How losing can cause an identity crisis

As a baseball player, so much of how you feel about your personal worth and ability to succeed can change over the course of a couple of outings.

I would wager to guess the 2017 Toronto Blue Jays’ identity has changed dramatically over the month of April, with more than a few players wondering who they are and how many more chances they’ll get to prove it.

When I was in big-league spring training camp in 2011 with the Tampa Bay Rays, manager Joe Maddon sat us invitees down in the outfield grass of a random practice field to talk about the psychological evolution of a Major League baseball player, at least according to his observations.

Maddon said there are five stages to being a big-leaguer. The first was when you’re a rookie, just happy to get called up. The notion of achieving your dream washes over you for the first time and you play the game like you might wake up at any moment and be cast out. Nothing is yet familiar.

The second stage was the realization that you could actually play at the big-league level, though you’re not sure if you belong or if you’ve just been lucky enough to not get cut. You understand the majors aren’t a dream, but rather a place where the harsh reality is that those who don’t produce won't be around long. It’s a high-pressure, unfair job where small samples ruin years of struggling for a chance at the dream. This is when you either make the adjustment, or your career is capped out as a Triple-A backup.

The third stage is when things get interesting. This is when you realize that you’re good enough to stay and you don’t care about pressure or politics. You realize you’re good enough to stay for the rest of your career and you want everyone to know it. You want to be the reason players in stage two think the game is “unfair.” You expect to succeed, and feelings of being comfortable or belonging are irrelevant.

Stage four is the money-making stage. This is when you’ve proved your talent ­– to yourself and the world – and want as much money as that talent can command. This is when you want the huge contract and you’re not going to be nice about it unless being nice helps you get paid. This is a selfish time in your career. You’re highly motivated and expect a big payout.

Stage five is the most desirable of all stages, but few athletes get there and stay there. Stage five is all about winning because you’ve done everything else. You’ve made the money, you’ve proven your place and people are wearing your jersey in the stands. What matters now is winning as much as possible, walking away with championship rings and leaving your mark on the game for as long as there is a game.

Maddon said he wanted to get as many of us as possible into stages three, four and five, while helping us handle the first two better. I couldn’t wait to get started!

I realized that my career was stuck somewhere between the first and second stage. I never seemed to have enough success to prove I should stick, and just when I was starting to roll I got hurt and spent a year on the disabled list. I knew what it was like to succeed, but I also knew what it was like to struggle and fail – the pain, the doubt, and the constant shifting of self-worth.

But that’s not all that occurred to me when I heard Maddon speak. As I walked away from the sermon in the outfield, I realized how rare it was to have a manager come out and directly tell players that he understands we have doubts about our ability, that we’re all in different stages of our career, and that he knew some of us expected to get paid big money.

To Maddon, we weren’t just guys in uniform hired to do a job that fans lusted after during good times and booed during the bad. Maddon, at the very least, made us feel like he understood the process, which granted many of us an instant connection to him in a way few of us ever felt with a manager.

As I watch this 2017 Blue Jays season unfold, I can’t help but think about the identity crisis that must be happening in that locker room. Players naturally expect to move forward on Maddon’s five stages of player evolution, but sometimes they go backward.

Pitching, for example, can sometimes feel more like throwing dice than baseballs. A pitcher, even one with the kind of success that Roberto Osuna has had in his young career, can feel more like he is gambling than pitching when he takes the mound. Pitchers who make big names in small, pressure-filled moments get it the worst. When they fail, everyone wonders if he’s done.

It’s the difference between hoping for a result instead of expecting it; wondering if you’ll survive this next appearance or if it will be the one that knocks you out of your role. If you don’t think getting past that moment is a big deal, I’m here to tell you it may be the biggest moment any player will face in their career.

The worst thing you ever want to hear a player say is, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know how to fix it.” Saying that phrase is like an incantation that will send you down a spiral of self-analysis, failure, and doubt. Are you still any good? Will you ever be good again? You tell yourself and the media that you’re good, but your results don’t corroborate it.

The game, as they say, can humble you. Quickly.

Until the Jays won their seventh game, they were on pace to have the worst start to a season in franchise history. Now, at eight wins, they’re simply on pace to tie it. It’s not much of a step up considering they presently have the second worst win/loss record in baseball, just above the miserable Kansas City Royals – a feat that wouldn't feel so bad if the Jays hadn’t made it to the playoffs the last two years in a row. This year’s Jays team, for the record, just won two games in a row for the first time this past weekend.

People talk about long seasons. I’ve talked about long seasons. There are still plenty of games for the Jays or any other losing team to stage a comeback. But the further away a team drifts from feeling like they have the ability to win, the harder that kind of the scenario becomes.

I’ve played on teams so bad that we expected to lose because we became comfortable with it. The paycheques kept coming in regardless of the outcome, and, as long as you weren’t the worst performer on the club, your job was relatively safe. In fact, during one stretch in the minors, I played on a team so bad that one of my teammates said, “Did we win? Or did we just run out of time before we could lose?”

The worst thing about prolonged failure is how it naturally drives teams apart. If you’ve got nothing driving you as a team – no team championship or postseason goal – the rest of the season becomes base capitalism. Stage five goes out the window. People get stuck in the selfish phases. You can’t control what your teammates do – or fail to do – but you can control what you do. Do well, get yourself paid, and to hell with everyone else. Hope to get traded to a winner.

That kind of thinking, if given the time to take root, can ruin a teammate for longer than just one season.

Thus, as the season grinds on and the losses pile up, the focus will shift from finding ways to come together and expect victory, to resigned acceptance of failure and a focus on individual results.

Whether the Jays are going to come back and fight in this season will largely be decided by what happens over the next month. If they continue to play as badly as they are now, the season will melt down into a fire sale and we’ll be talking about prospects and trade candidates in the summer.

Avoiding that scenario starts at the psychological level. Presently the team is hoping to win. Regardless of what they’re saying publically – because even the most public relations ignorant player can tell a camera they expect to do better – they’re presently having trouble recalling the feeling. If we know they stink, they know they stink.

But, unlike you and I, they feel like they stink, and they feel it every minute of every day. It’s in these moments that great athletes rise up and push back, or simply accept defeat and take the money, grinding out the season until someone offers them a ticket out.