Grigori Rasputin V: Sorcerer or Charlatan?

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“Was Gregori Rasputin really an occult mystic who used treacherous sorcery to ingratiate himself to Tsar Nicholas II by performing miracles on and curing the pain of the Tsar’s son? Or was he, no less impressively, a most gifted Counter-Agent who disarmed his country’s most powerful rulers through sheer charisma and manipulative charm?” –asks Adam Lehrer in the Safety Propoganda. 

“No!” say some historians. “Rasputin wasn’t any of those things. He was nothing more than a right time, right place charlatan.” Anytime one accuses another of absolute fraud, deceit or corruption, their first responsibility is to prove that the provocateur knowingly deceived. We can all read the conditions of the Russian empire at the time and see that they were susceptible and vulnerable to a charlatan. We can read through the health conditions of Tsar Nicholas II’s son, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, and know that the Romanovs were desperate for a miracle worker to spare him the pain and possible death of hemophilia. We can take one look at Rasputin, the ill-educated peasant from nowhere, Russia and know that if he didn’t do something spectacular, he was doomed to a life of anonymity, but there is ample evidence to suggest that Rasputin believed he had an ability, if not the otherworldly powers, to cure the Tsar’s son. To believe otherwise is to suggest that Rasputin knowingly deceived his family since birth, and the friends and neighbors who surrounded him in the early part of his life. There’s an old line on subterfuge that it’s not really a lie if you believe it. When we say this, we usually do so tongue in cheek, but Rasputin’s bio suggests that he truly believed he had God-like powers? “Christ in miniature,” Rasputin often said when asked to characterize himself. Was he a deceptive person? Did he attempt to deceive the Empress Alexandra, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich’s mother, to weave a way into the empire, or did he attempt to prove to himself as “The Chosen One!”

At the moment of his birth, Rasputin’s mother believed he was the chosen one, and we can guess that she told him as much on a daily basis throughout his youth. We might cut her some slack for this fantastical notion, seeing as how Rasputin may have been her only child of seven, or eight, to survive childhood. (Evidence suggests she had a daughter who may have also survived for a time.) Anytime a mother has a child, they consider that child special, but in Rasputin’s Serbian village of Polrovskove death among children was so common that the miracle we know as childbirth was increased tenfold in that world of peasants. The idea that Rasputin was special may have grown in her mind as he did, until she was convinced that Grigori was a gift from God, and she eventually made a crossover to the idea that her son was the chosen one. 

What would we think if our mother told us we were God’s messenger throughout our youth? What if she bolstered her claim by telling us that at the moment we were born a rare celestial event occurred to mark the occasion of our birth. “A shooting star of such magnitude that had always been taken by the God-fearing muzhiks as an omen of some momentous event,” she said.

What if everyone we knew and loved growing up believed, as our mother did, that we were gifted with the ability to read minds, and/or “see things that others could not”. Rasputin grew up in a climate where everyone he encountered on a daily basis, and presumably throughout his life, believed he had divine powers. If we marinated in the thoughts of our own divine nature throughout our youth, how many of us would end our believing it? Our parents are powerful influences on our lives, and how we think, but as we age, we begin to see the errors of their ways. If Rasputin went through this natural course of maturation, his friends and neighbors in Polrovskove only bolstered his mother’s claims. Rasputin was also involved in a death-defying accident that took the life of his cousin. He spent years wondering aloud why he was spared and his cousin wasn’t. His conclusion, one which we can assume that his friends and family encouraged, was that divine intervention spare him, so he could go out and spread God’s message. 

When historians say Rasputin fell into a right place, right time era, they’re talking about an era that followed executions for anyone who attempted the heretical notions Rasputin espoused to a time when minds were just beginning to open up to the idea that man could manipulate his surroundings for the purpose of massive technological advancement. Those from the era also learned, mostly secondhand, of some of the advancements made in medicine that suggested man could wield God-like powers over life and death in a manner deemed heretical in previous eras. The early 20th century Russian citizen was likely more amenable than ever before to the belief that man could now manipulate the bridge between life and death, and generally make life better for his fellow man without necessarily being a heretic. Based on that, we could say that Rasputin was a right time, right place charlatan, or we could say he, more than any other, took advantage of this window in time. Those who call him a charlatan, however, must still address the notion that Rasputin knew he wasn’t the chosen one, and that he was lying to the vulnerable, desperate Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (Alix of Hesse) to convince her that he was. 

