Watched the seventh inning of a meaningless August baseball game Tuesday night and the broadcast cut to the dugout to announce that the team’s starting shortstop wasn’t going to be in Wednesday’s lineup because he was taking, and I am quoting the sideline reporter directly, a mental health off-day. She said it the way my dentist says molar.
I went to bed thinking about that. Woke up, poured coffee, opened my phone, and the first thing I saw was that same shortstop on Instagram, in a linen shirt, holding a coconut, in Tulum.
Tulum. Mexico. From a Tuesday night home game in the Bronx. He got there fast. There’s a flight he had to be on, and he had to have packed for it before the seventh inning, which means he knew he was getting a mental health day before he took the field, which is its own kind of commentary.
Coach DiMaggio used to say there were exactly two acceptable reasons to miss a baseball game: you were dead, or you were getting married, and even on the wedding one he wanted a phone number for the church. He coached American Legion ball in a town with one stoplight and he ran a tighter ship than the Sixth Fleet. A kid once tried to skip a Saturday doubleheader because his grandmother was being buried and Coach DiMaggio said, and this is verbatim, “She’ll still be dead at six, son.” The kid played both ends. Went four-for-seven. Cried a little between games. We respected it.
Mental health day, in 1978, was your dad letting you sit in the truck cab during a thunder delay with a warm RC Cola. That was the program. You came back out when the tarp came off. Nobody flew anywhere. Nobody posted a coconut.
Ray Kowalczyk called me at 7:14 this morning, which is what Ray does when something on television has personally insulted him. He had the game on tape delay, watched the announcement, then watched the Instagram, then called. He said, and I’m cleaning this up considerably, that when he had a bad mental health stretch in 1983 he handled it by eating a meatball sub in his Buick in the parking lot of a Knights of Columbus and then went 2-for-3 in a softball league game that same night. He says that’s mental health. The Buick is mental health. Tulum is something else.
The sideline reporter, to her credit, delivered the announcement with the gravity of a hostage video. She said the team was “prioritizing the human being over the athlete,” which is a phrase that did not exist when I was learning to read and probably shouldn’t exist now. The human being was on a beach. The athlete was getting paid $11 million dollars to take ground balls in air-conditioning. I’m not sure either one of them needed prioritizing.
Now look. I’m not a complete fossil. I have read enough to know that the modern game is harder on a person than people my age want to admit. The travel is brutal. The phones in their pockets are full of strangers calling them garbage in seventeen languages. There are cameras in the dugout, cameras in the tunnel, cameras pretty much everywhere except the actual shower, and I’m not 100 percent sure about the shower. If a kid needs a day, a kid needs a day. I’ll grant that.
What I will not grant is the linen shirt. I will not grant the coconut. I will not grant the geo-tag. There is a way to take a mental health day that involves drawn curtains and a sleeve of saltines and your phone face-down on the nightstand, and it does not involve a resort with a swim-up bar and a hashtag that reads, I am not making this up, hashtag reset szn.
Coach DiMaggio’s reset szn was a cold shower and a fungo bat. He’d hit you grounders until the mental health came back. It always did. Usually around the forty-minute mark. You’d misplay one to your backhand and he’d say “there it is” and send you home.
The shortstop is hitting .218 since the All-Star break, by the way. Maybe Tulum fixes it. Maybe a coconut is exactly what the slash line ordered. I’m willing to be wrong. I’ve been wrong before, mostly about the designated hitter, and I came around on that one eventually, around year thirty-one.
Denise is bringing chili tonight. She says the recipe is from a podcast. I told her if there’s quinoa in it I’m taking a mental health day of my own and she said fine, but I’m not flying you to Tulum.