I always enjoyed baseball. Being a kid without much foot speed but with good hand-eye coordination, it was the game I was best at growing up. I couldn't dazzle anyone with quickness on a soccer field, but I could hit a baseball. I remember watching Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa hit home runs. I remember going through a rebellious stage where I pulled for the Yankees. I remember "coming home" and being a Cardinals fan like my grandpa and my dad. Like I said, I've always enjoyed baseball.
It wasn't until recently, however, that I truly got into following the game as a perhaps-obsessed fan. I blame David Freese and that magical World Series run of 2011. After that, I started reading blogs about the Cardinals and even following the evolution of minor league prospects as they inched closer to the big league club. It's become one of my favorite hobbies now, and I could easily list off the best thirty or so prospects in the Cardinals system if I wanted to. But I'm not going to do that. This post isn't about baseball or farm systems. It isn't about my fandom. All that is merely the backdrop. This post is about death and the limited time we all have.
It's not the fact that people die. We all know that much from a very young age. No, it's the fact that anyone can die. It's that they, we, can die at any moment. I imagine that if you thought about it for a moment, you could come up with the death that drove that point home for you. For me, it was the death of Oscar Taveras. That's where baseball comes into the discussion.
You see, Oscar Taveras was a superstar in the making. Like so many other foreign prospects, he was signed to a baseball contract when he was only 16 years old. MLB clubs sign these young men, most of them from Latin America, based on their future promise. They look for tools. They look for kids who can run fast, throw hard, or who can just flat-out hit. Taveras was in the last group. He was hardly alone. Many prospects signed when he did, but he soon distinguished himself. In his homeland, the Dominican Republic, he was simply known as "El Fenomeno" or "The Phenomenon." He was that good.
By 19, Taveras was tearing up A-ball. By 20, he was crushing it at AA-ball. By 21, he had moved on to AAA-ball, the highest league in the minors. By 22, he was in the majors. It was a meteoric rise. He was on the level of Mike Trout and Bryce Harper. He was moving through the system as fast as Carlos Correa would do soon after him with the Astros. Simply put, Oscar Taveras was, as I said earlier, a superstar in the making. He was a can't-miss prospect. And he was the Cardinals'. He was, for lack of a better way of saying it, mine. I was going to be able to watch him hit homers for the next 10-15 years. He was going to be the counterbalance to the accumulated talent the Cubs were gathering. In many ways, he was the great hope for my favorite franchise. And then he died.
It was October 26, 2014, when Oscar Taveras and his girlfriend died in a single-car accident. For anyone at all connected to the world of sports, it was a tragedy. For me, it was that as well as the moment when I realized the undeniable truth of my own mortality. I was a 25 year old at the time, a young man with no bad health to worry about. But Taveras was 22. He was a professional athlete, an elite athlete. And he was dead. It was then that I knew my own death could come at any time. It was then that I truly felt the weight of mortality.
Now, I'm not trying to make you live your life scared. I certainly don't do so. I'm simply reminding us all, perhaps myself more than anyone else, to enjoy the time we have, to cherish our loved ones. What brought this up today, you ask? Well, news broke this morning that another young baseball star died tragically last night. His name was Jose Fernandez, and he was one of the best pitchers in the game at the young age of 24. Does that matter? Of course not. He was a man with loved ones. He had a pregnant girlfriend. He had family and friends that he cared about and who cared about him. That's what matters. The time he spent with them is what matters. It's what matters for us all.
There's an often-used meme floating around the Internet, and it's popularity might have stolen some of its meaning. But I think the words ring true if we'll just take a moment to let them sink in. I'd like to close with those words, because I think they're more profound than anything I could ever conjure up. The following quote, as I'm sure you probably know, was the reply of the Dalai Lama when he was asked what surprised him most about humanity.
"Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then he dies having never really lived."
What I'm trying to say is this: death is all around us. It's in the cars we drive and the air we breathe. It's in our arteries. You could die a century from now. You could die tomorrow. Live today.
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