How did Rasputin discover that Tsar Nicholas II’s son, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich was sick? The Russian empire, in the era of the Romanovs rule, was a vault. No state secrets, or leaks, found their way out, and the illness of the Tsarevich was one of the most guarded secrets. The Romanovs had nothing to gain by announcing their only male heir’s illness and everything to lose. Through the connections he made, as a man “known to possess the ability to heal through prayer” Rasputin was called upon to heal the Tsarevich by Anna Vyrubova, the empress’s best friend. Did Rasputin struggle with this newfound information, did he consider it his patriotic duty to try to save the young heir to the throne, or did he see this as an opportunity to finally prove himself to himself? If he failed to convince his family, friends and neighbors of his special powers, there was nothing lost. If he was a fraud, and he knew it, he would surely have a list of excuses he could use to explain it. If he failed the Empress, the embarrassment of trusting the health of her only begotten son to a lowly peasant could lead the Empire to try to silence any fallout by imprisoning Rasputin or executing him, and needless to say, this empire had no moral qualms executing peasants. Failing the empire, at the very least, would ultimately reveal to Rasputin and everyone else in the empire that he was a fraud and a charlatan. This presumed struggle goes to the heart of this article, because Rasputin eagerly accepted the invitation to try to heal Alexei. 

The arguments about what Rasputin did to eventually calm the conditions of Alexei Nikolaevich are wide and varied, but most historians agree that Alexei was never cured of his case of hemophilia, because there is no cure. To this date, modern medicine has yet to find a cure. Alexei had hemophilia the day he was born, and he had it when he was murdered, a month before his fourteenth birthday. The very idea that he almost made it to fourteen, and he could’ve lived well beyond that, had he not been murdered, was viewed as one of a series of Rasputin’s miracles. The fact that Alexei was relieved of his pain, and many of the symptoms of hemophilia, was also viewed as one of Rasputins’ miracles.

Some argue that Rasputin may have been so familiar with hemophilia that he knew certain techniques he could use to help calm the Tsarevich down, and thus give the illusion that he was cured. We still consider it something of a miracle that our body often manages to heal itself. Some call it the power of the mind, others call it the power of prayer, and still others call it the mysterious power of the miraculous machines in the human body to heal itself. No matter what we believe, it appears that in some cases, if our mind believes we are being cured, it can go a long way to encouraging us that we are. 

No matter the arguments, details, and conclusions, Rasputin did it. Rasputin did what the most brilliant minds of medicine in Russia, in the early 20th century, could not, and when he advised Alexandra on how to maintain Alexei’s health, and that advice proved successful, Alexandra fell under Rasputin’s spell. She thought he, more than any of the other men of medicine in the empire, could cure her son of a malady to which her side of the family was genetically susceptible. The idea that she believed Rasputin could cure her son, led her to convince her son of it, and that presumably led Alexei calming to the point that his hemophilia was not as debilitating as it would’ve been otherwise. So, Rasputin did help provide what Alexandra considered a miracle, but our modern understanding of the relationship between body and mind suggests that it was not as mystical or unprecedented as Alexandra and those who love the narrative want us to believe.

The interesting nugget here, and the import of this story, is that Alexandra may have followed Rasputin’s advice on how to cure her son so often that she may have also followed his other advice on greater matters of the Russian Empire, and she may have whispered that same advice into Tsar Nicholas II’s ear as if it were her own. 

“What was he?” “Who was he?” “What exactly did he do to spare the life of the Tsarevich?” “Was he the most gifted sorcerer the world has ever known?” How great was his influence over Alexandra? Reports suggest he had no influence over Nicholas II, but Alexandra did. Did Rasputin whisper things in Alexandra’s ear that she whispered into Nicholas II’s, as if they were her own ideas. British intelligence believed this, and some suggest that the Britain commissioned Rasputin’s murder, because they feared his influence in the Romanov Empire might prevent Russian entry into World War I?

