1919 The Black Sox Scandal: Eight Men Out

December 19, 2022January 10, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

“Who is the bad guy?” is the first and last question we want to hear in any story. We used to love to root against bad guys, but some bad guys (e.g. Darth Vader and Joker) changed that dynamic. Some bad guys are so charismatic that we cheer them on as much, and sometimes more, than the good guys, but in most cases, we don’t want our bad guys complicated or conflicted, with a multi-layered narrative that leaves some doubt. We don’t want to think. We want Scooby Doo bad guys who only lament getting caught. Eliot Asinof’s 1963 book Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series does not satisfy this need. There are no heavy breathing bad guys encased in black metal in the tale, no maniacal laugher at the end, and no one specific person to whom fans, historians, or any of the players involved can point to when a kid allegedly says, “Say it ain’t so” in the aftermath of some members of the most talented team in Major League Baseball in 1919, the Chicago White Sox, confessing to fixing World Series before a grand jury.

If we are living paycheck to paycheck while our employer gets rich as a result of our efforts, our bad guy, in this tale, is the penny-pinching Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey. We learn that Comiskey’s players were allegedly underpaid relative to the rest of Major League Baseball, and we paint-by-numbers after that. If we have preconceived notions about the various gambling institutions that prey on little guys, we believe notorious gambler Arnold Rothstein is the most evil man in the tale. And it was Arnold Rothstein, and his henchmen, who approached the White Sox players with this whole scheme, right? We now know that it was the players, led by Chick Gandil and Eddie Cicotte, who approached the gamblers with the idea of throwing the World Series for money. If we love sports, and we want to believe that all sports are on the level, we direct our ire at the players, saying, “No matter what, you don’t sacrifice the integrity of the game.”

The most devastating details of this scandal, we now know, involves the athletes, and the the reason these details are devastating is that the athletes on the field are our heroes, the good guys, and the face of the franchise. We get to know players through their play on the field, and we savor any details reporters unearth of their personal lives that let us believe we know them. We feel their successes and failures as if they are our own. We also identify with them as fellow victims in this worker v. owner dynamic. If they fall prey to some sort of scandal, we want to believe them so much that we’ll repeat their defense against such charges. There’s also little in it for management, and those in the media, to contradict them. We also know that most athletes have relatively short-term careers, and they spend so much time honing their craft that when their careers end they often have no other marketable skills. Most of us do not begrudge them getting as much money as they can when they can get it to prepare for their life after sports. We understand this from a distance, but to suggest that a professional athlete needs more money to pay the rent, the mortgage, or to feed their family often falls on deaf ears for most modern fans who hear modern athletes turn down multi-million dollar contracts, saying, “I need to feed my family” to garner public sympathy.

“Who is the bad guy?” Just about everyone who has heard about the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, or watched the movie Eight Men Out, knows this narrative: The players were underpaid by the Mr. Scrooge of this tale, owner Charles Comiskey, and they fell under the spell of Arnold Rothstein and his henchmen offering them thousands of dollars to lose the World Series. The narrative portends that when the players sought more money from him, Comiskey turned them down, and there were various examples of how this man pinched pennies, until the desperate players were approached some gamblers with an idea to purposely lose the World Series for money, once-in-a-lifetime money. This narrative depends heavily on that desperate characterization. They were depicted as desperate to feed their families, “as any good man would.” If we approached the baseball enthusiast at the end of the bar, 99% of them would list, “They were starving, and their little kids were starving. We can’t blame them for wanting to secure enough money to feed their families,” as the primary, underlying premise of The Black Sox Scandal. It’s what we’ve all been led to believe.

Yet, The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) provides a list of the top paid players on the 1919 Chicago White Sox. It concedes that as with every professional sports team, then and now, the individual salaries of the 1919 White Sox were top heavy, and they also cite Asinof’s listings of salaries as a primary source for this information. Asinof listed the salaries, but he didn’t compare them to the rest of the league at the time. SABR did. SABR found that when compared to the league, five of the top White Sox salaries were in the top twenty individual salaries paid in Major League Baseball, in 1919, and that the White Sox, as a team, had the highest payroll in baseball at the time. So much for the “underpaid, perhaps criminally, underpaid White Sox players relative to the rest of the league” line. Eddie Collins (not one of the reported eight involved) and Eddie Cicotte (after bonuses) each made $15,000 a year compared to the most popular and highest paid player in the league Ty Cobb, who made 20,000 a year. The site suggests that while the average salaries of the White Sox athlete, in particular, and the rest of the Major League teams, in general, did not dwarf the average salary of the common citizen in the manner modern Major League salaries do today, with the top salaries of the top players being around $15,000.00 compared to the average 1919 citizens salary of $8,973.00, the site suggests that Comiskey’s purported greed is not nearly as scandalous as the movie, and much of history, have alleged.

