Going Against The Grind

Talented, joyful and Dominican-Proud, Manny Machado is the face of MLB’s new identity.

- Tim Keown

BASEBALL. MAN, SUCH a brutal game. Such a mean game. Sadistic, really, the way it runs itself up under your skin and makes you miserable. Hang around a baseball clubhouse and you’ll start to wonder why anyone plays the damned thing. Sometimes it seems everybody in the game wakes up each morning trying to decide whether to be angry or bitter. Fittingly, the ballplayer’s favorite word is grind, as if coursing through 162 games is the sporting equivalent of an 18th-century polar expedition. Even good moments are dismissed as untrustworthy, because if ballplayers know one thing about the grind— this joyless, painful six-month scrape of hard surface against hard surface—it is its infinite capacity to humble them.

Maybe that’s why they work so hard to create the illusion of frivolity. The visiting clubhouse in Detroit, to take one example, has a table with cartons of Dubble Bubble (three flavors), trays of Jolly Ranchers and Life Savers and Big Red and Tootsie Pops and Blow Pops and three kinds of protein bars, twist-top dispensers of Gummi Bears, peanuts, caramels and Reese’s Pieces, buckets of sunflower seeds in three different-sized bags. This setup might just be a distraction, like the promise of a lollipop after shots at the pediatrician’s, but at least it makes the clubhouse look like a fun place.