We’ll probably never know the truth of any of this, because the Romanovs had a situation in their empire where they were able to control their narrative. They had very little in the way of leaks, and no one from the empire wrote a tell-all after the empire collapsed to detail what really happened within the confines of its walls. It was a situation modern politicians would salivate over, but historians, not so much. As a result of the tight Romanov ship, most of the literature written about this Russian era and the relationship between Rasputin and the Romanovs involves a great deal speculation. That’s the fun part for the rest of us, because we can use the base details of what happened and submit our own subjective beliefs into the story for fantastic and fantastical conclusions. One of us can speculate that Grigori Rasputin was a sorcerer with otherworldly powers, another can say he was an absolute charlatan, and the rest of us can say that the man landed in the perfect time and place for nature of his actions are almost impossible to prove or disprove. The one thing we can state without fear of too much refutation, is if we took all of these ingredients and threw them into a big stew of rhetorical discussion, is that Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was one of the most enigmatic figures in world history.   

 

Joey at the Bat

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“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. 

Don’t Drop the Darn Ball

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“I could’ve done that!” we say when we see professional athletes perform spectacular athletic feats on TV. We say this after developing vicarious attachments to athletes after watching sports for decades. We do no not make the same I could’ve done that attachments when they mess up just as spectacularly? Being a fan allows us free movement along the spectrum of our associations with athletes. We identify with them when they succeed, and we distance ourselves from the stink of their failure. 

I got a small taste of I could’ve done that when I dropped a routine fly ball in front of about thirty people in total. I doubt any of them remember that. Check that. One does. One person will never forget it. It wasn’t just a drop. It was the way I dropped it that might haunt me for the rest of my life. You don’t care about that, and no one else does either, because no one cares about me, my softball team, or that game. We do care about professional sports, its athletes, and the outcomes. We care so much that our association them becomes an integral part of our identity. So, when one of our favorite players, from our favorite team, drops the ball we regard it as a personal embarrassment, and if they do it in a deciding game of the World Series, they’ll never forget it, because we won’t let them. 

“Hardly a day in my life, hardly an hour, that in some manner or other the dropping of that fly doesn’t come up, even after 30 years,” Fred Snodgrass said in a 1940 interview. “On the street, in my store, at my home . . . it’s all the same. They might choke up before they ask me and they hesitate — but they always ask.”

Imagine the life of Fred Snodgrass. He made one relatively small mistake as a young twenty something, and for the rest of his life, he’s so embarrassed by it that he probably does everything he can to avoid telling strangers his name. He probably considered legally changing his name at some points, and if he wasn’t so proud of his heritage, and that which he passed along to his children and grandchildren, he probably would’ve, just so he doesn’t have to answer any more questions about the one mistake he made in life. No matter what Fred did for the rest of that game [Snodgrass later made what many call an incredible catch later in that game], that season, for the rest of his baseball career, and beyond, when people heard his name, they’d probably snicker, ask him about that drop, and never let him move on in life because he dropped a ball. 

“I yelled that I’ll take it, and waved [the other outfielder] Murray off,” Snodgrass later told author Lawrence Ritter, author of the 1966 book The Glory of Their Times, “and, well, I dropped the darn thing.”

Can you hear the pain in his words? Even reading him recount a couple seconds of his life, 30 years prior, we hear how painful it was to him. We’ve heard that time heals all wounds, but some of the times it doesn’t. No one would let him forget “Dropping that darn thing” for thirty years, and he lived for another 34 years beyond that. We can assume that some people forgot as the 1912 “Snodgrass Muff” dropped further back into the rearview mirror and future generations forgot or never knew about it, but a 1974 obituary in the New York Times stated, “Fred Snodgrass, 86, Dead; Ball Player Muffed 1912 Fly.” They (we) wouldn’t even allow the man to have a peaceful death. We can only imagine how his friends and family probably talked about it at the funeral. “Most people don’t know this, but Fred actually lived a happy life, and we’re sad that he died, sure, but at least he doesn’t have to answer another question about that fly ball. At least he can have some peace now.” 

Fred Snodgrass wasn’t the best player on the New York Giants team that won three straight pennants between 1911 and 1914, but he was a solid contributor. He was a young talent that the man some consider the greatest manager of all time, John McGraw, spotted, signed, and kept in his starting lineup for seven years. After his relatively successful career in baseball, Fred Snodgrass became a successful banker, an appliance merchant, and a rancher who grew lemons and walnuts. He was also elected mayor of Oxnard California, and he served on the City Council for three terms. For all of his successes, on and off the field, Fred Snodgrass would never forget dropping an “easy” flyball in the deciding 8th game of 1912 the World Series (the 7th was game called due to darkness), because they (we) would never let him forget it.  