The counterpoint that Comiskey was not unusually greedy among Major League owners should also be countered with the idea that Major League owners collectively colluded to keep salaries low. In 1919, Baseball had a Reserve Clause which prevented players from going to another team, even after the end of their contract, until they were offered an unconditional release. When they signed a contract, they were basically the team’s property. The only power a baseball player had, in 1919, was to hold out, or refuse to play, until they received pay they considered worthy of their talent. The latter was often at the discretion, some say whims, of the owner. In short, the player had little-to-no power in contract negotiations. They were subject to the absolute power of the owners, and we can assume that the owners colluded to keep salaries low, so low that many players had to find jobs during the offseason. It was unquestionably an unfair worker v. owner dynamic that wouldn’t be tilted back in the baseball players favor until the reserve clause was abolished in 1975.

The system in place, in 1919, was undoubtedly unfair, but this idea that the White Sox players who signed up for the ploy to fix the World Series were all but destitute compared to the rest of the league, and that they felt it necessary to go to the gamblers to feed their families just doesn’t stack up for some of the players, like Cicotte, were earning almost double what the common man made in the era. Another future Hall of Famer, catcher Ray Schalk (not implicated in the Black Sox Scandal), was the 13th-highest-paid player in the league at $7,083. Chick Gandil, the primary organizer of the scandal, may have had a reason, with his $3,500 a year salary, and his eventual $35,000 pay out from the Rothstein-led gamblers (equivalent to $522,000 in 2020), but the rest of the scandal participants reportedly only received $5,000 each or more (equivalent to $75,000 in 2020).

The following is a list of the White Sox players involved in the scandal, and the reported amounts they received for fixing the 1919 World Series. Keep in mind that the average salary of the average citizen in the United States of America, in 1919, was $8,973. Unless otherwise listed, the players involved reportedly received $5,000 a piece for fixing the 1919 World Series when the gamblers promised them $20,000 a piece.

“Shoeless” Joe Jackson ($6,000).
Eddie Cicotte ($15,000 salary) (received $10,000 before game one).
Chick Gandil ($3,500 salary) ($35,000 for organizing the fix).
Swede Risberg ($3,250 salary) (received 15,000 for his role in the fix).
Buck Weaver (7,250).
Claude “Lefty” Williams ($3,500).
“Happy” Felsch ($3,750).
Fred McMullen ($3,600).

***

The other idea that sports’ fans want to believe, in reference to the Black Sox Scandal, the biggest scandal in sports in the early part of the 20^th century, is that it was a one-off, an aberration in the rich tradition of baseball before and after the scandal-ridden World Series. We prefer our stories in neat, tight little packages that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Before reading this book, I thought I knew everything there was to know about the scandal, because I watched what I considered the comprehensive story in the movie. The movie depicts the gamber’s influence on this World Series as a sort of whim by Chick Gandil, as if he just thought of it out of thin air, but the movie fails to discuss how institutional gambling and gamblers were in the game of baseball prior to the 1919 season. Time constraints don’t allow a movie maker enough time to display a full narrative, of course, but one would think they might include some discussions revolving around how institutional gambling was in the culture of baseball during that era. The unfortunate fact, as laid out by Eliot Asinof, is that there was evidence of gambling, gamblers, and throwing games before the 1919 season. Some suggest that the “history of fixed ballgames goes all the way back to 1865.” Author William F. Lamb wrote that Eddie Cicotte, the first of the Black Sox players to admit to the 1919 conspiracy, said he and his teammates were “envious of the $10,000 rumored to have been paid Cubs players to throw the 1918 Series” against Babe Ruth and the Red Sox. The idea that gamblers had any influence over the game was rarely talked about, but most members of the media, and baseball insiders, knew it was going on. The culture was so pervasive that certain players traded techniques of fudging a game in ways fans, managers, and even some of their peers couldn’t see.

Other than time constraints, we can guess that the movie makers also decided against bringing the whole house down by condemning an entire era in this manner, because most audiences don’t want to hear that. We don’t want to hear how players, on other teams, regularly threw regular season games, got caught, and were never punished. We don’t want to hear the fact that ballplayers accepting money from gamblers was so common that what the White Sox players did, didn’t necessarily stain the game at the time as much as it stained the World Series. The influence gamblers had on regular season games appears to have been so entrenched in baseball’s culture at the time that Chick Gandil may have considered throwing a World Series for money, for once-in-a-lifetime money, as nothing more than the next logical step.

One of the primary antecedents of the scandal author Eliot Asinof suggests may have laid the groundwork for what would become “The Black Sox Scandal” was the federal government shutting down the race tracks in 1917. Asinof provides no reason why the federal government did this, but research dictates that it might have had something to do with the fact that the U.S. government needed more horses to use in combat in World War I. The gamblers who previously spent so much time at the race tracks that they purchased homes and apartments near the tracks, “converted their vast machinery of operation from horses to baseball” Asinof wrote in the aftermath of the racetrack shutdown. “By 1919, two years later, gamblers openly boasted that they could control ball games as readily as they [once] controlled horse races.” The idea that by 1919 gambling and gamblers was so pervasive in baseball that players, coaches, owners, and those in league offices knew about it, is also not discussed in the movie.

