In Defense Of…
This is the first edition of a running column where Jeremy will defend a sports or entertainment star whose star has fallen thanks to public judgment. Wait, did he just refer to himself in the 3rd person? And did he (I) just do it again?
I’d like you to go on a journey with me, if you will. Let’s look at somebody’s life, all in the second person narrative. You’ve been trained to do a job since you were a little kid, coming from a poor neighborhood in a poor country. You have one specific talent that has carried you through your life, but you’ve never really made the choice to embrace it. You got a job right out of high school in your field, went through job training, and landed at your job, which pays very handsomely. You don’t love what you’re doing, and you may not share the passion that others have for the same line of work. But you continue to trudge along, doing very adequate, if not great, work until it’s time for your contract to be re-negotiated. Since you work in a position of high demand and limited supply, you make more money off of this contract than your resume indicates that you deserve. In the last few months, you’ve gotten married, and are thinking about starting a family. You live in the biggest city in the world, and you want to keep it that way. As a provision in your contract, you make sure that if your job wants to demote you to a tiny city hundreds of miles away from your home and family, then they have to get approval from you first. Your boss and employer agree to this deal, and the new contract is signed.
After a year and a half, your job performance has slipped, although you’ve tried to keep it at its best. Your effort may have gone down a bit from when you were working for a new contract, but you haven’t stopped trying altogether. Your boss isn’t pleased. He’s decided to demote you to the place that was hundreds of miles away for more job training. You say that you feel fine and that you’ll turn your performance around, but he’s having none of it. He demands that you go for more training, and leave everything that you have in order to do it. After thinking about it, you say to your boss that your contract states that you don’t have to make this move, and he has to honor it. You stay at your high-ranking job, despite hating it at this point. You’re made into a villain of the highest order by your co-workers and onlookers, because you decided to stand up for what is rightfully in your contract and was agreed to by management. You become the face of everything that is wrong with your line of work, and cynics scoff at the disgrace that you’ve become to the field. All you can do is take the abuse, and try to continue your work, until management tells you that you’re injured, despite feeling almost perfectly fine. The governing board of the management investigates the injury claim, but eventually agrees with management. They take you out of your job, and tell you to return when you’re ready to produce. Life sucks for you right now. Your name is Oliver Perez.
Perez came to the Mets in 2006, and was productive for about two years, before turning into the remarkably inconsistent pitcher that would eventually sign a 3-year, 36 million dollar contract. He went from being inconsistent to very, very consistent, and not in a good way. His ERA jumped from a 3.56 in 2007 to 4.22 in 2008 to a sky-high 6.82 in 2009. He’s been public enemy #1 for Mets fans ever since he signed his contract, and he’s done nothing to change their mind. Now, some of my first two paragraphs were pure speculation and shouldn’t fully be taken at face value, since none of us really know if Perez is passionate for the game or not. It’s possible that he’d give his life to win a World Series. But the body language he’s shown in the past few years has been of someone that is just doing his job, so that he can go home and have a stiff drink and get ready for the weekend ahead. It’s not all that different than the average person working at a cubicle and trying to make his boss happy without putting in too much effort.
This line of thought is far-fetched to a lot of sports fans out there. Why wouldn’t Perez give his all? Doesn’t he want to win World Series titles? But what if Perez just doesn’t have that kind of mentality? Is that really his fault? I went to NYU, among the biggest liberal arts schools in the country, as a vocal performance major, where some of the most artsy, non-sports-loving people attend. So I know about people that just don’t have any interest in sports and competitions to win a championship. And that’s completely fine. I couldn’t judge the people that I was with for not liking sports, because it’s totally normal to not like it. Some people do, and some don’t. There are perfectly valid reasons to hate sports (I’ll save them for another time), even if I personally don’t agree with them. What if Perez is one of these people? Is that really his fault, for working in a field that he’s not passionate about but is the one where he can make the most money? The amount of people in the world that hate their jobs but just do them anyway is large. The amount of people that are truly passionate about what they do is a much smaller number, but professional ballplayers are usually in that rare group. When an athlete isn’t, that’s when his fans and teammates vilify him. So, for people who want to blast Perez for not caring enough about winning, remember that playing baseball is his job, regardless of his excessive salary. There aren’t rabid fans calling in to radio shows to complain about when you don’t work your hardest at your job. Just because he makes more money than average people doesn’t stop it from being a job. As Oliver Perez comes off the DL this week and rejoins the Mets, remember that passion usually can’t be obtained by osmosis. It has to come from within. Some players have it, and it can be seen from miles away. But some just don’t. It’s our job as sports fans to judge the performances on the field, and to root for our teams to win. It’s not our job to measure what’s inside a man, for better or worse. We can ask of our athletes to try their hardest to win. But we can’t ask them to change who they are in order to do it.
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