All of us are faced with certain amounts of pressure in our lives, and each of us deals with it differently. Exercise, eating, yoga, deep breathing - you name it, and everyone has their own methods to get them through the madness. Usually, I am not very interested in how other people handle pressure, but at a Baltimore Orioles baseball game Friday night, I witnessed first hand a young man's extraordinary efforts to handle an extraordinary amount of pressure.
The young man in question is Matt Wieters. A first-round draft pick as a catcher in 2007, he had progressed rapidly through the minor leagues and was making his major league debut that night. Heralded in the newspapers as a potential savior for the Orioles even before his first at-bat in the major leagues, I could only imagine the pressure he must be feeling.
Luckily for me, the Matt Wieters story line provided an intriguing angle for me at an otherwise uninteresting Orioles versus Detroit Tigers ballgame. Don't get me wrong, I'll go to any baseball game anywhere, anytime - but outside of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Boston Red Sox, a playoff or World Series game, it's hard for me to be personally invested or connected. The story surrounding Matt Wieters' debut changed all that.
From the moment Wieters' name was announced, the crowd went wild with applause. How do you deal with that kind of crowd reaction when you haven't even done anything yet to be cheered for? Detroit thought they could intimidate Wieters and the very first pitch of the game, the leadoff batter bunted. For a catcher to handle a bunt, he has to get up from his normal crouch, scramble over to the ball, smother it, and make an odd-angle throw to first base. The applause alone told me of the rookie's first success.
Coming to bat for the first time in the third inning, the entire stadium of over 42,000 fans rose in a standing ovation - again, at the mere announcement of his name! Pressure? What pressure? He proceeded to foul off a few good pitches and finally flied out to right field. All in all a very respectable performance, and though he did not get a hit that night, he did hit a triple on Saturday for his first major league hit.
Whatever pressure there may have been on Matt Wieters in his major league debut, he was more than able to deal with it. In the face of great fanfare and expectation, as well as great hazing I am sure from his clubhouse peers - they ignored him completely when he returned to the dugout after his first at bat - I have no doubt that he will go on to a long and successful career.
However, there was a different kind of pressure that the rookie catcher was unable to stand up to. One of the ushers seated near the dugout told me that Wieters' mother demanded that he get his haircut before his debut. Sure enough, as he stood in the on deck circle for the first time that evening, there was the clean and fresh look and lack of a tan near the base of his new hairline.
Seems there are pressures and then there are pressures . . .
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