Thursday! 2-47: Be Like a Closer (But Not *that* Type of Closer!)
V2, I47
There is a saying in baseball that goes “A closer has to have a short memory”. That may not make a lot of sense if you don’t know what a closer is, in baseball terms1.
When a team takes a slim lead — usually three runs or fewer — into the ninth inning, they want to protect that lead because the other team is going to throw everything they have left in their lineup at the pitcher to get runners on base and to get those runners across home plate. The opposing team wants to catch up; the team with the lead wants to close the door on them. Hard. That is the job of the closer, a pitcher whose express job it is to make sure they get those final three2. Closers have, over the past twenty years or so, become bona fide celebrities, quite an accomplishment in a game where consistent winning relies on teamwork and not one or two star players. A good closer can make the ninth inning a psychological rallying point for his team, a point in the game on which you can build confidence and even swagger. A bad closer? Well, there aren’t many worse feelings for a baseball fan than watching those bullpen doors swing open and Joe The Crappy Closer walk onto the field with your team holding a slim one-run lead. Sometimes, a bad closer can make a game feel like a loss even before it is.
The worst thing a closer can do, by the way, is something we baseball nuts call “blowing the save”. It means he3 failed to do the one thing they’re on the roster to do. They gave up the lead. The game is tied or, worse, the other team is now ahead because they didn’t close it out. A closer who blows too many saves becomes an ex-closer and, just maybe, no other team will want to take a chance that he just had a bad patch of games. I’ve seen closers excel, then blow a few saves, then never show up on another major league roster. It is a high-pressure position where failure matters in a way it doesn’t for most other positions on the field.
The greatest closer who ever played is a man named Mariano Rivera. It pains me to say that because Rivera played his entire career with the New York Yankees, a team I have never liked, even before I was born. In fact, when I was a mere wisp of a soul in Heaven, I’m pretty sure I asked God not to deliver me to parents who loved the Yankees4. Rivera, however, was a player I always loved to watch. The man stood on the mound like he and the catcher were the only two players on the whole field. Nothing seemed to rattle him, not even blowing a save in the deciding Game 7 of World Series, which he did5.
Here’s where this matters to you and me. A couple or three questions arise when you consider the high stakes a closer faces whenever they stand on the pitcher’s mound. How does he ready himself for the necessity of success but the possibility of failure. And how does a closer put away the failure of one night in order to pitch with full confidence the next night?
Those are big questions that show up in small ways. For instance, say a closer gives up a game-winning home run on his very best pitch — a fastball that has been almost unhittable all season. How does he throw that same pitch the next night with the same confidence he had in it before that home run? What prevents him from wondering if maybe he’s lost command of the pitch or that it’s not quite as quick as it was before? I’m going to let Mariano Rivera himself handle that one. Here’s what he wrote in his own book The Closer: My Story:
I am convinced that being fully committed to the moment, without any worries about the past or projections into the future, is the best attribute a closer can have. You wonder why the shelf life of so many short relievers is, well, so short? Why guys can be unhittable for a year or two and then disappear? It's because it takes a ton of concentration, and self-belief, to stay in the moment in this way and not let the highs and lows mess with your psyche.
So, that’s it. All you need is “…a ton of concentration and self-belief…” and you’re golden! Just pop down to Concentration and Self-Belief ‘R’ Us and pick up a couple buckets full of each and you’re set!
Except you saw the same thing I did, didn’t you. You saw what he said at the very beginning. Stay committed to the moment. Don’t worry about the past and don’t predict the future. I must tell you, I have a tough time with “the moment” because I tie that in so tightly with also having a ton of concentration and self-belief. Most of us do. We assume we must be supremely confident in ourselves, in what we’ve done and will do, that we stand in the moment an unshakeable colossus.
That’s not how it works, though!
Mariano Rivera doesn’t need to know anything about himself before he throws a pitch but that he can deliver that one pitch where he wants it to be at the velocity he wants it to have. If he needs a fastball, he knows he can throw a fastball. Maybe his fastball is great today. Maybe it’s just good enough. Doesn’t matter. Can he put it where he want to put it to get the result he wants? He believes he can for that pitch. Then, when he gets the ball back, he throws the next pitch and adjusts based on what happened with the last pitch.
See, if that past pitch was a strike, he can throw a different pitch now. Maybe he throws one out of the strike zone, because he doesn’t have to throw another strike right now. Maybe he can bait the batter into swinging at a bad pitch. Maybe he can fool the batter into expecting one type of pitch while he throws another. Those are all considerations he and his catcher make right there.
But none of that matters when it’s time to pitch the ball. All that matters is if he can deliver that pitch where and how he wants it. That is all the confidence he needs. In fact, that is all the confidence he ever needed to put together the finest career a closer has ever known in the whole history of major league baseball. Kind of cool, don’t you think?
Let’s take that out of baseball and put it into our art now. Your job as an artist is to make the best art you can, not over a week or month or year, but now. The story you’re writing now isn’t any story you wrote last month and it’s not a story you’ll write next year. It is today’s story. Your job is to tell that story the way you mean to tell it. You can not say it will fail or succeed. You can only deliver it how you want it to be delivered. That’s it. Same for a painting, a sculpture, a song, and poem…anything. What you did creatively yesterday says nothing at all about what you might do today. What you will do tomorrow is unknown to everyone except Almighty God.
Today. Now. This story. This poem. This drawing. This curve ball.
Deliver it the best you can. It might be perfect. It might just be good enough. Heck, it might fail and get jerked all the way out of the park for a game-winning home run. No matter. See the mistake and do your best to deliver the next one how you want it. Don’t dwell on the mistake. Let it be there as a thing that happened, no more nor less important than your last success. You can’t make past art. You can’t make future art. You can only make something here and now. Might as well make it the best you can make it, right?
Right.
A closer has to have a short memory and so does an artist. A creative person who gets locked up in the past or future is a creative person who isn’t creating anything. I want you to make cool stuff. The only way to do that is to be like Mariano Rivera6 and commit yourself to the moment.
One last note. My Patreon is all about committing to the moment. That’s what I do when I write Thursday!, post a poem or story on my web site or Twitter account, share them with you here, or send out a special delicious surprise video. Two bucks a month is barely a twitch in the budget but it means a ton to me. Take a look. I’d appreciate it.
[You may choose one of three tiers: $2, $5, or $20 a month. It takes barely any time at all!]
What I Wrote Last Week
As opposed to in Glengarry Glen Ross terms, where closers get coffee and the Glengarry leads.
Or sometimes four, but that’s a bit more baseball speak than maybe we want this week.
I’m going to use “he” to refer to closers because, at least at the professional baseball level, all the closers are men. For now. :)
He didn’t, by the way.
Oddly enough, his failure saved the life of his friend and fellow teammate, Enrique Wilson. Because of the loss, Wilson rescheduled his flight home to the Dominican Republic. The flight Wilson would have taken crashed into a neighborhood in Queens, killing everyone on board along with several people on the ground.
If it helps, crank “Enter Sandman” when you go into your art-creating place. That was Rivera’s walkup music.