Hemingway's Kind of Hero (One Sixty-Two: Day 41)

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 Forty-One: Albert Pujols, St. Louis Cardinals

Do you believe the great DiMaggio would stay with a fish as long as I will stay with this one? he thought. I am sure he would and more since he is young and strong. Also his father was a fisherman. But would the bone spur hurt him too much?

I have begun reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea with my freshmen. While they haven’t yet reached the quote above, they are engaged in Santiago’s humble, dedicated life as a fisherman, and they are well aware of the protagonist’s devotion to the great Joe DiMaggio.

When I asked the freshmen if they knew who DiMaggio was, almost all said they’d heard the name, and that he had something to do with baseball. A few knew he was a Yankee. But that was about all. So I gave them a primer on one of the 20th century’s most famous Americans, from his humble beginnings as the son of an immigrant fisherman to his 56-game hitting streak to his life as the royal prince of New York and, eventually, of baseball. I explained that the level of popularity DiMaggio experienced during the 1940s surpasses the fame of any American athlete today, since baseball was simply the sport at that time in our history. We watched a video of DiMaggio, and the kids asked some good questions.

But afterward, as I flipped through the book preparing for tomorrow’s lessons, I wondered who Santiago would call his hero if he were out on his skiff in the Caribbean today. Which ballplayer would give him strength as that mighty marlin tugged on the line for days?

Would it be the great Mariano Rivera, relief pitcher for the New York Yankees, who maintains a regal grace and cool under pressure as he saves games for his team? Would it be Mike Lowell of the Boston Red Sox, who has been discarded like an old fisherman and tossed aside on the Boston bench, and who must wait patiently for his opportunity to ply his trade again for another team? Or would it be Kendry Morales of the Angels, the most famous of the current players born in Santiago’s country of Cuba?

All would be wise choices. But I think that if Hemingway were writing this novel today, he’d do just what he did 60 years ago, and shoot for the top. If you’re facing the greatest challenge of your working life, then why not take your inspiration from the mightiest baseball hero of all? Santiago’s choice would be easy: He’d be cheering for Albert Pujols, the St. Louis Cardinals’ larger-than-life first baseman.

It is the mighty Pujols, after all, who hits all pitchers, who has played with pain in his elbow, and who stops at nothing to excel in all facets of his game. Pujols has averaged 40 home runs and 123 runs batted in per year in his first nine seasons. He has won three Most Valuable Player awards and one world championship. At age 30, Pujols is already a sure-fire Hall of Famer. And he may still be improving. By the end of the year, this Dominican-born slugger will likely have more than 400 career home runs. Were he to play into his 40s, there may be no record he does not own.

So yes, Pujols would surely be Santiago’s man today. But although it’s easy to pick DiMaggio’s equal in 2010, it is much more difficult to visualize Pujols the hero in quite the same way that Santiago saw DiMaggio in Hemingway’s story. Santiago was a poor man, who might have had access to some radio, but whose main source for baseball news was the newspapers that he read, then used as a sheet to cover the springs that stuck up from his bed. Today, however, the fisherman would surely have access to countless Pujols images on TV and the Internet.

While this makes it easier to know just what the big guy looks like hitting his awesome homers, it also takes something away from the myth-makers inside of us. When you’ve got to create your own images from the agate type you read in the box scores, those home runs take on a whole new life. They become personal snapshots and videos that you can own and fine-tune all day long, as you hold fast to that great fish inside your skiff on the sea.