Fixing games was so commonplace by 1919 that players casually joked about techniques they would employ to fix games that weren’t apparent to fans, managers, owners, or even the media. Outfielders joked about getting “a bad jump” on the ball in the outfield, and infielders talked about making routine ground balls appear so difficult that a poorly timed throw to first appeared more reasonable. The idea that they joked about these techniques suggests that not only how easy it would be for a fielder to fudge a little, but that they developed these techniques over time. The rumors of players fixing games eventually reached members of the media. Eliot Asinof’s narrative suggests anytime representatives of the media tried to dig into these rumors, they were easily bought off, and instructed to stop digging. Buying their silence was done, according to Asinof, “for the good of baseball”. Whether their access to players was threatened or not, we can say that these members of the media played a role in this scandal in that if they weren’t so compliant they may have broken a story that prevented The Black Sox Scandal, but they didn’t put up much of a fight by some accounts.

The ultimate search for a bad guy leads us into a chicken and an egg scenario that asks which came first, the owner’s collusive efforts that kept players’ salaries low, or the influence of gamblers, and the enticement of their money. Evidence suggests that the owners underpaid the athlete first, and that drove them into the arms of the gamblers. At some point, the owners and all of their underlings caught wind of the players’ fixing games, and they did everything they could to sweep it under the rug? Did they do this to protect the integrity of the game, or did they see it as a way to continue to underpay the athletes? There’s a famous scene in this story that might have prevented the entire Black Sox Scandal. The best pitcher, and game one of the World Series pitcher, of the White Sox, Eddie Cicotte, allegedly approached owner Charles Comiskey, with hat in hand, asking for a bonus he thought he believed the owner and manager conspired to prevent him from attaining. SABR states that Cicotte was “Never promised a bonus that doubled his salary, certainly not one that doubled Cicotte’s salary” for winning 30 games in one season. Cicotte won 29 games that season, and the rumor suggests he was pulled from the 30th game before he could win it by rule. Baseball research suggests that Cicotte was pulled from that tenant-clinching game, because he wasn’t pitching well that day.

If this particular meeting happened, we could speculate that Comiskey may have turned Cicotte down by telling Cicotte that he, like other players in the game, should seek that money “elsewhere”, with an unspoken wink and a nod to gamblers. We believe that Comiskey wanted to keep more of his money, of course, and he most assuredly knew his ballplayers were making more money under the table, so if this speculative scenario holds any weight, both parties walk away happy, corrupted but happy. If this never happened, then it pulls out one more leg out of the “Comiskey was the bad” guy argument.

We can presume that as long as their team won most of their games and stayed in contention to keep fan attendance high, the owners turned a blind eye to any hints of game fixing, and they benefitted by not having to pay their players top dollar. Accounting receipts for Major League Baseball are murky, but SABR suggests that owners were paying players approximately just under 33% of revenues, which they could get away with thanks to the Reserve Clause. Where did this revenue come from? TV revenue was still 45 years in the future, so while the Major League teams received some money from some media, the overwhelming source of revenue for all Major League Baseball teams was attendance, so the owners probably didn’t sniff around the dugout when their teams remained in contention to keep attendance high.

The final tally on the 1919 Chicago White Sox, the best teams of their generation, won only 88 games that year, 3.5 games ahead of the Cleveland Indians. They won enough games to win the pennant, in other words, but if they were the best team in 1919, it invites some speculation that they only won 88 games. We should also note that the season was shortened by the war department, from 154 games to 140, after playing only 125 in 1918. So, the White Sox probably could’ve won 10-12 more games of the 14 they would’ve played in a 154-game season, but that’s unprovable speculation.

“Who is the bad guy?” Some of us enjoy saying, as Dave Mason sang, “There ain’t no good guy, there ain’t no bad guy. There’s only you and me and we just disagree.” Those of us who try to sort through the he said, he said of the Black Sox scandal might answer D, all of the above. If this is you, let me ask you a question, who do you care about most? Nobody cares about an owner, or a group of owners involved in a collusive effort, and nobody cares about a bunch of smarmy gamblers? The owner might be the bad guy if he deprived his players of a living wage that might cause their families to starve, but I think this article proves that, at the very least, Comiskey and the Chicago White Sox did not stand out in that regard, and if Major League Players were underpaid, in general, they knew this going in. We might care that one of the owners so deprived his players of money they earned by putting on athletic shows for the audience, but we only care about it in lieu of it driving the players to throw the World Series. It might intrigue us to learn how much Charles Comiskey made that year in an historical perspective, but other than that we don’t care. It also might intrigue us to learn how much Arnold Rothstein and the other gamblers made by selling their souls to taint the game, because we might ask them, in a rhetorical sense, if it all worth it? Did they make once-in-a-lifetime money, or did they make just enough to put a big, huge smile on their face. They obviously didn’t care about the integrity of the game, and we shouldn’t expect anything more from them. They’re the smarmy gamblers sitting on our shoulder trying to convince us to sell our soul for a couple bucks. We all know those types. The only ones we truly care about in this story are those with whom we identify the most, our idols growing up, and those most capable of letting us down. Fair or not, we have greater expectations of players to live up to our expectations. We know they’re human and prone to temptation, but what some of the eight players confessed to was inexcusable in many respects.

