see his opponent’s pain. He wants to eat it up, savor it, gain strength from an adversary’s anguish.

———

Cruelty is inherent in competition. Even if the combatants aren’t actually red in tooth and claw, a sort of sadism attends any game that isn’t just a game of catch. Winners, in order to earn their status in the taxonomy of matched contestants, require losers to assume their positions, and once the vanquished have entered their places in misery, or at least in something less than joy, the victors remain short of sympathetic. Indeed, despite imposing the penalty that they fought like hell to avoid, the winners are typically unaffected, and blithely so, by the heartache on the other side of the field.

Schadenfreude is different. It goes beyond callous indifference to find a place where the pleasure, or much of it, is sprung from the other guy’s suffering – or, as South Park’s Eric Cartman puts it, where the winner savors “the tears of unfathomable sadness.”

A cartoon might have contemporized it, but the sentiment is nothing new. Aristotle called it epikhairekakos, which is a lot less entertaining – see? schadenfreude! – than “sweet taste of the tears, etc.” but means the same dang thing. Lucretius, in an aphorism that would gain no small measure of fame, observed that “(i)t is pleasant to watch from the land the great struggle of someone else in a sea rendered great by turbulent winds.” Dude. Yikes!

In a less unseemly stance, the Book of Proverbs counsels against this Lucretian response: “Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth.”

Nice advice, but hear my confession: When the A’s did stumbleth to a 6-1 loss, mine heart was very glad. I was hardly alone. Arencibia, who several times had stated his desire to “crush dreams,” couldn’t help but turn Doolittle’s nightmare into amusement, and later in the inning, when a TV shot of the A’s dugout showed Luke Gregerson with his head down, Stephen Vogt in a thousand-yard stare, Jesse Chavez shell-shocked and Doolittle slumped, it quickly turned into gifs and screensavers for Rangers fans who at last felt retribution for the two-year torment that saw Oakland conjure its way to consecutive division crowns.

Schnitzel!

It’s doubtful that anyone is proud of the feeling, but it’s doubtful, too, that anyone wants to return it for something of lesser value. It feels good, even if we know it’s bad. And it’s natural. One study, exploring the theory that our emotions are correlated to a tendency to compare ourselves to other people, concluded that children as young as two can experience schadenfreude. Like their elders, the kids can’t help it. Brain-scanning studies have revealed that schadenfreude activates the brain’s ventral striatum, i.e., its reward center. You can’t buy it on the corner, but schadenfreude’s a drug; your most hated rival loses, and suddenly it’s Haight-Ashbury, circa 1966, inside your head.

The phenomenon holds especially true for sports fans, studies have shown. One study, conducted by a Princeton University psychology professor, measured the electrical activity of smile muscles and reward centers when Red Sox fans and Yankees fans watched baseball.

“As expected, intense fans reported pleasure when their team made a good play or their rival made a bad play, and their brains’ reward centers lit up. They didn’t react this way when their own team played a third neutral team – the Baltimore Orioles. But – and this is the kicker – they were happy, and their reward centers lit up, when their rivals lost to the Orioles, showing pure schadenfreude. Likewise, the activation of their brain’s reward centers correlated with their reports of having heckled, insulted, threatened or hit a rival fan.”

After the Rangers’ victory I went online to find whatever schnitzel crumbs I could – Rangers fans celebrating with schadenfreudian snark, A’s fans grumbling in apocalyptic tones and Oakland players speaking to an appropriately solemn press in the flat, somber voices of athletes who’ve just snatched defeat from the salivary glands of victory. In baseball, the agony/ecstasy divide is often quickly rendered, with emotions distributed once and for all in the space of an instant, the time of an inch. We’ve seen enough walk-off homers to know that one little moment-place – one tiny sliver of the shared continuum that contains all oceans and eons – can lay waste to one fan base and elevate another, to a place where celebration is derived in part from this dramatic reprieve from sadness. Yep, we could’ve been those other guys. “There but for the strength of (fill in the blank) go I.”

At other times it begins with a fissure and slowly widens, such that emotions spring less from impulse than from a steady recognition that, yeah, this is happening. Such was the case with the A’s, a hated rival, the best team in baseball at the midway point and then steadily, deliciously the worst. And today a sub-Mendoza Line hitter had promptly pushed apart the gap. As a proud member of a modern-day tribe, wrapped up in all the narratives that lend a mythological character to the color-dyed sectarianism in which every fan takes part, I clicked on an interview with Doolittle, the defeated. Villains are easy to come by in sports. All they need is the uniform of the other team – especially a team that rode a magic carpet to what had been, for two straight years, a berth reserved for the men in my colors. Cartoons and comic books agree: Revel in his misfortune, laugh when the anvil falls on his head.

