For the Love Of...Love What You Do. Do What You Love

“You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end, it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”  

 --baseball pitcher Billy Chapel, from the film “For the Love of the Game”

$1,100 per month, and that’s just when they play.

That’s the minimum pay level guaranteed in a standard minor league baseball player contract and since most player’s seasons are at best four months long, well…there’s not a lot of money to be made if you are a player on one of the more than 200 teams in the United States. A minor league player’s dream, of course, is to make it to the big leagues, to play for a major league team, like the Boston Red Sox, to make it to the show, in the parlance of the game. If you do get to play at the Triple A level, the last rung up the ladder before the majors, you can make a minimum of about $40,000 per year.

Which still isn’t a lot of money. Which begs the question: then why do they play?

Why do they grind it out day after day after day? Up early for extra batting practice, then a three-hour game, then load up your stuff on the bus, no first-class seats here. Then a long trip at dawn the next morning after sleeping in a Motel 6 or a Red Roof Inn. Hundreds of miles to go before the next game in Reading, Pennsylvania or Bridgeport, Connecticut or Toledo, Ohio. Not very glamorous. Not a lot of press in the locker room. So much time away from loved ones. And always work, so much hard work: thousands of swings of the bat and tosses of the ball, and all for a dream that probably won’t come true.

And yet they still play.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, as I’m in the midst of a 12-day, five-game, 14-state 2,117-mile baseball road trip that is taking me from Boston to Aberdeen, Maryland, to Hickory, North Carolina, to Dayton, Ohio, to Akron, Ohio, to Binghamton, New York and then back home.  To watch teams with names like the Iron Birds and the Crawdads and the Dragons and the Rubber Ducks and the Rumble Ponies, and that’s after also taking in, earlier this summer, games featuring the Pawtucket, Rhode Island Red Sox and the Saint Paul Saints too.

Yes, I’m a baseball geek. I love the game. But there is even more joy to be had, beyond the fun of seeing these young men compete. Beyond exploring these often forgotten and overlooked American cities, many hardscrabble and struggling to survive. Beyond eating a boatload of hot dogs and drinking a river of diet Coke. 

For me there is something poetic and beautiful and right about seeing human beings do something for the sheer love of it. Because to be a minor league player: you just have to have a fire in your belly, a desire in your heart, a motivation--beyond dollars and cents--to do what they do. To play.

For the love of the game.

I see that passion in the players I watch on late Sunday afternoons, in games played on a muggy and hot diamond, and on cool July nights with the sliver of an orange moon hanging in the sky, and on late summer’s evenings as the promise of the season begins to fade, to give way to the inevitably of the autumn.

And still they play because they love what they do. They play for the love of the game.

All of us should have such a love in our lives. To do something because we have to do it, we so want to do it, for in doing this one thing, we just feel more alive. We somehow know that we have been made by our Creator to do it.  We embrace this vocation or hobby or pastime or sport because it feels as if it is in our very bones. 

For the love of…and so when we swing a bat or write an essay or sing a song or parent a child or grow a flower or hike a trail or do whatever we have to do: our souls soar.  It feels like some kind of prayer in the doing, the playing, the creating, the living.

So, I send greetings from the ballparks of America, from so many playing fields, where adults get to play a child’s game and in doing so, they still love what they do. They love the game.

And you? What do you love to do? May you seek it. Find it. Practice it. Enjoy it. Play it. Share it. Love it. Just love it.

Me? I’m on to the next game.