The sad, tragic effect of the White Sox Black Sox scandal occurred after the commissioner banned the eight players involved in the scandal from Major League Baseball for life, thus effectively removing the greatest team of their generation from the list of contenders. Was it wrong for baseball’s commissioner to ban them for life? To answer that question, we ask another question: What if they hadn’t? To this day, sports fans question whether its athletes are on the take? These suspicions probably weren’t born the day the Black Sox Scandal hit the news, and they obviously didn’t die the day after the banning, but imagine how much fuel it would’ve been added to the conspiracy theorist’s fire if these players received nothing more than a slap on the wrist? The White Sox became a second-level team after some of their best players were banned for life and beyond, and the ban paved the way for Babe Ruth and the Yankees to begin their reign over baseball. The sad thing is that if these players were not involved in the scandal and thus banned from ever playing Major League baseball again, it’s possible that the White Sox might have been the team to rule baseball for the next thirty years, not the Yankees. That might be a bit of a stretch, as the Yankees made so many brilliant player personnel decisions that are too numerous to list here, over the next thirty years. The talent the Yankees “discovered” had nothing to do with the Black Sox scandal, so perhaps their dynasty was inevitable, but success often breeds success, and who knows where the White Sox could’ve gone with a World Series ring and that roster for the next five to ten years. At the very least, the scandal deprived baseball history of some of the most talented individuals’ of their era, as their future careers were both lost and scarred beyond repair, and some incredible games and pennant races between the Yankees and the White Sox. History being what it was, the scandal and the ban ruined the franchise for the rest of some of their fans’ lives, as the White Sox wouldn’t win a pennant for forty years (1959), and they wouldn’t win another World Series for another eighty-five years (2005).

Living, Dying, and Getting a Haircut

November 16, 2022August 28, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

The world has changed in many ways since I was a kid. One of the big ones is the return policy most department stores employ on most items. The stores still have a “no return” policy on some items, but back when I was younger, they erred on the side of no returns for just about everything. They put you through the wringer too. “Why are you returning this? What was wrong with it? According to section D sub point B of our return policy, there has to be something wrong with it for us to give you your money back. Was it the wrong size?” Ummm, yes, that’s it. “Then get another size.” I don’t want another size. “Well, you can’t have your money back on this item, unless you have a qualified reason listed under the return policy.” If this doesn’t read confrontational, go back and read it in the most confrontational, dismissive, and rude manner possible. After working in the service industry, I wondered who hired these awful, angry people, and did they analyze all of their employees and put the most confrontational ones on the returns desk? I still have anxiety issues whenever an item goes bad, doesn’t fit, or I somehow realize I’ve made a bad purchase. I mentally prepare for the battle that more often than not, doesn’t take place now. For those who still have issues returning items, I developed a battle plan.

Try to find the teenage male working behind the counter, if you’re returning an item. They don’t give a crud about the bullet points on the return policy of the company. The typical teenage male does everything he can to avoid confrontation. They might even speed through your transaction before the manager nears, in fear of doing something wrong. If there is no teenage boy available, go male over female, and young over old. If the only checker available is an old woman, either stand in the longer line, or just go home and come back another day. Older women tend to treat your return like a pop quiz on the laws and bylaws of the company’s policies on returns they’ve studied so well that they don’t even have to look them up.

If you’re getting a haircut, flip it. An older woman has paid her dues, learned her craft, and studied the finer points of her profession so well that she treats every haircut like a pop quiz on cutting hair. She might not talk to you, but her skills and techniques are so refined that she may speed through your haircut without anything but the necessary Q&A’s. If you see a young, attractive female, she will talk to you, and if you’re lucky she might even lead you to believe that you’re young and attractive again, but you’ll probably walk out looking like Mo Howard from the Three Stooges. And wait in line or just go home, if the only available stylist is a twenty-something male, because they don’t give a crud.

***

“I’m Geoffrey, Geoffrey Guardina, and I’ve been diagnosed with cancer,” Geoffrey said. Geoffrey caught me off guard with that unnecessary addition. I asked him a very pointed question about his kid. Geoffrey answered the question, but he basically since I have the floored me with that comment about his health. It caught me so off guard that I pictured myself having cancer, and I took a moment to thank The Creator that I didn’t. He had an unmistakable look in the space that followed. The look asked, how come he hasn’t said I’m sorry to hear that yet? His look condemned me. It’s social protocol for him to say that, yet he refuses.

