Professional baseball players are humans like you and I

If you’re lucky, your job will have some objective measure for your position’s success. Maybe it’s total sales made, machines serviced, revenue generated, pageviews reached, whatever. These metrics give you a hard, unbiased look at where you are and where you want to be, and can be a bulwark against bosses that may or may not have your best interests at heart.

Performance metrics are usually private. A lot of times, it’s just you and your boss and company leadership that have access to them. Some sales teams or other competitive groups have leaderboards where folks can see how they’re doing within the team.

But even in those scenarios, your performance metrics aren’t public. Your Twitter followers can’t look up to see how many cars you’ve sold, or when you’ve sold your cars, or what your average lead-to-sale ratio is. Your friends can’t look those numbers up. Your spouse and mom can’t look those numbers up.

Imagine, for a minute, if that was the case, if nearly every detail of your job performance was publicly and easily accessible. And imagine, for a minute, if your job performance could increase your yearly salary tenfold. How would that affect how you work? How would that affect your working relationship with your team? How would that affect your home life, and how might your home life affect you?

Professional athletes have very different jobs than most of us. They do nearly superhuman things on the field at a stunning rate and under immense pressure. We see athletes on television, or on our phone, or from hundreds of feet away on a field built for 40,000 people. What we see of them is such a small part of who they are, and it makes empathy, for nearly all fans, extremely difficult.

This is unfortunate, because the simple fact of the matter is that these players are humans that play baseball, or basketball, or football, or whatever sport you happen to watch.

This year, I’ve gotten to cover games at the Royals clubhouse more than I have for any previous season, and it’s been equal parts humbling and eye-opening to see how the sausage gets made, so to speak. The aura around these players quickly evaporates when you’re hearing, say, an argument about whether to get a physical copy of Call of Duty from Best Buy or download the game digitally (a real conversation Vinnie Pasquantino and Michael Massey had this summer).

I don’t want to Lee Judge you all and essentially argue that fans can’t have opinions or can’t be right because they don’t have access. But I do think that we so often overlook the human element. Like, how would you feel if you were forcibly transferred to a new branch and half of your job was suddenly different? How might your struggles compound, with a new set of eyes watching your every move compounded with your expectations of excellence? Consider that as you read this excerpt from an August MLB interview with Jonathan India:

“I’m not myself right now,” India said pregame. “I’m not being the hitter I know I can be. There’s a lot of factors in that. I understand. I’m not playing well. It’s just part of winning. We’ve got to win. That’s the bottom line.

“And I’m a team player. I want to win at all costs. Whatever helps the team, I’m in.”

…“Physically, it’s been a tough year,” India said. “It’s more physical than mental, but maybe mentally, too. I love all the guys here. I love the organization. But maybe I’m just not comfortable. I don’t know what it is. I’ve been searching for pretty much the whole year now, trying to find myself. My passion, my fire. And it just hasn’t come out. I don’t know why.

“It’s just part of baseball. It’s a new team, new atmosphere. … It’s nothing to do with the organization. They treat me with such respect. It’s very structured. And it’s a winning organization, which I love. So it’s me. I just need to get built in here and figure it out.”

…“I want fans to know that I’m not going out there and purposely [doing] this. It’s a transition for me that I’m going through, and I’m learning every day. I’m continuing to play, and I’m not afraid to be out there. I love this game too much to hide from it.”

India knows that he wasn’t doing well. He knows because his stats are public. The fans can see, and India and his family can’t go on social media without seeing people tagging him every time he lets them down. And that last quote, man, that’s coming from someone who sees it.

The best tool we have for evaluating players is the stats they put up on the field. It’s why objective metrics exist, and it’s why non-professional jobs have those kinds of metrics, too.

But these players aren’t just lines on a spreadsheet. They’re humans who go through the full range of human motions and experiences just like you and I. And incorporating that line of thinking doesn’t just help you be more empathetic and less prone to name-calling, though it does. It can actually give you a better handle on evaluation and provide some nuance to your analysis.

In India’s case, he is statistically due for some bounceback to some degree, as I’m sure ZiPS will show when it’s out. And after the year he’s had as a person? Well, he’s only human. The reset would do you good if you were in his shoes, wouldn’t it?