Breaking the Rules (One Sixty-Two: Day Three)

Writer’s note: This is the third in 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 Three: Vladimir Guerrero, Texas Rangers

Katie has a new art book, thanks to a generous Barnes & Noble gift card from her aunt and uncle. My 8-year-old has been reading the book almost every day for the past couple of weeks, and she keeps coming back to a two-page spread on Vincent van Gogh. She stares at the sunflowers and tells me how vivid the gold and yellow colors look to her. Together we read about Van Gogh’s use of texture, and how he’d apply his paints straight from the tube.

In Katie’s art classes, her teachers won’t be showing her how to paint directly from the tube anytime soon. They’ll hand her a paintbrush and show her how to do things the traditional way. She’ll follow the rules. In the same way, the boys and girls who learn to hit a baseball or softball are told to swing only at pitches that look like strikes. No need to try and hit something that’s outside your comfort zone.

But both painters and hitters are allowed to break the rules of their craft once they know what those rules are. If Van Gogh needed to use a paintbrush, he could do it in a heartbeat. He simply chose to think, and act, different. Over in Arlington, Texas, the Rangers’ designated hitter is a future Hall-of-Famer named Vladimir Guerrero. If you asked him to tell you whether a pitch is a strike or a ball, I’m sure Guerrero could tell you. But for the past 13 years, this right-handed slugger has made a living hitting baseballs that no one alive should be swinging at, much less hitting.

And my, does he hit them. Hits them hard, hits them far. Balls down at his shoe-tops. Balls up by his shoulders. Balls far outside. He lunges, he reaches, he hacks – and he hits. Guerrero has hit more than 400 home runs, more than 400 doubles, and nearly 2,300 total hits. So far. His lifetime batting average is .322. About the only thing Vlad doesn’t do much is walk. Of course, when you’re as busy as he is breaking the rules, there’s little reason to hold back that swing.

This winter, the word around baseball was that Guerrero was too old and out of shape to play well anymore. Going into today, he was hitting above .370. So the 35-year-old apparently has plenty left in that bat. To those who have watched him over the years, this was really no surprise.

One day eight years ago, I took a road trip to Montreal with my brother and some friends. Our goal was to catch a game at Olympic Stadium before the dome closed and the Expos left town. It was a bizarre old place, with enough eccentricities inside to have kept Van Gogh busy for years. Early in the game, Vladimir Guerrero stepped up to bat; at the time, he was Montreal’s best player. As a pitch arrived, Vlad took one of his legendary full-body hacks, and wood made violent contact with rawhide. The ball flew up – higher, higher, higher – until, finally, it bounced off the white roof of the dome.

In Olympic Stadium, the roof was fair play. The ball careened of the padding above us, then landed somewhere between shortstop and left field. Guerrero trotted into second base with a double. They were breaking rules all over the place, and the fans loved it.

There’s plenty of texture left on Vladimir Guerrero’s canvas. Just don’t force him to paint with a brush.