I missed my spot, I admit that but I just met this guy, and he just talked about how he was his kid’s high school baseball coach. I didn’t expect him to pivot into a terminal diagnosis. He did, and I failed to fulfill my contractual obligation of social protocol.

“They’ve given me four years to live,” he added.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Who was wrong? Geoffrey told me he had a fatal condition about one minute and thirty seconds after our greeting. I did not fulfill my end of the social contract. Geoffrey presumably wanted to inform me that he was a fighter, and he expected all the kids on his baseball teams to be fighters. We could also say that death defines the life of a person soon after they learn that it will end soon. It defines a life as much, if not more than any accomplishment in life. Yet, I come from a long line of men who defined strength through silence. What’s the first thing they say about a person who died a long, slow death. “He knew for years that he was dying, but I never heard him complain.” A man who works his diagnosis into his intro probably does a whole lot of complaining. Regardless how I think Geoffrey Guardina reacted, it leads me to wonder how I will react to the news that I am informed that my time as a resident of Earth will end soon.

***

WE want athletes to retire before they’re ready, so WE can remember how good they were. OUR ideal scenario involves them retiring one year too soon over one year too late, but some athletes love the game so much that THEY want to play one more year beyond their expiration date. WE find that absolutely revolting, because WE want to remember how great they were in their 20’s.

Nothing lights up message boards like a premier athlete who stays one year too long, and he becomes nothing more than one of the better players in the league. Due to the fact that some of us live vicariously through athletes, we take their desire to play one more year as some kind of personal insult.

“He was too old two years ago,” WE write on message boards. “Now MY lasting memory of him will be of him will be of him being a good player, but I wanted to remember him as great.”

Imagine you’re this professional athlete. You’ve sacrificed more than anyone knows. We rarely talk about the lonely, arduous hours spent in gyms and weight rooms. We rarely talk about how some of the best to ever play the game didn’t hang out with the fellas when they were teenagers. No one cares about the boring details of a gym rat, spending all of their free time doing something, anything they could think up, to get whatever edge they could find on an opponent. Some probably played some video games in their free time, but how many of the premier athletes spent a tedious amount of time studying game film, trying to spot a weakness or tendency of your opponent? We’ve all heard stories of athletes hanging out with their professional peers, drinking, doing lines, and groupies, but how many of them went to bed, because they believed sleep would help them heal and play at maximum efficiency. After all those sacrifices that didn’t feel like sacrifices at the time, because they loved the game that much, you turned 30, and a bunch of people who know nothing about the sacrifices you’ve made in life, and continue to make, to get better, are demanding you retire. They claim you’re doing it for the money, but you don’t need the money, and you haven’t for about ten years.

You love the game, and you’re not ready to end your career. You know your physical skills have diminished slightly, but you think you still have something in the tank, and you love the game. Isn’t that the most important thing? You love it more than the twenty somethings who coast on God-given talent. You remember when that was you, but you’ve mentally matured to the point that you’ve learned from past mistakes, and even though your physical skills have diminished a little, you’ve developed techniques to compensate for that. You think you can make up for diminished physical play with smarter play, and you finally appreciate everything you took for granted when you were a twenty something.

You were wrong, as it turns out. Your skills diminished more than you thought, and you realize that you are over-the-hill. Now that that’s clear, you can go into next fifty some odd years of life knowing you left the game on your terms, for the right reasons, and that you left it all out on the court or field.

Imagine being in your early 30’s, two years removed from being one of the best athletes in the world, and the sycophantic broadcasters who once called you one of the game’s greatest are now telling you to call it a career. NBC broadcaster Bob Costas was one of the worst, in recent memory, at doing this. He asked the question everyone was supposedly afraid to ask, but everyone asked. “Have you given any thought to retiring?” To listen to Bob Costas, every player should retire at 26, one year after the average physical peak, just so he/WE can remember them for who they were. The world according to Bob would have it that every aging athlete should be forced to retire after that championship game, so he/WE can live with the memory of them as champions. After listening to Bob Costas broadcast the 2022, American League Championship Series, some audience members stated that his performance suggested that he may have stayed one year too long. I instinctively blanched at the notion that anyone but the individual, and the individuals who sign their checks should decide when someone is done, until I remembered how often Bob spoiled an athlete’s jubilation by asking his sanctimonious questions. I now view it as karma.

