Where your feet are.
“If you use your eyes and ears,” Pirates manager Clint Hurdle said on Sunday morning, “there’s reminders throughout your week that life’s short and you don’t call all the shots.”
He’d been asked to comment on the news that a boat accident had claimed Jose Fernandez’s life hours earlier.
The former Rangers hitting coach, who made a mark here in just one season and who had a huge impact on the man who now manages this club, continued: “It’s so horribly sad on so many different levels that there’ll be no more of that, there’ll be no more of him, there’ll be no more of that emotion on the mound, that skill set, that human being, that young man with such a gift, such a great smile.
“Be where your feet are,” Hurdle added. “Enjoy the moment. There’ll be a day where there won’t be another day.”
Two days before that, in a completely different context, I heard someone else tell a room of 100: “Be where your feet are.”
I’m sure the expression is more common than I realized, and I’d probably heard it before, but I didn’t remember ever hearing it when I did on Friday, and wrote it down so I would.
Then I heard it again Sunday, and it meant something entirely different.
Well, no, not an entirely different meaning. But a much different impact. Sports offers hope but it can tear your heart out, too, sometimes in ways you can’t fathom, or at least don’t want to.
I spent a couple days last week at Fall Instructional League in Surprise, something I’ve done every year since 2007, motivated that year to make the trip because of all the talent the Rangers had added in the few months leading up to it — including Mitch Moreland, Derek Holland, Blake Beavan, Tommy Hunter, Neil Ramirez, and Julio Borbon via the draft; Martin Perez, Tomas Telis, and Leury Garcia internationally; and Elvis Andrus, Neftali Feliz, Matt Harrison, Engel Beltre, and Max Ramirez in trades — and while I expected the talent level to be different in this 10th September trip to Arizona than it’s been most years, different due to big trades and late draft position and caps on international spending, I looked forward to it as much as ever.
There were drills and there were games and there were displays of talent to dream on, and there was the “Be where your feet are” message, a permission and persuasion to celebrate successes — a base hit or a chased slider, or two-tenths shaved off in the 60 or a new mark in the weight room — to celebrate all of those, along the way, in this game of failures.
Two days later, Marlins manager Don Mattingly spoke, through tears, of the joy that Fernandez played with, as much a signature of his game as the filthy stuff and 80-grade competitiveness. “When you watch kids in little league or something like that, that’s the joy that Jose played with. The passion he felt about playing — that’s what I think about.”
Brandon McCarthy said: “We were all jealous of his talent, but deep down I think we most envied the fun he had while doing something so difficult.”
Mattingly’s remarks and McCarthy’s tweet both expressed the type of thing people will say about Adrian Beltre in Cooperstown one of these days.
This year’s trip to Surprise ended with a table for 10 or so at The Brookside II to watch Texas vs. Oakland on Friday night.
It’s the same restaurant at which I’ve finished several trips to Instructs, including the one that ended on October 3, 2012.
The same restaurant.
With some of the same people.
Same opponent.
Same ballpark.
Different result.
What Ryan Dempster coughed up on that 2012 day in Oakland, Cole Hamels did not.
Beltre had three hits that day in 2012 (one off A’s starter A.J. Griffin), but none were bigger than the one he had Friday night, when he homered off Kendall Graveman in the seventh inning — the only frame in which Texas reached base at all, aside from a ninth-inning walk — to give his team a 3-0 lead that Hamels, Matt Bush, and Sam Dyson made stand up.
And that led to a baseball celebration reserved for moments when a team locks in the opportunity to move on . . . or when it wins the final game of the post-season, which will happen around here eventually.
The joy in the visitor’s clubhouse that night was something that 2012 club never got the chance to share. In spite of 93 wins that year, only two of those came in the final nine, and as a result on the last day of the season the Rangers fell out of first place for the first time since the season’s third day. And then Texas lost the Wild Card Game to Joe Saunders and the Orioles. There was never anything clinched, and no Ginger-Ale-and-champagne celebration in 2012.
