December Days 06 - Right Place, Right Time (XIV - The Hero)

[This is part of a series exploring the Baseball Tarot. If you would like to prompt for a part of the game or a card from the deck, all the rest of the month is available for your curiosity, about either baseball or Tarot. Leave a comment with a prompt if you want in. All other comments are still welcome, of course.]

"The Shot Heard 'Round The World" (Watch on YouTube)

Transcript: There's a long drive ... it's gonna be, I believe ... The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! Bobby Thomson hits into the lower deck of the left-field stands! The Giants win the pennant and they're going crazy! They're going crazy!

I don't believe it! I don't believe it! I do not believe it! Bobby Thomson hit a line drive into the lower deck of the left-field stands and this blame place is going crazy! The Giants! Horace Stoneham has got a winner! The Giants won it by a score of 5 to 4, and they're picking Bobby Thomson up, and carrying him off the field!


Of course, baseball heroics are not limited to the offense in the final inning of the game - the defense can just as easily become the star of the show with a circus catch to preserve a lead, the relief pitcher can fight off a good hitter and get a final strikeout, or an improbable sequence of events can cut a rally short before the offense can win.

Who the hero is of the game is often a matter of perspective, but they are always going to play for the winning team, and they're going to have done something as an individual effort that is crucial to the team's victory. More often than not, it will be something that shows up on the highlight program that evening.

Particularly memorable heroics may make you a legend for your team, and they are often a way of increasing visibility with the fanatics that support your team... and that buy the merch with your name on it. If you're looking to build a brand of yourself, raise your profile so as to ask for a bigger contract or to possibly get traded to a team that might win a championship in your career, heroics on the field are one way of gathering that momentum and power, so long as you can turn in consistently good performances that please the people around you. This sounds easy, but stardom is often a difficult thing to hold on to for more than a year or two - the nature of athletics means that the next generation of players will always be better, until we brush up against the limits of the human body. To remain a star player often involves making the mental part of the game work better, so that raw physical power isn't needed quite as much. Those players that always mysteriously seem to be in the right place to make a play have learned that being in a good position to start with makes less need for heroics, but also makes the heroics that do happen that much more impressive to both the trained and untrained eye. Making miracles mundane is the way that players keep themselves in the game for long enough to make a good career.

There are very few things in the sport world that are better than being the hero of any particular game. In the world of replays, highlights, and analysis, the heroic play no longer has to be the last one to be memorable and proper heroism, and it is entirely possible that a defensive play made in the first inning will end up being the game-deciding action.

If this card should show up in your reading, most of the time, congratulations, you're going to do something good or the good that you have done is going to be richly rewarded. Accolades and rewards are headed your way, as is some amount of fame and notoriety for your work. Keep up the good work, and you will have more opportunities for reward and for being the Hero.

There is one thing to be careful of, though - being the Hero is a great boost to the ego, and makes a lot of people feel really good about themselves. Which can make people want to pursue the feeling for the feeling's sake, or begin to believe they are the only person who can be the hero, or the only person who should be the hero. Pursuing the fame and the accolades for selfish reasons often backfires spectacularly, and all of that time spent in front of the cameras building your star power becomes fodder for all the time you'll be spending in front of the camera as everyone speculates where things went wrong for you, and where that ego came from that's affecting your play so much. If that's your case, the Hero is trying to remind you to get back to the reasons why you became heroic in the first place - it's probably not for the endorsement deals, y'know?

And staying on that destructive path often leads to the opposite effect of the Hero...

December Days 07 - Critical Failure (XV - The Goat)

[This is part of a series exploring the Baseball Tarot. If you would like to prompt for a part of the game or a card from the deck, all the rest of the month is available for your curiosity, about either baseball or Tarot. Leave a comment with a prompt if you want in. All other comments are still welcome, of course.]

...the Goat. Because baseball is a game of opposed sides, there will always be someone who wins the game for their side and someone who loses it for theirs. That said, the Goat label is usually only applied in situations where the loss ends up being particularly dramatic - an error on a ground ball that lets in the winning run, a wild pitch or a breaking ball that doesn't that produces a loss, or the worst Goat of all, striking out to end the game with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. Really, the only thing that separates the Hero and the Goat is which team wins the game from the play.

Like Hero status, being a Goat is a temporary situation for most people. Lost this one, go out and win the next one. There will be more games to play. Except that the human condition is really good at ignoring the good things, or discounting their frequency, importance, or impact. Those socialized into roles that say "no, you do not talk about your accomplishments", with the moniker "uppity" that is applied to those who buck this trend, are even more quick to dismiss the things that they have done that are truly good things.

With the good things discounted and minimized, the only things left to fill the void are the bad things, which start to take on outsize importance in the psyche. They can blunt the power of the good things that then happen later, and the small bad things start to snowball all together to become big and mean. If this sounds like the beginning of depression, you've got the idea. Call it a slump, the yips, the mental game, being stuck in your own head, whatever you like, being the Goat takes a psychological toll that tests the resilience of any player. Sometimes a player has coaches that can help them collect perspective and shake it off. (And sometimes, yes, Taylor Swift is filling the role of that coach.) Every now and then, though, the person who is supposed to be the coach is the person contributing to this problem - if you've got a coach (or teammate) that's more interested in assigning blame than helping you make your game better, it can be really easy to feel like you're always going to be the Goat. The ideal would be to go to another team somewhere, but that's not always an option for everyone.

This card, and the Rider-Waite Tarot equivalent, The Devil, are both kind of bleak cards to get, should they show up in your reading. They're pretty clearly indicating that failure, possibly even spectacular failure, is in your future, and odds are good that you're going to be at least partially responsible for it. This sucks.

The thing to remember, though, is that this is supposed to be a temporary setback, instead of a permanent issue or some form of commentary about who you are as a person at your core. Unlike stories where misfortune is always concentrated on one person (usually for a nefarious purpose), out here people usually don't have those kinds of failures all in a row unless they've engineered them to happen this way through their deliberate actions (and at that point, the multinational usually takes a bankruptcy, a bailout, and then goes right back to setting the dominoes back up in exactly the same configuration again). These kinds of cascades often happen if you've been trying to set yourself up as the Hero at the expense of others. Not only do others start to conspire against you, but keeping all the effort going starts to become akin to juggling chainsaws, with the same amount of potential damage when one gets dropped or specifically interfered with by someone else.

It's part of our nature to see the bad things more easily than the good, and to believe the bad things happen more often and are worse than the good. If you end up being the Goat, this too shall pass. And if you can actually believe that thoroughly enough that it does just pass, you are going to be very happy in life.

Just saying.