Bill Buckner played Major League Baseball for twenty-two years, spanning four different decades. He had over 10,00 plate appearances, 2,715 hits, won a batting title, and received MVP votes in five different seasons, but all anyone remembers him for is the Mookie-ball that rolled between his legs in game 6 of the 1986 World Series. 

2003 shortstop, Alex Gonzalez, might’ve suffered a fate similar to Snodgrass and Buckner, were it not for a man named Steve Bartman. Gonzalez muffed a routine groundball that could’ve and should’ve gotten the Cubs out of the “Bartman inning” with a double play, so routine that Gonzalez probably executed to perfection a hundred thousand times throughout his life. He muffed the most important one of his life, but few casual fans put him on any lists, like this one, thanks to Bartman. For the record, Bartman’s relatively innocent attempt to catch a foul ball for a souvenir led to a walk, and Gonzalez error led to five unearned runs. Steve Bartman’s life was ruined in a way few fans have ever experienced, and Alex Gonzalez’s name remains unknown to everyone except writers who write columns based on a theme that the Chicago Cubs lost that National League Championship Series, not a fan named Steve Bartman. 

Most people, young and old, know the name Babe Ruth. “The Babe”, the Bambino, the Sultan of Swat. He was, arguably, the first national sports celebrity, and some say he saved the game of baseball from the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Long, soaring home runs, are still called Ruthian, 100 years later. He appeared in ten different World Series, and he helped his teams win seven of them, but some contend that Ruth’s ill-advised attempt to steal with two outs in the bottom of the 9thinning of Game 7, cost the Yankee’s a World Series ring. The truth is that the hitter behind Ruth called for a hit and run, but the hitter, a Bob Meusel, signaled to Ruth that a hit-and-run was on. Ruth ran, but Meusel didn’t get the hit. Ruth was then left out to dry as Rogers Hornsby tagged him out and the St. Louis Cardinals won the 1926 World Series. History goes to the winners of course, and some writers have attempted to besmirch Ruth’s name by saying, “He might have been the home run king for decades, and he might have been a World Series hero many times over, but did you know…?     

We all dream of becoming a professional sports athlete. They live the lives that only royalty knew in the past. They have more money than any of us could dream of making, and they have all spoils their culture has to offer, and we live vicariously through their successes. If you’ve ever dropped the ball in a spectacularly humiliating fashion, you received some taste of how awful it feels. They call these plays routine for a reason, because we’ve practiced for such moments hundreds to thousands of times, and professional athletes have performed the routine perhaps hundreds of thousands of times. Some of the times, routine becomes so routine that we accidentally take our eye off the ball for less than a second, and we’re already throwing the ball before we catch it, or whatever the reason might be. When we play sports, we make mistakes that take a fraction of a second. Every athlete has makes so many humiliating and embarrassing mistakes that contests often come down to who makes the least amount of them. Athletes are so used to making mistakes that the best ones just move on, but we never do, and we take it as a personal insult when someone from our team tries to move on from one. In Fred Snodgrass’s case, a fraction of a second ruined his life for about sixty years.    

We don’t think about how awful it would feel for an athlete to make a crucial mistake that decides a championship, because we’re fans, and being a fan allows us to move wherever we want in our relationship with them. We want to move closer when they succeed, but we distance ourselves from the stink of their failure. It also gives us a certain joy to mock and scorn them for the rest of their lives, so that they never live the worst moment in their life down. Anyone who has ever dropped the ball, even in a meaningless softball game, has empathy for those who commit errors. We think everyone who was there that worst day of our lives remembers. They don’t, because they don’t care about us, and nobody cares about an insignificant softball game. Those of us on the outside looking in have no idea what it feels like to have someone associate their lives with us. Some of us would give up everything that makes us happy now to know just one day of their life, but as many have said in so many ways, fame has so many downsides that we should be careful what they wish for. Imagine being a grandparent, and a relatively successful business man, living a quiet, happy life, and every third person you encounter says something like this in front of your beloved grandchildren, “Aren’t you Fred Snodgrass? Didn’t you drop the ball in the World Series? Yeah, kids, that play is so famous they gave your grandpa’s play a name, the Snodgrass muff.” Most people would never say such a thing, especially in front of adoring children, but some do, and they think it’s okay, because they were fans, and he let them down.