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[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.]
A much-ignored fact of most athletics competitions and leagues is that the people on the screen or at the highest levels have gone through a winnowing process that started at a very young age. Getting to the first stage of this process requires being in a place that has competitive learning leagues - if you're not on a traveling team or an all star team in addition to any casual baseball, then the chances of making it all the way are slim. After the summer leagues and school baseball, for which there are tryouts for just getting on the team, the collegiate game brings both increased visibility (and some amount of money) and a lot more people to have to beat in the tryouts. Many hopefuls are stopped at this point, and their game will end up being intramural and casual leagues (the "beer leagues") and/or becoming a coach or umpire for the learning and casual leagues. It can be a long and fulfilling career, even if it goes nowhere from there - the game is not solely for the money and fame, after all. If it were actually just for that, the game wouldn't last.
Collegiate programs then have their own competitiveness, and from there comes the draft for Major League Baseball. Those that survive these tryouts will have beaten the odds in a rather improbable string. And that's basically just to make it to a minor league affiliate. Which involves more proving oneself to advance to other affiliates, and then finally managing to impress the Major League team to get called up. Needless to say, it's not an exaggeration of odds to say that becoming a professional athlete in Major League Baseball is a one in a million shot. The actual calculated probability might say that it's closer to one several hundred million to successfully make it to The Show. And yet, the way that baseball and other sports are glamorized, used as inspiring stories of how minority kids and poor kids made it big, and otherwise promoted as an achievable career makes no mention at all of how statistically improbable of is. Sport marketing and lottery marketing are much the same idea - focus on the payout and not the methods to get there. As Han Solo says, "Never tell me the odds." Because knowing the odds might make people second-guess chasing the dream and turn away to assume a more practical pathway. And without all the candidates chasing, sport would have to change.
Surprisingly, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the over-organization for most collegiate sport, acknowledged the unlikeliness of making it to the pros in an advertisement campaign, with the tagline “There are over [Number] student athletes, and most of us go pro in something other than sports.” In addition to all the statistics tracking performance in the game, athletes are also tracked outside of it, which is how we know about things like academic eligibility (a minimum requirement of grades to be able to play sport), the presence of tutors on sport teams, and the graduation rates of various athletic programs. While these things only become important to fanatics when they affect the game unfolding in front of them, for the majority of the life that will be spent outside of sports, this is Serious Business. Because many players don't ever make it to the professional leagues, and several of them have troubles with money, substance abuse, and the law once they do. (And for many athletes, including those in Olympic programmes, there isn't enough money to support them anyway.) Betting everything on success in sports is a fool's position.
Which brings us to the card for this session, the MVP of Balls, who celebrates accomplishments of the intellect. I thought about a lot of the intellectual feats of baseball, like winning awards, or throwing perfect games, or negotiating higher salaries with a team and playing the trade markets, but none of those seemed to capture the essence of what the card represents, because sports is ultimately about a melding of physical actions, often practiced to repetition, and the intellectual ability to discern which of those actions is appropriate for the situation. In baseball, everyone is thinking, with the coaches and manager thinking big picture, and the players thinking about what will happen immediately, based on pitch selection and contact with the bat. The sometimes complex decision tree involved uses numbers and feelings and subtle cues all wrapped up together into something that looks almost instinctual instead of cerebral. Picking out a component of the game that highlights just the triumph of the brain is pretty tough.
Outside the game, however, it becomes easier to find those places where intellect is a key component and deciding factor. The decision to get an education and a degree, so as to have a back-up plan in case sports doesn't work out is, by far, the smartest decision any player can make. Which is why I like to hear about players that stay in school to complete their degree, or about players like Shaquille O'Neal, Ed.D, who have been able to complete multiple academic degrees in addition to their prominent careers in sports. It doesn't have a lot of power to have a player tell kids to stay in school, but if a kid can see that their favorite player finished college, it has a bigger impact.
The presence of the card in a reading is a celebration of intellectual achievements. You've done particularly smart things, or there is a particularly smart person or piece of advice that you have that will be very useful to follow or consult. As with many things involving wisdom, it may not be apparent who the smart one is, but they are there, and they (including you) will reveal themselves at the right time with something that turns the right heads. Perhaps a problem that has been vexing you for a while will suddenly fall into place and give you a way of beating it or working around it.
The downside to the card is the know-it-all or a person convinced they are the smartest person in the room and thus the only one worth listening to. The days of the polymath are over, and it is incredibly likely that someone else knows more about this than you do. The more you talk about this with no expertise or knowledge to back it up, the more foolish you look, and the more dangerous things will be for you when things inevitably crash. Particularly bad failures of this trend to do things like cause housing bubbles and recessions that last nearly a decade. The pursuit of profit at all costs is rarely the smartest thing to do, as the consequences, when they catch up, are likely to be vicious.
