The Hammock Papers: Prepare.

21 June 2013

Prepare.

In a place where the object is to quiet the mind and block out everything but the pitcher, Cabrera sees everything, including the manager in the opposing dugout at Comerica Park.

“I know he is looking in the dugout trying to see if I’m giving signs (on how to pitch him),” said Gardenhire, who has faced Cabrera 15-18 times a season for the last five years. “He is staring at me.”

The first time Cabrera did this, Gardenhire was stunned.

“Is he looking at me?” he wondered. “I’m like, you are not supposed to be doing that.”

Not because it’s poor gamesmanship, but because hitting a baseball is the most difficult thing in sports, and most batters need to focus on the pitcher, not the opposing manager.

“But he pays attention (to everything),” Gardenhire said. “He hears us yelling from the dugout. I tell my guys, ‘Be careful here, he is looking at us, trying to figure out what we are trying to do.’ ”

When asked why he does this, Cabrera admitted he was just searching for an edge. He didn’t start trying to decode opposing managers until a few seasons ago. As a right-handed hitter at Comerica, he can take a step out of the box between pitches and shoot a glance at the visitor’s dugout. He does this at other parks, too, wherever the opponent’s dugout is to his right.

“It helps me a little bit to prepare,” he said.

CONNECT

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL