Play Ball!

With the 2022 major league baseball season barely begun, a starting player on a prominent team lost his job.

Though not in itself unusual – professional teams make on-field adjustments all the time – the disclosure that Wilmer Flores wouldn’t in the foreseeable future play for the San Francisco Giants was rare, because a cause was cited: mental illness. His manager told reporters, what was wrong with Flores was so damaging that “we couldn’t have him on the field.” Comparing it to a bodily injury. Gabe Kapler (Major League Manager of the Year 2021) said, “These things are equally challenging, whether they’re emotional or mental.”

Perhaps an enterprising (and Spanish speaking – Flores is Venezuelan) reporter will find out more.

Did Flores seek, or have, professional counseling and treatment? Were there background issues – family, financial – troubling him? And what happened to cause Flores to be reinstated in the Giants starting lineup the day, after his manager seemed to say he needed time off for mental health reasons?

Amidst the endless journalism in newspapers, and the torrents of silly, statistics-choked drivel spewed forth on TV and radio, you will search far and wide before you find the answers to these questions. 

Had Flores fractured a limb, doctors, trainers, specialists would have been cited. But the words “mental illness” seem

to mean there are no experts available.

There was one exception, quite a while ago. A star baseball player, Jimmy Piersall, “went bonkers” in the 1950’s. You could read and hear about it everywhere. A best-selling book and a very popular movie captured the nation’s attention.

“Fear Strikes Out – The Story of Baseball Great Jimmy Piersall” appeared in 1957. I was already a devoted baseball follower, saving pennies from my $5 a week allowance to see the Brooklyn Dodgers. I read a lot of newspapers. Piersall’s antic behavior was in all of them. He’d clowned around on and off the field. He got into fights with opposing players, even with teammates. Eventually he’d been dragged out of his home stadium in Boston by police, and confined to a mental institution. 

He was treated with electroshock and gradually became well enough to play again, at an All-Star level, and was a broadcaster and sportswriter for many years after his playing days were over. Given the ubiquity of mental illness in our society, then as now, you know there were other cases among professional athletes. Yet with rare exceptions, like Wilmer Flores, you don’t hear about them.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see why Piersall’s story, both book and movie, had such resonance.

Sports can be a great escape, and a great delight. Or sports can stress your body and mind beyond the bearable. Sports can bring into your life forces and influences which push and pull you in good directions. But sports can also reveal to you that your life is not yours, and whoever “owns” you, financially and psychologically, can frighten you unbearably.

In Piersall’s case, it was his father who had a grip on his soul.

John Piersall was a frustrated man, with a physically powerful body that enabled him to earn a modest living as a house painter and repairman. But his body aged prematurely, due to the hours of hard work he put in, trying to support his family and move from the tiny coldwater flat where they lived in Waterbury, Connecticut.

He had a heart attack in his forties, and had few options about what to do. It was the “Great Depression” and jobs even for the able bodied were scarce. The Piersall family survived on charity food. 

His wife was the victim of John Piersall’s frustrated, unpredictable rages. Intermittently she left home, to be cared for in a charitable “rest home” run by nuns. As she got better, he got worse. And young Jimmy grew up exposed to rage, depression, absence, demands, silences, and total control. His father and mother couldn’t control themselves, so they settled on controlling him.

“When he was nice to me he was as wonderful as any father could be,” Piersall wrote in “Fear Strikes Out.” “He bought me ice cream and put his arm around me and sometimes even kissed me. But when he was angry he terrified me. He would kick me so hard I couldn’t sit down for a week. He would bellow at me in a voice that would make the windows rattle. He would beat me with a strap for not doing what he wanted when he wanted.”

His mother couldn’t bear it. For two years, when Piersall was between seven and nine, she mostly lived in that Catholic retreat.

Jimmy finally found out that his father had been abandoned as a child. In various foster settings John Piersall developed a philosophy that “you have to fight to live.” Jimmy was overwhelmed, as any child would be.

His escape mechanism was to play sports, and he was good at it. But not good enough for his father. Here the “Fear Strikes Out” movie excels, as his father throws baseballs at him with an adult’s strength; Jimmy isn’t even a teenager yet. But John Piersall forces him to run faster, slide harder. And all the time, with his mother “away,” “I had never known a moment when I didn’t worry about her…my apprehension about her was only the beginning. I was worried about everything.”

So how did he become a major leaguer, an all-star, a recognized and revered contemporary of legends like Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio?

By more or less accidentally being mentored, treated, and cured by experienced athletes, devoted clergy and trained doctors.

It’s worth reading the book and seeing the “Fear Strikes Out” movie to find out the facts and see the story dramatized.

In our time, it’s also worth remembering that there are thousands like the kid Jimmy Piersall, needing help, and not getting it. The collective enterprise known as “government,” then as now, hides mental illness and lets it be seen, seemingly hopelessly, in the streets. 

One example. In early April, the State of Michigan, with its progressive, liberal governor, received funding from a Biden era initiative known as the American Rescue Plan. One Michigan county got $60 million. According to the New York Times (4/10/2022) Ingram County will “replace septic systems, hire a nurse and a health provider for a new clinic, renovate a community dental facility and start a harm reduction program to reduce the incidence of H.I.V. and rural hepatitis.” The harm reduction clinic hopes to open by the end of the year and “serve as many as two dozen patients a day to start.”

Ingram County has 300,000 people, including the students, faculty, and staff of Michigan State University. The words “mental” and “health” are not mentioned in its application to the American Rescue Plan. Mental health needs also aren’t mentioned in the legislation that President Biden signed. 

But you can be certain that somewhere among the 300,000 people in Ingram County there are children in the thrall of abusive adults. And that many of those kids are scared to open up to anyone. And are contemplating suicide, as Jimmy Piersall did. 

It will matter to few of them that Piersall became a highly successful athlete, a great husband, father and grandfather.

As Piersall writes of his life, “Kids when they hear about me will ask, ‘Was he really nuts?’ All I can say is that I started out as a guy without an education, but because of baseball and my ability to work hard I have done all right just the same. I fought my fears, and I was determined to win.”

Starting on a similar positive path for children and families could and should include reading this still widely available book. And watching this still widely accessible movie.