Sisyphus from Both Sides of the Plate
Sisyphus from Both Sides of the Plate
By Steven Gimbel
The first thing that happened when he got to college was that the coach took away his left hand. The swing was beautiful, the mirror image of his natural right-handed cut which was nothing short of elegant. It took years of grinding, but the left had finally developed to just about the same amount of power as the right.
To this coach, though, catchers are sluggers. Athleticism behind the plate, pop time, intelligence in working with the pitching staff…it could all be sacrificed for a middle-of-the-line-up bat. After one session with the gun off the tee looking at both sides, because the right-handed number was slightly higher than the left-handed, the coach declared that he was no longer a switch-hitter and, it would turn out, in any real sense, no longer a ballplayer. It was like the coach hit him in the knee with a bat and then said, “I can’t play you, you limp when you run.” But despite having his boyhood dream ripped away, he handled it with grace…certainly more so that I did and I could not be more proud of the lesson he taught me.
He was six years old, wrapping up his first season in machine pitch when he sat next to me on the couch as I watched the Orioles game. He always had his mother’s eye for detail and after a couple of innings asked why Brian Roberts was hitting from the other side of home plate this time. I explained what a switch-hitter was and how, once pitchers throw curveballs, there is an advantage to being able to hit lefty and righty. He asserted that he would be a switch-hitter. I vetoed the idea. “Let’s work on tightening up your right-handed swing,” I told him, but he continued to nag. I just wanted to finish watching the game, which was close—a rarity in those years for the O’s—so I made him a deal. You go down to the basement (where we had a tennis ball hanging from a string for him to hit) and you try to swing left-handed. When the game is over, I will come down and see. If it looks good, then we’ll work on it, otherwise, we will focus on being right-handed.
It was a sucker bet. Who can do anything well with their off-hand? I’d bought myself a few innings of quiet and once the game was over, I would take a look at a couple of awkward swings, and tell him we will go out to hit, but that he should perfect his right-hand.
The Orioles blew it late, and I figured it was one of two things that would turn out the way I expected. But then he steadied the ball and took a rip. “Do that again.” It was a remarkably good-looking swing. The mechanics were tight, the load and swing smooth. Wow. “Okay, grab the wiffles and let’s go out front and work on this.”
A couple weeks later, his team had their end-of-season cookout and the coach set up a parents vs. kids game where the parents had to hit with their off-hand. He gets up and steps in lefty. This was coach Dave’s only six year old who knew which hand the glove went on, what base to throw to in any situation, and how not to get doubled up on a line-drive. Surely, he wasn’t in the wrong batter’s box out of confusion. So, Coach Dave asked him what he was doing. He replied matter-of-factly, “I’m now a switch-hitter.” The coach looked at me incredulously and I just shrugged my shoulders. He hit the first pitch on a line through the 3-4 hole, getting a well-struck single in his first-ever left-handed at bat.
For years it was just a party trick. Youth-ball coaches would turn him around if they wanted a ball hit to the right side to move up a runner, making them feel like a real manager, but he pretty much always hit from the right.
As a Christmas present, my parents got him batting lessons with a local former MLB player. He was taking all reps righty and getting good tips when my mom piped in that he was a switch-hitter. Skeptically, he was told by the pro to take a rack left-handed. Much like I was that first day, he thought he knew what he was going to see. After nine pitches, the attitude changed. He was told clearly, “From now on, for every swing you take right-handed, you take one left-handed.”
He did, but there was always the sense that his left was a work in progress. Years later when he moved to a prestigious travel team, he practiced from both sides, but hit only right-handed in the first game. His new coach, who had himself been a switch-hitter who worked his way up to the edge of the majors, pulled him aside. He said, “On the one hand, I would rather have the power of your right-handed swing. But if you are thinking of going on, being able to switch-hit could open doors for you. You need to commit to hitting match-up. The worst thing that happens is that I have to move you down in the line-up until you develop the power left-handed.” He listened and took the overwhelming majority of cuts from the left side of home plate the next couple of years.
Hour after hour, bucket after bucket, I threw BP to him at the local field where he got to the point of being able to put them over the fence regularly from the left side. He played for a weak high school team in an even weaker conference, but despite losing his senior season to COVID, still was able to set the school records for homers hitting mostly lefty. He found a Division III school that suited him academically and athletically. After all his work, he was going to live his dream, he would play college baseball as a switch-hitting catcher.
