Aging by baseball standards, that is.
It's a little bit of an odd, angular, article, with Derek Jeter in the crosshairs as an example.
Odd, but interesting feature.
For Derek Jeter, on his 37th Birthday
Just one thing has reduced Jeter to human scale, and it is not surprising what it is: age. On June 26 he turns 37, which makes Jeter a decade older than Einstein was when he published the special theory of relativity, a decade older than Lindbergh when he set the Spirit of St. Louis down in Paris and 15 years older than Ted Williams when he batted .406 in 1941. Even more to the point, Jeter is a dozen years past the best baseball version of himself — the 25-year-old who in 1999 played a sprightly shortstop and also functioned as a slugger, hitting 24 home runs, to go with 102 runs batted in and a batting average of .349.
The night I watched him in Baltimore was like most games for Jeter these days, only more so, because it went on for 15 innings. He came to bat seven times, and in six of those he hit ground balls — two of which squirted through the infield for base hits. He struck out in his other plate appearance. He leads all of baseball, by a wide margin, in his ratio of ground balls to balls lifted in the air, an arcane but telling statistic. Jeter can no longer consistently bring the bat through the hitting zone at the proper moment, and with enough authority, to hit line drives into the outfield gaps or fly balls that clear the fences. (Think of that classic advice to Little League hitters: Swing the bat as if you’re mad at the ball! Jeter swings as if he’s mad at the ground, with an abbreviated, downward stroke that pounds ball after ball into the turf.) In his best season, he had 70 extra-base hits. He is on pace for just 30 extra-base hits this season, meaning that about once a week he gets something more than a single.
We’re fascinated by sports partly because in physical matters, elite athletes set the outer limits. They do what we wish we could: hit a baseball 400 feet, dunk a basketball, sprint 100 meters in less than 10 seconds. Their feats look so pleasurable in the doing that some of us, long past our best playing days, dream at night we are in their realm — say, for example, patrolling the expanse of a big-league center field, or digging our cleats into the batter’s box as a pitcher goes into his windup. (Or firing a slapshot at a goalie, as one of my dreams went not too long ago, even though I have never played ice hockey in my life and don’t even follow the sport.)
But the careers of elite athletes, enviable as they may be, are foreshortened versions of a human lifespan. Physical decline — in specific ways that affect what they do and who they are — begins for them before it does for normal people. The athletes themselves rarely see the beginnings of this process, or if they do, either do not acknowledge it or try to fight it off like just another inside fastball. They alter their training routines. Eat more chicken and fish, less red meat. They try to get “smarter” at their sport.
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