Fearing Failure (One Sixty-Two: Day Six)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day Six: Alex Gordon, Kansas City Royals

I’ve been reading The Tender Bar, J.R. Moehringer’s warm and clear-eyed memoir on his search for a father figure and family in a Long Island bar. One of the dominant themes in Moehringer’s book is a theme we can find throughout modern American literature, from Death of a Salesman to Fences to Rabbit, Run: A man’s fear of failure.

So many of us feel this fear at times in our lives, as we compare the life we’re living now to the dreams of our adolescence. What if I never realize those dreams? What will I make of myself? Will the writer ever claim his Pulitzer, or get that job at The Times? Will the actor ever make it to Broadway, or at least out of regional theater? Will the lawyer finally – finally – get a shot at making partner? We compare ourselves to others, to the expectations we’ve had for ourselves, and to the prophesies that well-intentioned teachers or family members uttered on our behalf one shining graduation day.

As I reflect on The Tender Bar, I wonder what’s going through the mind of 26-year-old Alex Gordon. He was drafted five years ago with the second overall pick in the Major League Baseball amateur draft, and was quickly declared the face of a revitalized Kansas City Royals franchise. Gordon was compared to Hall of Famer George Brett, who, like Gordon, played third base for Kansas City. By March of 2007, Sports Illustrated had run a feature story on Gordon, the next can’t-miss kid.

This is now Alex Gordon’s fourth year in the big leagues. His highest average in a season was .260. He’s never hit more than 16 home runs in a year, never driven in more than 60 runs, never scored more than 72. To say that the young man has not lived up to expectations would be a gross understatement. There are rumblings that he might in fact be headed back to the minor leagues in the days ahead.

Which begs the question: What if Alex Gordon is not the next George Brett? What if he’s not even an All-Star? And, to take it a step further, what if he’s not even good enough to start for one of the least-successful teams in baseball?

What should he make of himself? What kind of man should he see when he looks in the mirror?

One can only hope that Gordon finds success in the truest of ways, and that he feels fulfillment from work, yet also from the deeper joys that life holds for him. But as he struggles on, he can take comfort in the knowledge that he’s not alone. Not by a long shot. They win Pulitzers writing about this stuff.