Theodore Roosevelt once talked about how hard it was for him to deal with the idea that he peaked so early in life. (T.R. was in his early forties when he became president.) Imagine how difficult it must be to peak in our twenties, when most of us are too immature to process and appreciate, such is the life of the athlete. They still have fifty some odd years of life left, and active aging athletes learn how difficult that can be, secondhand, from those who’ve lived it. So, the athlete plays a year, or a couple years, longer than they should have. We don’t want to remember Franco Harris in a Seahawks uniform, Muhammed Ali v. Larry Holmes, Michael Jordan in a Wizards uniform, and Willie Mays looking lost in the outfield. With the perspective of time, we now know that the athlete doesn’t tarnish their moment in the Sun, but what does it say about us that WE continue to fear that it will? The aging athlete wants to arrive at the definitive answer that they’re done. Better that, they might think, than living the next fifty years, thinking they could’ve played one more. WE don’t think that way. WE think they should’ve retired a year earlier, so WE can remember how great they/(WE?) were in their prime. It’s their lives, and they sacrificed everything for the game, and they were so great at one time that someone is willing to pay them to see how much they have left. WE have nothing on the line, and they have so much. They’ve earned the right to make the decision when they are done. It should be none of our business, but WE make it our business every time an aging athlete decides to play one more year.

Joey at the Bat

October 27, 2022September 24, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

“Joey! C’mon, it’s just a game,” Regina shouted out, as Joey Dunning took a bat to a Gatorade water cooler. It obviously wasn’t to Joey. To Joey, it was an existential crisis to strike out three times in a company sponsored slow-pitch softball game. Companies organize these company functions, so we stupid people can have fun, and we were having fun until Joey took a bat to one of those insulated Gatorade coolers with a beverage dispenser. If Joey hits it once or twice, it’s a thing that draws attention. If he hits it as hard as he can, eight to nine times, it’s a human being imploding, and we watch with our mouths open, like this,” Barry said mimicking the expression. “We pretty much know life isn’t going the way Joey planned, and that this might be one of the worst days of Joey’s otherwise miserable life. What do we do? Do we laugh ourselves to tears? Not at the time. At the time, it’s shocking, kind of sad, and a little pathetic. We’re in tears later, replaying every second of it, every swear word he used, and replaying our reactions to it. One of my buddies actually took a picture of the Gatorade cooler after the it was all over, and he saved it. He didn’t know why he saved it, but the next time something bad happened to me, he texted that picture to me with a caption, “It could be worse.”

“Nothing excites the coward more than seeing a hero fall,” Dave Chapelle once said, “because it justifies their cowardly existence.” That doesn’t quite nail this scenario, because Joey wasn’t anyone’s hero. He was a good-looking guy, though, and a body-builder, who had none of the problems we did attracting women. So, did we kind of relish seeing the worst moment of such a man’s life? We did. All of us did.

The Germans have a term for laughing at another person’s pain. Schadenfreude. Leave it to the Germans to develop a term for laughing at the destruction of another person. And for any offended Germans out there, I’m part German, so I can say that. We laugh when someone trips and falls in the hall and leaves makeup on that carpeted wall. It’s funny, and we all know it. Even when we fall, we know it’s funny, no matter how painful and tragic it is. We know someone, somewhere will develop some material about it that they will share with their friends for years.

I laugh at other people’s pain, and I expect them to laugh at mine. Without knowing the exact definition of yin and yang, we all understand how nature balances itself out through opposite but interconnected forces. As long as it doesn’t involve something debilitating, we all enjoy seeing someone else fall. The bigger the better, and the level of emotional and physical pain one incurs corresponds to the comedic value of the situation. Some say it’s karma, and as a person who laughs at other people’s pain, I know I’m going to get mine, and you know you’re going to get yours. We know karma is going to reach around and bite us in some very tender areas.

We’ve all experienced some levels of karma, but something tells us that ain’t it. That’s just the tip. We’ve done a whole lot of laughing at others, and we know that there’s more to come. We know we’ll get ours. We know there will come a day when we’re old and decrepit, hooked up to some machine that sustains life, and some intern will come into our room, see us gasping for air, and he’ll find it hilarious.

We might expect a little sympathy from a hospital employee, but all institutions have good employees and poor ones. As death creeps up on us, the emotional hysteria will probably lead us to yell something like, “What are you laughing at? I’m dying here, for Cripes sakes!” When we cool down and recognize that we don’t have the strength to fight death anymore, we’ll either acknowledge that we deserve it for laughing so hard at so many others on the worst days of their life, or we might see the humor in it too. Seriously, are you so sick that you’ll probably be laughing with the orderly who’s laughing at your death mask?

“You should’ve seen your face,” that orderly will say, “You were all like …” Barry mimicked the orderly’s imitation of his desperate gasp for breath.

‘I know,’ we say, chuckling, ‘but you gotta remember I am dying here. No, I’m not saying it’s not funny. I’m just saying that when you’re taking your last breath, it’s probably going to hurt, and if you’re wondering if it is your last breath, you’re probably going to make some embarrassing faces too.’

When that day comes, we might regret laughing so hard at a grown man beating a Gatorade cooler with such intense frustration, or we might not, depending on sadistic we are.