A much-ignored fact of most athletics competitions and leagues is that the people on the screen or at the highest levels have gone through a winnowing process that started at a very young age. Getting to the first stage of this process requires being in a place that has competitive learning leagues - if you're not on a traveling team or an all star team in addition to any casual baseball, then the chances of making it all the way are slim. After the summer leagues and school baseball, for which there are tryouts for just getting on the team, the collegiate game brings both increased visibility (and some amount of money) and a lot more people to have to beat in the tryouts. Many hopefuls are stopped at this point, and their game will end up being intramural and casual leagues (the "beer leagues") and/or becoming a coach or umpire for the learning and casual leagues. It can be a long and fulfilling career, even if it goes nowhere from there - the game is not solely for the money and fame, after all. If it were actually just for that, the game wouldn't last.
Collegiate programs then have their own competitiveness, and from there comes the draft for Major League Baseball. Those that survive these tryouts will have beaten the odds in a rather improbable string. And that's basically just to make it to a minor league affiliate. Which involves more proving oneself to advance to other affiliates, and then finally managing to impress the Major League team to get called up. Needless to say, it's not an exaggeration of odds to say that becoming a professional athlete in Major League Baseball is a one in a million shot. The actual calculated probability might say that it's closer to one several hundred million to successfully make it to The Show. And yet, the way that baseball and other sports are glamorized, used as inspiring stories of how minority kids and poor kids made it big, and otherwise promoted as an achievable career makes no mention at all of how statistically improbable of is. Sport marketing and lottery marketing are much the same idea - focus on the payout and not the methods to get there. As Han Solo says, "Never tell me the odds." Because knowing the odds might make people second-guess chasing the dream and turn away to assume a more practical pathway. And without all the candidates chasing, sport would have to change.
Surprisingly, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the over-organization for most collegiate sport, acknowledged the unlikeliness of making it to the pros in an advertisement campaign, with the tagline “There are over [Number] student athletes, and most of us go pro in something other than sports.” In addition to all the statistics tracking performance in the game, athletes are also tracked outside of it, which is how we know about things like academic eligibility (a minimum requirement of grades to be able to play sport), the presence of tutors on sport teams, and the graduation rates of various athletic programs. While these things only become important to fanatics when they affect the game unfolding in front of them, for the majority of the life that will be spent outside of sports, this is Serious Business. Because many players don't ever make it to the professional leagues, and several of them have troubles with money, substance abuse, and the law once they do. (And for many athletes, including those in Olympic programmes, there isn't enough money to support them anyway.) Betting everything on success in sports is a fool's position.
Which brings us to the card for this session, the MVP of Balls, who celebrates accomplishments of the intellect. I thought about a lot of the intellectual feats of baseball, like winning awards, or throwing perfect games, or negotiating higher salaries with a team and playing the trade markets, but none of those seemed to capture the essence of what the card represents, because sports is ultimately about a melding of physical actions, often practiced to repetition, and the intellectual ability to discern which of those actions is appropriate for the situation. In baseball, everyone is thinking, with the coaches and manager thinking big picture, and the players thinking about what will happen immediately, based on pitch selection and contact with the bat. The sometimes complex decision tree involved uses numbers and feelings and subtle cues all wrapped up together into something that looks almost instinctual instead of cerebral. Picking out a component of the game that highlights just the triumph of the brain is pretty tough.
Outside the game, however, it becomes easier to find those places where intellect is a key component and deciding factor. The decision to get an education and a degree, so as to have a back-up plan in case sports doesn't work out is, by far, the smartest decision any player can make. Which is why I like to hear about players that stay in school to complete their degree, or about players like Shaquille O'Neal, Ed.D, who have been able to complete multiple academic degrees in addition to their prominent careers in sports. It doesn't have a lot of power to have a player tell kids to stay in school, but if a kid can see that their favorite player finished college, it has a bigger impact.
The presence of the card in a reading is a celebration of intellectual achievements. You've done particularly smart things, or there is a particularly smart person or piece of advice that you have that will be very useful to follow or consult. As with many things involving wisdom, it may not be apparent who the smart one is, but they are there, and they (including you) will reveal themselves at the right time with something that turns the right heads. Perhaps a problem that has been vexing you for a while will suddenly fall into place and give you a way of beating it or working around it.
The downside to the card is the know-it-all or a person convinced they are the smartest person in the room and thus the only one worth listening to. The days of the polymath are over, and it is incredibly likely that someone else knows more about this than you do. The more you talk about this with no expertise or knowledge to back it up, the more foolish you look, and the more dangerous things will be for you when things inevitably crash. Particularly bad failures of this trend to do things like cause housing bubbles and recessions that last nearly a decade. The pursuit of profit at all costs is rarely the smartest thing to do, as the consequences, when they catch up, are likely to be vicious.