There were three in 2010.
And three in 2011.
There’s been one in 2016. So far.
But in 2012, a great team — one featuring a roster Jon Daniels has since called, in his estimation, the Rangers’ best — never got to celebrate in that way, and that’s a shame.
A few weeks before Texas dropped seven of nine to land in that year’s Wild Card Game, Fernandez finished his Low A Greensboro/High A Jupiter season at 14-1, 1.75.
That winter, Jurickson Profar would grace the cover of Baseball America’s Prospect Handbook as the game’s number one prospect. Fernandez was number five.
But even though Fernandez hadn’t even reached AA when the 2012 season ended, in 2013 he was NL Rookie of the Year — and third in the Cy Young vote.
He wouldn’t have another healthy season until this year, when he might well have been — and could still be — on his way to another top three Cy Young finish.
You spend a couple days at Instructs and you see Alex Speas shoving 97-99 with a wipeout breaking ball, you see Brett Martin and Cole Ragans (with the exact same shoulder-hunch/torso-rock/full-extension mechanics as Hamels and nearly as wicked a two-plane curve) dealing and wonder how the new ballpark might favor left-handed pitchers, and you see David Garcia (b.2000) showing the tools that made him the most coveted catcher in this year’s J2 class, and you watch Leody Taveras (just named the Arizona League’s number one prospect by BA) and Jairo Beras and Josh Morgan sharing cuts in Cage 1, and you find yourself thinking about three or five years down the road, when the truth is that three or five days from now aren’t necessarily promised.
You see a Dad watching his kid play.
You see a Dad watching his kid coach.
And then you can’t stop thinking about a Grandmother watching her grandson pitch.
Some things that are never supposed to happen do.
Some things that everyone expects to happen don’t.
On one of the walls inside the Rangers’ Surprise complex, on the minor league side, is a display showing the dozens of players who began their Rangers careers without earning an assignment to a minor league club out of spring training, but in spite of being held back in extended spring training got to the big leagues. It’s meant to serve as motivation.
It’s also a reminder that there’s no sense bemoaning things when reality doesn’t yet match up with expectations, or feeling sorry for yourself, worrying about where the chips fell. A reminder to take on the challenge at hand without bitterness, to hit each mark with everything you’ve got, to celebrate each success along the path.
To be where your feet are.
The Rangers celebrated Friday night. Players and coaches and families — including Prince! (cold fusion) — celebrated, because there’s room in the game for joy, even moments that are just steps on a path.
Texas isn’t going to be satisfied with 2016 if that turns out to be the final celebration of its kind. But that’s no reason not to celebrate.
Even Beltre, whose moments of baseball joy are even evident on pop-ups between third and short and on rundowns when he’s the one in the helmet and on called strikes he doesn’t particularly care for, shows a different side when he gets the chance to put on goggles and shoot Moet & Chandon fireworks. I remember thinking the same thing about Michael Young.
I can only imagine what Jose Fernandez would have looked like celebrating a division title, or more. He never got that chance. And that sucks.
He played with joy. He brought us joy.
He was an expectant father, and that’s a joy he won’t get to experience. Hate that.
My plan was to come back home to write about Anderson Tejeda and Joe Palumbo and Taveras and Martin. Not about boats or “reminders that life’s short and you don’t call all the shots.”
I don’t know if any of the 80 or so players in Surprise had enough energy Friday night to find a TV somewhere and see Adrian and Prince and Cole and Yu and Banny celebrate, or if the minor league coaches and coordinators showed them a clip or two on Saturday morning, a clip or two showing players like Mazara and Gallo and Leclerc and Mendez who were at Instructs just two years ago, to help inspire those 80 in a way not even a wall display can.
I also don’t know whether any of them will jump one day from Class A to Rookie of the Year like Jose Fernandez did. It’s unlikely. But that’s not the goal.
The goal is to get better today. And then better than that tomorrow.
And to take joy in it.