The World Needs More Warriors

 

 

 

Thirty-four pitches. Across 10 batters. That's what 2025 World Series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto survived to close out Game 7 and secure the championship for his Los Angeles Dodgers against their worthy opponent the Toronto Blue Jays. Having started and pitched six strong innings just the day before. Rightly his performance has reached "instant legend" status, given the high quality on the highest stage. Rightly is he seen as a warrior of warriors, with his "losing is not an option" quote sure to grace locker room walls and yearbook photos for many years to come.

The thing I want to highlight, and the reason why I used the word "survived" in the previous paragraph, is that, while Yamamoto ended up being the hero of perhaps the greatest game in baseball history, there were many opportunities that he could've been the goat. Thirty-four, to be exact. In baseball, the home team is up last, and in a tie game in the ninth inning and beyond, that means that if the home team scores the game is over. It's called a "walk-off," and the home fans in Toronto were waiting desperately to cheer for one.

Which means that, 34 times, Yamamoto made a pitch that could've ended the game and the series. (Actually, not all 34: in the bottom of the 11th, he was protecting a one-run lead, so had the first batter homered it would've tied the game rather than won it.) Talk about nerve-wracking! The last series of the year. The last game of the series. The last inning of the game, and then another one and then another one (he entered in the 9th and finished the 11th). With every pitch, the possibility of giving away the game and entering into baseball history as the loser, his sad walking off the mound to join his teammates in the dugout immortalized in highlights to be played until the end of time. 

In life, few of us will experience this sort of pressure cooker, where the fate of an entire sports league and two cities' fan bases hangs on a single pitch, let alone 34 over 3 nerve-wracking innings. It is easy to forget that the pitchers and batters in the World Series are human beings, and young ones at that; I'm not that old and I'm twice as old as Yamamoto is. At the highest levels of sports performance, it takes both endless practice to sear in the muscle memory required to perform on command with the world watching you, and severely strong mental capabilities to block out everything around you and execute.

There are obviously many more spectators than players in the game of baseball. On the field were 9 fielders and about 50 players total between the two teams, whereas the stands held 50,000 viewers with another 25 million watching on TV. So odds are you're a spectator and not a player, when it comes to baseball.

But in the game of life, we have many more opportunities to be on the field rather than in the stands. And the world needs people to be on the field. But too often we prefer to be in the stands. We are happy to cheer the players on or boo them mercilessly; we just don't want to be the players themselves, not really given how hard it is to perform at that level and how stressful it is to do so in front of millions with so much at stake.

Being on the field requires a lot of work, a lot of risk-taking, and a lot of catching flak. For most of us, in most aspects of life, we're not interested. Easier to kibbitz from the comfort of our seats or homes, second-guessing and criticizing and lampooning endlessly with no regard for what it's like to actually have all eyes on us. Which is a shame, because, considering how amazing Game 7 was, being on the field means being responsible for bringing a lot of people a lot of joy (except for Blue Jays fans, I guess, but even they would, after they lick their wounds, agree it was an amazing experience to behold).

Some of us will aspire to be great athletes, the kinds that millions will watch. Some of us will put in the work to be elected officials or small business owners or civic leaders, for the positive good we can do in the world to influence communities and societies. But it feels like not enough of us are willing to put in the time, bear the stress, and expose ourselves to the heckling. And we're worse off for it.

Much has been made of Elon Musk's desire to take steps towards sending people to Mars and eventually having permanent habitation there. It seems incredibly impossible and perhaps wasteful and foolish. And maybe it is. But I'm reading a book about the earliest humans, and how they somehow made their way from Africa to the Middle East to the rest of Asia, and then, improbably, to the continent of Australia. Which, at the time, must have felt just as unreachable as Mars is to our modern minds. 

I'm not sure every crazy venture is worth pursuing. There is nothing wrong with seeing the punishing lifestyle required of elite athletes and powerful politicians and startup unicorns and deciding that for our self-care we will decline such a path for ourselves. But if too few of us decide we don't want to be the warriors on the field, humanity is less well off for it. And it leaves me wondering what it'll take to get more people to have the heart to do it. Even if, like Yamamoto ran the risk of, every pitch brings with it the possibility that you'll be the goat forever.