I have admitted, in this space and others, that I can't really watch football anymore. I just can't. I keep up, to some degree, and I know that my Ph.D. alma mater is in the alleged national championship game for college football's Football Bowl Subdivision, and that the NFL franchise in the nation's capital is having a rotten year, but actually sitting and watching a game is beyond me at this point, when all I can do is wonder how many years that hit took off a player's memory or cognitive function.
I have also admitted, in this space and others, that I'm a big baseball fan.
Therefore, specifically because I know my own biases, I am compelled to devote this column to the first confirmed case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in a Major League Baseball player.
Ryan Freel was a utility player. He played for several teams, the Cincinnati Reds for six years and spent shorter terms with the Baltimore Orioles, Chicago Cubs, and Kansas City Royals. According to his own account, he suffered "nine or ten" concussions across the course of his career, from being hit in the head by pitches or other thrown balls, from collisions with opponents, teammates, bases, walls, and all sorts of other things. A sentence from the ESPN.com report linked above offers a pretty good description:
Freel showed no fear as he ran into walls, hurtled into the seats and crashed into other players trying to make catches. His jarring, diving grabs often made the highlight reels, and he was praised by those he played with and against for always having a dirt-stained uniform."
He was the prototypical "scrappy" player, one who didn't necessarily have the natural gifts of other players but hustled relentlessly and played with reckless abandon, without regard for his own body -- a phrase which rings eerily prescient now, after Freel committed suicide one year ago Sunday (December 22).
Like so many football players after their careers ended, Freel's life after baseball was increasingly consumed, apparently, with symptoms like headaches, loss of attention or short-term memory, and swings from depression to explosive emotion, not to mention a family increasingly wondering what had happened to their son, husband, father.
Freel is somewhat of an atypical case for baseball. While players hit in the head by pitched balls can and do suffer concussions -- Justin Morneau (now of the Colorado Rockies), Brian Roberts (just signed by the New York Yankees after years with the Orioles) and Corey Koskie (once of the Minnesota Twins, Toronto Blue Jays, and Milwaukee Brewers) are examples of players whose careers were derailed by concussion-related symptoms -- most of baseball's concussion-sufferers have been catchers. Possibly the most well-known example is Mike Matheny, who actually had to retire from baseball due to ongoing symptoms. Matheny may also offer some hope; he is now manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, taking that job five years after his retirement, and having pretty respectable success in it (the Cards made it to the World Series this year, in case you've forgotten). Possibly the highest-profile catcher to see his career affected by concussion symptoms is Joe Mauer, the All-Star catcher of the Minnesota Twins, who is moving to first base next season (the position occupied by Justin Morneau, when health allowed, until he was traded this past season) in hopes of avoiding any more concussions.
Catchers are easily put in the most situations that might lead to concussions and their complications. In addition to the risks any batter faces of taking a pitch to the head (rare, and frowned upon), catchers also face particular risks associated with the position they play. When a fastball upwards of 90 mph (sometimes even 100 mph or more) tips just slightly off the bat of a major-league hitter, it is physically impossible for a catcher to react quickly enough to keep the ball from slamming into his face mask or helmet, if that's where it's headed. More rarely, the end of a hitter's swing just might slam the bat into the catcher's helmet. These are not intentional; they happen nonetheless.
More dubious is the home-plate collision. If a runner happens to be approaching home plate at about the same time a throw is reaching the catcher in an attempt to get that runner out, a collision is a frequent result. Sometimes a catcher is attempting to block the runner from the plate even though the ball hasn't arrived yet, sometimes the runner is attempting to knock the ball loose from the catcher's mitt or hand. Either way, the result is typically the most violent play in baseball (though a few accidental collisions between fielders come close at times). All the padding in the world can't necessarily stop the catcher from sustaining a head injury in that situation.
Of course, Major League Baseball, like its companion league the NFL, has taken a head-in-sand approach to the issue, moving to deny any responsibility for such injuries and claim that the problem is a distinctly minor . . . .
Wait, what? Actually (and amazingly), MLB has done quite the opposite.
Even before the results of the tests on Ryan Freel's brain were announced, MLB had already taken steps to cut out one of the major contributors to baseball head injury; the elimination of those home-plate collisions. Already MLB had instituted a seven-day disabled list specifically for head injuries -- an opportunity for a player to recover without missing more time than might be necessary if the problem is diagnosed quickly and accurately.