But when Doolittle began to talk, I saw the pain in his face. I heard it in his voice, source of a humble mea culpa. He answered questions patiently and showed sympathy for fans and teammates whose heartaches his fastballs had caused. Suddenly off script, gone rogue from the gospel of schadenfreude, I began to feel bad for the guy. Athletes are really just avatars of characters we create, manifestations of the heroes and scalawags who populate the story we’ve established as the one that makes sense of a world where victory and defeat are central to its operations. We hate them or love them because of the roles they play.

But strip them of those roles, however briefly, and we might see real people emerge, twentysomething sons of humanity. Instead of a villain on whose shoulders we can heap our partisan bile, we might see a guy who stepped off the field and into a clubhouse whose gloom, he knows, is his fault. Instead of a role-player who supplies the sadness and its necessary inverse – a role, admittedly, for which he volunteered upon putting on the uniform – we might see a guy who worked hard and got drafted and now feels like hell because he has disappointed the people who matter most to him, people who root for him.

Midway through the Doolittle interview, I clicked stop. I didn’t need to see any more of his sorrow to know that, OK, he’s a person, just like me. So what? I still needed my villain, someone to root against and to suffer my hostility with scurvy teammates who suffered as much. Devotion has its support in hostility, and if that hostility can find a place in fandom, where it might replace the animus that our ancestors felt for genuine life-or-death foes, so much the better. We can love some players, our players, only because we hate the rivals.

Rare is the one that everybody roots for.

———

The batter, a man for whom the Mendoza Line remains 200 points and a lifetime away, steps toward the fastball and begins to uncoil his hips, not with the torque that precedes one of two true outcomes – strikeout or dinger – but with a shift that hints at a softly hit ball.

But this – a softly hit ball, falling between fielders who cannot throw him out – is all the man needs, at the age of 31, to finally make his mark … a mark other than 0 in the batting line of his big league stats page.

An instant hence, he drops his hands and initiates his pass at the two-strike pitch from Astros starter Nick Tropeano, a man for whom this moment, no matter the factors that have made it partly his, is not as vital as it is to his foe. History has found this path before, with Frank Abercrombie (1871) and Curtis Brown (1973), Rufus Smith (1927) and Hank Small (1975), George Bryant (1885) and Bill Sodd (1937), men who, though blessed with the talent to step to a big league plate, would never deliver a big league hit. Such is the prospective future of Guilder Rodriguez, a career farmhand who after 1095 games in the minors – more than any other player in baseball – has finally gotten his chance in The Show. But here, two weeks into what is likely his final call-up, the switch-hitter is mired in a worrisome O-fer, one that, if permanent, would hardly grant him Moonlight Graham’s mystique.

Now, in that juncture when all possibilities – wild pitch, “just a bit outside” – are reduced to a few, Rodriguez directs his bat at the outer-edge heater, forging an instant when potential is repositioned on the balance of a sliver’s distance. Were the viewer to pause the scene, he might expect that Rodriguez hits a flare to left or fouls the pitch back, capping his failure with the grimace of a guy who just blew one of his best (or at least last) chances.

The situation: bottom of the third; scored tied, 0-0; runner on first.

The larger situation: Here on Sept. 22 and in front of his wife and his father, Guilder Rodriguez is channeling a life in baseball into one defining swing.

Two weeks earlier, on Sept. 9, several outlets reported that Rodriquez cried for two hours upon receiving the news: After 14 years in pro ball, in places like Beloit and Helena and all the Super 8’s in between, he would finally get his shot in the bigs, among men who might not know how to pronounce his name (WHEEL-dair). Prior to his first game, against the Angels in Arlington, he told Fox Sports Southwest, “Every player, when they sign professionally, the goal is to play in the big leagues. Not too many people have had this opportunity, and I wait for 14 years for this opportunity, and thank you, God, for this day here today.”

At home, I watched the dream take shape in facts.

First, there was his name in the lineup.

Batting fourth: 3B Adrian Beltre: .323

Batting ninth: 2B Guilder Rodriguez: .000

How did it feel, I wondered, to share space with a star after years of sharing a bus with Johnny Forgotten and Billy Fizzled? How did it feel to put on a uniform, as he had done thousands of times before, but to do so in a locker room among players he did not need to conquer in order to earn the promotion? Here he was, already promoted.

Welcome to the big leagues.

Sometime later, in the top of the second inning, he dived to his left to snag a low liner of the bat of Kole Calhoun: a big league play, his first, even if every second baseman from here to Beloit could have made the same catch.

Welcome to the big leagues.

In the bottom of the third, in his first big league plate appearance and batting right-handed, he swung through a fastball for his first big league strikeout. In the bottom of the fifth he struck out again, this time looking. In the bottom of the seventh, batting left-handed for the first time in The Show, he checked his swing on a high heater and struck out yet again.