But then the coach took away the thing he had that no one else did. With a single declaration, he was no longer a switch-hitter. Years of concentrated work thrown away in a single instant. Not being as big as the other catchers, he was put at the bottom of the depth chart, in essence, remanded to being a bullpen catcher. In blowouts, it would be younger catchers who got the time behind the plate.
His senior season, the end of his baseball life, he was put into just one late-season non-conference game, and then as a pinch-DH, not even letting him squat down one last time. His first at-bat, he lined a single over the shortstop to plate a run and his second time up, a took an outside pitch up the alley to the fence in right-center. He stood on second, his dugout going crazy for him—they knew he had been given a raw deal—and he calmly acknowledged them having shown that he was, in fact, good enough to play at this level, even if he had never been given the chance.
Senior day, they played a conference double-header and got blown out in the second game. It would be the last time he ever suited up. The coach knew darn well who the seniors were and when it came time to pull the starters, he put a freshman behind the plate depriving him of his very last chance to be a catcher, to be the ballplayer he had worked his whole life to be.
After the game, going back to the hotel to shower and change before the senior banquet, I lost it in the car, screaming about how despicable his coach was. This was it, the endpoint of years of work, lessons, practices, seemingly endless BP and throwdowns in the park in the off-season, tee work and cages, weight rooms and protein drinks, long drives to tournaments and showcases all around the country, it was all over and he couldn’t give him a single meaningless inning behind the dish? I used words I don’t think I have ever uttered before and I meant them.
The existentialist philosopher Albert Camus argued that being a human is to be like the Greek tragic figure Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to endlessly roll a boulder up a mountain. As he approached the peak, the rock would inevitably tumble back down and Sisyphus would have to begin again. Camus says that the real torture in this story is not the physical pain of having to forever engage in back-breaking effort. It was a psychological punishment. The real torment was knowing that all of your work would amount to nothing. No matter how hard you labored, you would never end up reaching your goal, yet you had to keep going with complete understanding that you would fail in the one thing you needed to do. The hopelessness robs you of your soul. It makes you into a sad machine, not a human being.
Camus ends his essay by saying that there was one route out for Sisyphus, one way for him to escape his sanction. He could never stop rolling the boulder, but he could avoid being punished if he decided that pushing it up the mountain was, in fact, what he wanted to do. If it was his choice, if the seemingly futile act was something he decided to do on his own, then he would not be punished, but rather would reclaim his autonomy and thereby his humanity. In making that switch, Camus wrote, “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
At the banquet, there were ten seniors being honored. For each, an underclass teammate would give a valedictory and the senior would then say a few parting words. All of the other players had speeches regaling their on-field achievements, so it seemed like was going to be awkward when he was honored since he was deprived of the opportunity to have any. But when one of his pitchers spoke about how he was unqualifiedly supportive of all of them in the bullpen, tutoring them in their classes off the field, and being a mentor for them, you could sense a real love of him. He took the mic and with his quick wit had the room laughing as he returned the love that was given to him by all of his teammates.
Watching him on the dais, I saw a soon-to-be college graduate who was a modern-day Sisyphus. In his comments, he thanked me and his mother for all of the time and expense that it took to get him to this point, mentioning the cost of the gas and gear over all those years. He was not denying how much rock-rolling had been done. But he chose not to be bitter that he never reached the peak of the mountain after getting so close that he could see it over the bullpen fence. Rather, he embraced the futile labor, embraced his situation by embracing his teammates. He consciously decided to want to be where he was, even if it was not where he wanted to be.
It is a pat cliché that baseball is a game of failure that teaches grace in the face of defeat. But it goes so much deeper than not showing disappointment when walking back to the dugout after striking out. What I learned from my formerly switch-hitting catcher of a son was a lesson of philosophical profundity, of the deepest moral meaning, that baseball at its toughest can teach you to be truly human, to transcend the death of your dreams to be the person you decide you want to be.
Steven Gimbel is the William Bittinger Professor of Philosophy at Gettysburg College and author of 12 books including Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion and Isn’t that Clever: A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy.
Jeff Brain is a retired public school teacher. You can find more of his art on his website or on Instagram.
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