This is frankly mind-blowing. The same league that turned a blind eye to drug scandals in the 1980s and performance-enhancing drug use in the 1990s is actually being shockingly proactive. MLB and its owners can be profoundly corrupt, whether it comes in the form of holding municipalities up for glossy new stadiums or ignoring some of the horrifying practices involved in the development and signing of baseball players from the Caribbean region. In this case, though, there seems to be genuine sorrow when a player like Matheny has to retire, a sorrow which in this case seems to be prompting genuine and surprising willingness to address the problem, even if the rules of the game are affected.
One of my least favorite parables in the Gospels is the so-called parable of the sheep and the goats, Matthew 25:31-46. It is probably familiar to most folks with much church experience at all; the nations are gathered before the Son of Man, who separates them as a shepherd separates sheep from goats, sheep to the right and goats to the left. The Son of Man then praises those on the right (who are now not sheep but "the righteous") for their responses to him when he was in need; feeding the hungry, clothing those with no clothes, visiting the sick or imprisoned. Those on the left, the "accursed," are upbraided and even cast away, for exactly their failure to do those things the righteous did. In each case, the rationale is offered that what you did to "the least of these," you did to Christ.
To me, what has lately jumped out at me about this passage (a troublesome one to me and others) is that, even as a sorting is portrayed at the beginning of the story, the "righteous" and the "accursed" had actually "sorted" themselves well before coming before Christ, by their actions towards those they encountered in need. They fed hungry people or didn't. How we respond to needs, to crises, to harms, to injustices in the world matters. Those responses reveal us. Further, they shape us -- ignoring one injustice or one need makes it easier to ignore the next one.
Grantland writer Brian Phillips penned a column this week pointing towards the particular quality of the sporting year 2013 as one in which the fan's increasing and unavoidable awareness of the corruptions of sports (the CTE horrors of the NFL being only one of many addressed) somehow failed to intersect or connect with the sports watching experience. Baseball had a frankly amazing season, even as the Biogenesis scandal unfolded; the NFL continues to thrive even as the increasing tide of CTE stories vies with murder, bullying, and who knows what else conspire to stain the sport; worldwide soccer is as huge as ever even as it becomes clear that next year's World Cup will take place in a deeply dysfunctional (and yes, fatal) atmosphere. Somehow fans simply keep the two separate. Fans do care, Phillips claims, about CTE and match-fixing and murders and suicides and murder-suicides, but kept watching as if unaffected.
To which I have to ask, how long? How long can the two be held apart from one another? How long can the two go on, coexisting, before the fan sorts himself or herself in among the sheep or goats? Another scripture, Matthew 6:24, points out that serving two masters doesn't work out so well. You end up serving one or the other.
Eventually a fan will serve one master or another; his or her attentions (and dollars, the stuff that actually hits sporting leagues or players where it hurts) will turn away from unrepentant exploitation in sports towards other pursuits, or he or she will keep on watching, less and less fazed by the mounting toll in bodies or brains or children in poverty in the shadow of flashy new stadiums.
I can't help but wonder if we -- not just the NFL or MLB or FIFA or whatever league you care to name, but we -- the people who put down the money to buy tickets or subscribe to cable to get ESPN in its various guises, or buy the merchandise or devote eight Sundays or six or seven Saturdays to tailgating, who buy product X because King James endorses it instead of product Y endorsed by Kobe Bryant, we -- are at a sorting point, slowly aligning ourselves with the sheep or the goats when it comes to the excesses and the abuses that are intricately bound up in the sports-fan experience.
This may require people of faith to make a leap many are not willing to make: to realize that one who may be an exploiter in one circumstance may well be the exploited in another. For example: male athletes have, to put it mildly, a reputation as being sexually active, taking on groupies for pleasure (witness the claims that the late Wilt Chamberlain bedded at least 2,000 women in his lifetime). An athlete who buys a prostitute? Clearly not paying attention to the women waiting in the hotel lobby. By no means does every athlete do so, but many do. When you're on the road, have plenty of money to blow, and plenty of women to enjoy, it's easy to do both.
Exploitative behavior? Sure. But does that make the athlete any less the exploited party when, after years of his league telling him concussions were no big deal, his brain ends up on an examining table in Boston or Pittsburgh? I don't think so. What are those millions of dollars (if they haven't been squandered by then) worth in that case?
Athletes are at a sorting point, too. Are NFL or NCAA players going to stand by and continue to participate in their own brain damage? Just how much are major-league baseball players willing to pump themselves full of chemicals in pursuit of a competitive advantage?
The tricky part is, one of the options requires an active choice. You have to choose to walk away from your sporting passions, or at least to scream like Howard Beale in Network. If you don't, you eventually go numb. Of course, you can choose to let the corruptions pass unobserved, and go numb voluntarily.
Either way, you will go numb, eventually, unless you choose not to.
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