Just a Little Patience (One Sixty-Two: Day Nine)

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 Nine: Aramis Ramirez, Chicago Cubs

I turned the corner from our bedroom into the hallway, and it was there that I witnessed the punch. It was a straight, right-handed jab to the nose. Or, rather, to the snout.

The 5-year-old glanced over her right shoulder as she inexplicably slugged her puppy. The dog was not at all fazed, but I was certainly distraught at what I had seen. I sent the girl to the couch, where she buried her head in a pillow, awaiting punishment. As she sat there silently, I tried to determine what exactly you do for punishment when your preschooler dismisses all those Cesar Millan dog-training tips and instead goes Julio Cesar Chavez on the poor pooch.

Q: What in the world caused you to do that?
A: I don’t know.
{Sigh.}

Patience. Among the qualities required of a parent, few are as critical as this. You teach, model and reward positive behavior, then watch as they slowly but surely figure out how they’re supposed to behave in this world. You plant the seeds and wait, faithfully, for the growth.

In the first weeks of baseball’s new season, certain established players inevitably get off to painfully slow starts. It takes patience from managers, teammates and fans in order to wait out these awful, early-season slumps. When the player has proven over several years that he can do the job, you’ve got few other options than to wait – patiently – for the turnaround.

On the North Side of Chicago, long-suffering Cubs fans have had to wait more than any other spectators in American sport. Their team last claimed a world championship 102 years ago, while Teddy Roosevelt was president. The patience required of Cubs fans has spanned five generations. On top of the overall team futility, there is a player on the current roster who demands a wait all his own.

Aramis Ramirez, the Cubs’ third baseman, has hit 267 home runs in his career and driven in nearly a thousand. His lifetime batting average is .283, and he’s played in two All-Star games. But over the course of his 13-year career, Ramirez has hit worse in April than in any other month. This year, he took those opening-month blues to a new level, hitting all of .152 in the season’s first month and striking out once every four trips to the plate.

There is no reason to believe that this will continue; there is simply no precedent for Ramirez hitting poorly all year. He will get better. Just not yet. Cubs fans must wait, and hope, and trust.

My 5-year-old has a favorite book. It’s the classic picture book The Carrot Seed, by Ruth Krauss. The plot is simple: Boy plants a carrot seed. Boy’s family members tell him the carrot won’t grow. Boy waters the spot every day. Boy watches, one day, as a giant carrot the size of Aramis Ramirez grows in said spot – just as he knew it would.

My daughter knows every word to the book, and she smiles every time we read it. She loves the story. Her middle name, after all, is “Faith.”

So the seeds are planted. This much we know.