The Mariners & Field of Hopeless

Mariners spring training started a week early! Feel good stories pour out of Peoria, lots of come from behind or overcoming adversity tales. The famous Mariner commercials have not yet surfaced. I understand that the sun actually shines in Arizona, unlike Seattle. Normally springtime harbingers hope and renewal. I know I experience it every year and usually write rhapsodically about it. So why does it already feel like autumn ripened endings fill the Seattle air.

Why?

Because we already know that the Mariners will finish last again. We already know they will have one of the worst offenses in baseball, again for four years running. This is not spring, rather it feels like the aborted and endless repeated cycle of spring in Bill Murray's Groundhog Day movie.

I am feeling flashes of PTSD from my years of watching the Kansas City Athletics (not so fondly known as atheloosems) stand as the worst team in baseball for 13 years running.  Flashbacks are one thing, but reliving it in HD is another.

I would like to blame this upon the unfair economic distributions of baseball, but cannot given the spate of recent wins by midrange budget teams like the Giants and Cardinals. No this grows from the amazing ineptitude of the Mariners. One of my favorite sites Fangraphs along with USS Mariners reviewed the drafts for the last ten years valuing them by WAR or wins above replacement level. The resounding conclusion: the least successful drafters and traders in baseball, hands down are my Mariners. How would you like a team that has  .45 WAR per year or total of +8 over 10 years. We make Pittsburgh and Baltimore look good.

Welcome to our team. The team’s big controversy focuses upon whether to start 10 million dollar a year bust Chone Figgins, once a good player until he arrived here, as third baseman and lead off hitter despite the last two year’s of 188 and 259 BA and 306 and 243 SLG. The hope is that this will somehow help him regain the élan and drive that made him such an effective lead off player for the Angeles.

The great hope is that the team can turn into the Florida, sorry Miami, Marlins (is it still the Marlins?) Or Devil Rays or Rays? I get very confused by Florida baseball; anyway, the team’s utterly non-existent offense depends upon four untested minor league players learning to play professionally OJT. Could be fun or it could be just time for NCIS reruns, unfortunately I have already seen most of them five or six times.

I guess watching Felix Hernandez keep growing will provide moments of baseball joy, although I still miss the Cliff Lee’s sojourn. Watching him pitch live was like watching clean, clear and crisp masterpieces air painted before your eyes. Felix may become an artist, but is not yet there.  But the team really has no places of grace such as that.

For me the anchor will be hoping that Ichiro Suzuki possesses one more brilliant year. He has labored so long and gloriously here on the moons of Jupiter in media land. His presence and performance provided a quiet place of grace and excellence year in and year out, day in and day out. Last year the cumulative impact of age and a frazzled culture unsure of what it wanted of him or its team took their toll. He had career lows of 272 BA and a career low of 184 hits.

Sabermetric projections suggest this is the beginning of the end of his phenomenal hitting and fielding. He may face a cliff drop off, not a slow decline like that afflicting Alex Rodriquez. Although, I must admit that actually watching Alex flounder will be another pleasure for the year.

I am relying upon Ichiro to defy the odds and the projections provide a ray of luminosity amid another squalid year of hopelessness.

To Excel is a Habit: Lessons of Ichiro

Consistent and high level human achievement builds upon habits. It's startlingly simple. To engage and succeed in complicated and demanding activities requires practice, reflection, learning and more practice. The keys lie in the interaction of practice and reflection. If you practice a failed action over and over, you just fail over and over. When Seattle Mariner Ichiro Suzuki hit his 200th. hit for his tenth straight season, he not only achieved what no other baseball player had ever achieved, but demonstrated that excellence builds upon the very mundane but critical concept of habits.

It is hard to fathom the magnitude of the achievement. Hitting a baseball is one of the hardest activities in all of sports. Ten to twenty players a year may bat above 300; a trace element garner 200 hits over 600 plus at bats. Now magnify 200 hits for ten years running--1600 plus games!

Such batting reflects a stunning degree of consistency and concentration. To succeed is one thing; but to succeed over time only occurs if a person masters the art of a profession and then constantly adapts. In baseball as in life, once you succeed, your competitors adapt. A litigator will face new strategies or a politician different candidates or a business new products and competitors. Ichiro defied this competitive dynamic. Here are his stats over the last decade!!

Year	Hits	Avg.
2001	242	.350
2002	208	.321
2003	212	.312
2004	262	.372
2005	206	.303
2006	224	.322
2007	238	.351
2008	213	.310
2009	225	.352
2010 *	200	.315
Career	2,230	.331

The lesson of Ichiro's success carries over to all aspects of life. A master of a craft practices but practices mindfully. Individuals perform the action, maybe interviewing a candidate, teaching a class, writing a report (it really does not matter). Then they evaluate the success of failure of the action. Then they revise and train themselves to adapt the next time.

Success like this builds on a set of habits that embody an emotional and cognitive ability to scan the situation, judge what is required, and then act upon it. Over time and experience, great professionals and masters spontaneously act this way because their practice has engraved habits of perception, recall and judgement in their minds and bodies. Habit not only grounds character but grounds achievement.

So hitting 300 or getting 200 hits one year is an amazing accomplishment. But to continue means that the player must adapt each year to new pitchers and to coaches and pitchers who have pored over statistics and tape to analyze every tendency and pitch around or against them. It means a good athlete, lawyer, doctor, teacher, business person must learn and adapt or their tendencies will lead them to be fail.

The major leagues have probably turned over 90 percent of their pitchers in this decade, but it has not mattered. As in the above examples, each situation is the same but different. The ability to enact consistently while adapting is the key to mastery and greatness in any field of judgment and action.

Perfecting a craft can be a very lonely art. It requires the cooperation of working with others, but it also exacts immense time alone and  ruthless focus upon the minute analyzing, adjusting and practicing the art. Perfecting a craft demands monomaniacal focus. Many superb athletes or professionals look aloof or feel distant because of this devotion. What emotional energy they have left over they devote to family where it counts. They will be consumate professionals with their team; but their team ultimately treats them as a  commodity; their loyalty lies with their craft and deeper bonds.

The other side of a person who excels is their ability to stay focused and ignore the noise. Ichiro achieves this by studious rituals from his catlike stretches to the precision of where and how he hits in the cage. He seldom wastes physical or emotional energy because it is all channeled into achievement of his exquisite hitting and superlative fielding.

You find the same pattern over and over again with great professionals in all fields. They often don't feel like team guys, but they are essential team contributors, and their ability to insulate themselves from the quack of the crowd and whims of fans and media anchors their consistency. In Ichiro's case it becomes more evident because he has played on such awful and woebegone Mariner teams; but despite the losing and carping, he performs. Sustained excellence depends upon the balance and focus to transcend the noise of crowd and passion praise and even glory. It is compatible with glory and for Ichiro to acknowlege his own "happiness." But even then he resolutely refuses to compare himself to others, but remains solitary in his pursuit of a Platonic ideal only he can see.

Mindful repetition; thoughtful adjustment. Persistent and consistent practice and adaptation. It sounds simple; it is very hard.