Welcome, alas, to the big leagues.

Now here he is, hitless and in mid-swing, poised to hit a 1-2 pitch from Nick Tropeano, one of maybe two dozen people in the ballpark who aren’t rooting for this man to collect his first big-league knock in the wake of so many misses. The moment is paused – DVR, narrative – but time is ticking. Only seven games remain and then his MLB player page will be locked shut, memorializing a lifetime of struggle in digits made of moments like this one.

An audience waits, in hopes of the joy that is typically reserved for relatives and genuine friends. Buddhists call it mudita, a vicarious pleasure derived from someone else’s good fortune. It is a feeling, patiently earned, that separates us from our tooth-and-claw instincts. In truth, we don’t see it much in team sports. The fans who revel in schadenfreude – and we must be honest; it’s nearly all of us – are the same fans who cheer for their own teams with feelings of rational (or, really, irrational) self-interest. We don’t hope that Player A is happy so much as we hope he makes us happy, that he rewards our fandom with a trip to the attractive side of the agony/ecstasy divide. But sometimes a near-consensus can form around a guy with a good story, a guy who by all accounts is a solid citizen and who has inspired a sincerity of the usual clichés: a love of the game, a real professional.

Fans see now the real-life truth of a reality-show formula: Give us someone to root against, someone to really freakin’ hate, but also someone to root for.

Here he is, hitless, and in mid-swing.

THWACK!

Or maybe: pop.

In an instant, with a flip of the wrists, he sends a soft line drive to straightaway left, in front of a charging Robbie Grossman.

“Get down!” analyst Tom Grieve screams at the ball.

The outcome of the game is irrelevant. As the ball hangs between a lifetime treasure and just another out, what matters is the physics of this moment.

Most readers know what happens next. In moments the broadcast will show Rodriguez’s dad and wife hugging, his dad crying, teammates cheering, fans standing and the ball, now a keepsake, bouncing toward the dugout. What’s more, in the time to come, I will hit rewind and play it again and again, just as I did with Arencibia’s home run.

But first, now, I shout, and this time the feeling is different even if the sound is the same.


John Paschal is a regular contributor to The Hardball Times and The Hardball Times Baseball Annual.
4 Comments
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J.P. Arencibia
9 years ago

Hey, I resemble that remark — very closely, in fact.

Greg Simonsmember
9 years ago

“We can love some players, our players, only because we hate the rivals.”

I completely disagree with this statement. I’ve never understand the need – the desire – to hate the opposition. Yes, I want my team to win every time, and if they’re in a battle for the playoffs, I want their competition to lose, but I don’t hate the other team(s).

Hatred in sports leads to simply foolish things like Red Sox fans chanting “Yankees suck!” when the Blue Jays are in town, to truly stupid things like spectators hurling everything from batteries to racial slurs at opposing players, to absolutely abhorrent actions like the two imbeciles who beat Bryan Stow outside Dodger Stadium a few years ago.

Root for your favorite team, certainly, but let that be enough.

John Paschal
9 years ago
Reply to  Greg Simons

Greg: First, I’m glad you disagree with the quoted statement. Your attitude, likely rare among sports fans, is suggestive of the sort of evolution — or, more accurately, development — I have explored in this piece. Given the examples you provide, I can hardly disagree with your sentiment. That sort of hatred is contemptible and inexcusable, and I’m certainly not celebrating or advocating anything of the sort. With slightly exaggerated language, I’m simply examining the sort of “sports hatred” — often playful and easily forgotten in favor of more gallant pursuits — that might supplant the troubling animosities that darken our histories as violently sectarian creatures in a seriously bloody ecology.

Second, in the cited passage and in the piece itself, I’m indicting myself as a less-than-perfect person who is probably representative of a large segment of sports fans. Perhaps my gifts as a writer aren’t sufficient to have suitably conveyed the theme, but, in the end, I’m attempting to celebrate our capacity overcome the usual provincialism by rooting for a fellow human regardless of his tribe. (That Guilder played for my team is immaterial, and I hope that comes across.) Of course, writing is hard and it’s easy to fail. The writer needs to be perfect, but the writer — here’s the part I hate — is human.

Lastly, upon re-reading the quoted passage, I wish I had written something milder, such as, “We can root for some players, our players, partly because we root against the rivals,” or, “We can love some players, our players, simply because they’re not on the other team.”

Thanks for the comment, Greg. I appreciate the opportunity to reevaluate my work.

Greg Simonsmember
9 years ago

John, being familiar with your work, I didn’t believe that statement reflected your true feelings. But it did allow me to comment on a part of sports I greatly dislike.

And the second half of the article was terrific. I just came across the video of Guilder Rodriguez’s hit, and the happiness he and his parents felt was easy to see and just as easy to feel along with them.