I don’t know how women would handle this situation, but when a guy strikes out three times at a slow-pitch company outing, in front of everyone he works with every day, forty hours a week, it’s our version of a Promethean hell. The story of Prometheus is that the gods wanted to find a creative way to punish him for introducing humans to fire. The gods decided to bind him to a rock and have an eagle eat the liver out of his body for the rest of eternity. Have you ever seen a bird eat? It’s not clean. Even a large eagle has a relatively small mouth, and they don’t have teeth. So, if they’re going to eat your liver out, they have to stick a talon in you to balance you, while they rip it out bit by tiny bit. Yeah, the gods knew how to bring the pain. As the tale of Prometheus tale goes, once this eagle is finally done carrying out that torturous punishment, Prometheus’ liver grows back the next day, and the eagle rips it out again, and again, for the rest of eternity.

As horrific as that punishment is to picture, I’m willing to bet that most men in the audience here tonight would prefer that torturous afterlife, for the rest of eternity, to striking out three times in slow-pitch softball, in front of all of your friends and drinking buddies. Why, well, as with the repetitive torture Prometheus experienced, we will relive that moment over and over for the next thirty years. You might think it’s over, and you might finally reach a point where you’re no longer staring up at the ceiling at three in the morning, reliving it over and over, seeing all of the faces, hearing the silence that followed, and remembering that little kid giggling when you went Al Capone on the Gatorade cooler. If you have mean, sadistic friends like I do, you know they’re going to bring it up, and force you to go through your own version of Promethean hell.

What’s worse, physical pain or mentally reliving your worst day at-bat for the rest of your life. Now, if you’re a regular softball player, like I was, you’re going to mess up a lot. You’re going to make horrendous, humiliating errors, but you can try to erase it next week by making some good plays. Joey, to my knowledge, never played softball, or any other sports, after this game. My bet is that he remembers that moment from 10pm until 1AM, staring at the ceiling, listening to his wife snore, for the rest of his life, and then when he mercifully finds sleep, it invades his nightmares.

Joey was a big body builder type. Most of us go to the gym about two times a week. I’m betting Joey was a five-to-six-day-a-weeker, so we naturally thought the man was built for athletic domination. We could tell that Joey thought that too. He was on my team, and I was behind him in the batting order. I wanted him to do well, of course, because I wanted our team to win, but I didn’t want him to do so well that my little blooper singles would be an afterthought. The ropey muscles on this guy’s forearms made me think I was in trouble. The outfielders backed up for him. We all thought Joey was going to put on a clinic. He had brand new batting gloves that it looked like he purchased just for this company outing. He even had wrist bands. Who wears wrist bands to a company outing? Between pitches, he adjusted the fit of his gloves and fiddled with his wrist bands, just like Major Leaguers. It was so shocking to see him strike out on three pitches that first time that when the other team even ribbed him a little, in a good-natured way, we all kind of giggled. It was all polite and fun.

So, what’s the best resolution we might develop for the inability to hit a huge softball coming at you incredibly slow? Whenever we substitute a good solution with the best, most perfect solution, we often end up choosing the worst. Joey’s solution was to swing faster and harder? In his second at-bat, Joey swung so hard he fell down. Yikes! We could almost hear the nails going into the intangible walls of his nightmares, building a permanent fixture in there.

Seeing as how we were at a company function, and the sense of competition between our teams was fun more than anything else, the pitcher lofted the last two pitches up of Joey’s second at-bat, with the greatest of ease,” Barry said mimicking the soft toss. “The way we might pitch to a five-year-old who is having trouble hitting the ball, and in a scene that will probably play in Joey’s nightmares for the rest of his life, he missed both of them. Would you laugh at this man self-destructing right in front of you?” Barry paused for all the laughing yesses in the audience. “You would? While witnessing the worst moment in someone’s life?”

We all say yes at a comedy club, three to four drinks in, but when it’s someone you know, someone you see at work every day, forty hours a week?” Barry paused to survey the crowd. “We all would. We all do, because we have grievances, petty personal and impersonal grievances. We have grievances against mother nature, God, and the world and everyone in it. If you don’t find failure funny, let me add this. After Joey’s second strikeout, there were groans all over the field on our team and the opposing one. Even the men who envied how easily Joey picked up women, dropped that grievance and began rooting for him. We were all cheering for him. Even though he fell on his ass after the third strike of his second at-bat, someone yelled out, “That’s all-right Joey! Get ‘em next time!” The other team was even saying stuff to cheer him on, being good sports and all.

Now with the third and final strikeout, let me ask you what do you think would be the worst possible reaction you can think of following a third strikeout in slow-pitch softball? Try to put yourself in Joey’s shoes, and think what reaction might haunt you for the rest of your life?” Barry asked the audience. A few people shouted some reactions out. “More teasing? Laughter? Wrong. How about silence? If you asked me, prior to this display, I probably would’ve said more teasing and more laughter too, but that day taught me that silence, claustrophobic silence is the worst possible reaction you can give to someone striking out in slow-pitch softball. Why? Every other reaction gives us some direction for our anger. If Billy laughs, we can say, “How dare you laugh at me Billy, I was trying so hard, and that was so embarrassing, and you laugh? What is wrong with you? You cold-heartless bastard?” If someone tries to soften the blow, by encouraging us in some way, we can say, “Aw, shut it!” to their condescending sympathy, but silence? Silence causes you to eat the moment whole without lubricants or anything to aid in the digestion process, and it festers in some black hole in our innards for the rest of eternity, and the only outlet we can find is an inanimate object that can be used to retain the temperature of drink products.

