Back to School (One Sixty-Two: Day 118)

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 One Hundred Eighteen: Neftali Feliz, Texas Rangers

Staples has spiral notebooks for a penny apiece. Target will give you a pack of Crayola crayons for a quarter. Office Depot has boxes of ballpoint pens for a buck apiece.

You can try and look the other way, especially if your kid doesn’t start for another few weeks, but facts are facts: It’s back-to-school time. In some parts of the country, Semester One is already in session. It’s always a shock to the system for students, teachers and administrators, but the start of a new school year does carry with it all kinds of promise for individual learning, personal growth and fellowship. There’s really nothing like it.

It’s a marathon of education, and you have to prepare yourself for the long road ahead. Once it starts, you’ll find yourself learning more than you thought possible, and it comes at you in all kinds of ways – from book learning to literary journeys to lessons in social skills. It doesn’t always feel like fun, but school takes hold of our minds and maturity levels in a way that is both exhilarating and exhausting. By the time June rolls around, we feel like different people.

Neftali Feliz is 22 years old, an age at which many young Americans are graduating from college. But Feliz is a little different from most of us in that he can throw a baseball 100 miles an hour. Therefore, he is not following the traditional path of education. At age 18, Feliz was pitching in the minor leagues rather than for a college team. By age 21, he was a Texas Ranger. In 2010, Feliz’s first full year in the majors, he has saved 29 games for the Rangers and earned his first All-Star Game appearance.

The Rangers are soaring toward their first postseason appearance in more than a decade. And in the playoffs, you don’t win a lot of games by 10 runs. You often find yourself holding on by a thread, and you turn to your closer to bail you out in the end. So if the Rangers are leading the mighty New York Yankees 4-3 in a first-round playoff game, will Feliz be able to hold the lead amid the pressure? Last week, in two close games against New York in Texas, he experienced two different outcomes: In the first game, he pitched two dominant innings to pick up the win in extra innings, while in the second game he blew a ninth-inning lead to take the loss.

It’s been a very good year so far for Neftali Feliz. But school is about to begin for real as the pennant race heats up. There are still some things that this gifted young man has to learn. The question, of course, is how quickly he’ll learn, adjust, and grow. There’s no sale at Staples to cover that; it comes from within.