As cold and sadistic as we are, we’re not even close to as cold and sadistic as children can be, because they don’t understand how to apply sympathy, and they haven’t experienced enough failure in life to be empathetic. They just think a guy going ballistic on a water cooler is hysterical. “Is he joking dad?” No, now look away.

We try to cover their eyes, but they fight it. This isn’t something they see every day, so they fight to watch it. “Why is he so mad, dad?” they ask far too loud. “Was he mad because he struck out?”

Yes, now for God’s sakes quit staring and join the rest of us, pretending this isn’t happening. The other parents in the audience don’t even laugh at our boy’s innocent, loud questions. They maintain the silence.

Kid won’t let stuff like this go either. “Why did Joey do that?” they ask on the car ride home.

“Joey had no idea he was common. He thought he was special. He thought he’d be a contender, a somebody, some kind of prodigy. Some part of him thought he might be Major League baseball material. He thought that when he was your age, we all did, but he doesn’t play recreational sports the way some of us do, so he never learned that he wasn’t special. He had no idea that by the time he was thirty, the only thing anyone would pay him for was data entry. Missing those slow-pitch softballs, told him that he’s no better than the rest of us, and that was quite shocking to him.

“Some of us played sports when we were kids, and we played softball in recreational leagues when we aged out of most sports, and we all made horrible errors everyone enjoyed. Sweet little, old ladies laughed at us, “Idiot!” they’d say. Joey, obviously, never went through all that. We made errors that were so awful they were met with silence, and trust me nothing is worse than silence. They don’t even try to cheer us up after a while, because we’re so awful. They allow us to go back to the dugout in silent shame. After that, we realize that we aren’t half as good as we thought we were. Everyone who plays any sport goes through that, but Joey never did. Joey preferred sitting in the stands, laughing at us losers, thinking about his potential for greatness. That company softball game was his big chance, the moment he thought he’d realize all his hopes and dreams of being a prodigy that no one ever heard of before. Joey believed the mythology of Joey that Joey built, and he thought he had potential to be great at something, anything, but he didn’t really do anything about it. He believed something would come along, something would happen, and when it didn’t, when he realized that he was no better than those of us he laughed at for working so hard at stuff that came naturally to him, he took it out on a Gatorade cooler.”

It was a meaningless slow-pitch softball game, at a company outing, and I’m sure that the twenty-something people who were there that day don’t even remember the day, the game, or the fact that we even had an outing. The joke here is that Joey remembers, or that he’ll never be able to forget it. The joke is that in some small way, this meaningless game ruined his life in some meaningful way. I’m almost positive it didn’t. I didn’t talk to Joey before this company outing, and I didn’t after it, so I don’t know the if, when, or how he worked through it. I don’t even know if Joey had to work through it, or if he’s the type to obsesses over such matters. Joey might have moved on as if nothing happened that day, but if he’s anything like me he dreads quiet moments, because they remind him of the silence, he heard that day after the third strike of his third at-bat. If he’s anything like me, those intermittent quiet moments have a tendency of popping up at the oddest times, and I’m sure Joey doesn’t even know why he now has a preference for some kind of noise, music, TV, or anything that makes noise in his background, because of what happened after that third and final strikeout at that company function. You’ve no doubt heard the cliché deafening silence. Yeah, that’s the type of silence that puts an exclamation point on top of one of the top ten worst moments of his life. It’s the type of silence that almost allows you to hear the facial muscles of the players, on both sides, twitch into a cringe.

It strains credulity to me to think that Joey doesn’t remember this day. If I ever asked him about it, and he said, “Huh, I don’t remember that we even had a company outing.” I’d immediately think he was lying. How could he forget falling on his keister the way he did, the way that pitcher lofted him pitches the way we would a five-year-old, the deafening silence that followed his third strikeout, and, of course, destroying a water cooler in frustration? (Even though he hit it eight, nine times, Joey didn’t damage the container, which either speaks to Gatorade’s sound construction of it, or Joey’s ineptitude as a batter, but Joey did offer the owner compensation for the cooler if there was any damage to it. The owner said it worked fine, and no compensation was necessary). If Joey is able to forget all that, because he is blessed with such a short-term memory that he only thinks about today and tomorrow, then all the power to him. It was such a meaningless game, as I wrote, that I don’t doubt that most of the players, and the people watching, have long forgotten about it. If Joey was able to forget the specifics of his failure that day, or the day in general, it probably speaks to the sound construction of the brain, and its ability to just forget that which could, even in small, insignificant ways, plague us and diminish our quality of life.