#284 - Daily MG - The Only Rule Is It Has To Work by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller - 6 of 6

“There’s a story,” I say, “that major league managers all tell their players these days.” I go slowly. I speak too fast when I speak in front of people. I spoke way too fast in spring training, and during all the pregame shift speeches. But I’m going slow now. After every clause. I take a pause. To hit my marks. To keep my meter. “It goes like this: When the explorer Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico, with plans to defeat the Aztecs and colonize the New World, he ordered his ships be burnt. This way his men would have no way to flee. The only direction they could go was forward. The only option was victory. History says it worked, but I hate this story. This is a story about a leader who didn’t trust his men, didn’t think they would be loyal and fight on their own, couldn’t do the job unless some manager at the top took away their agency. “Cortés was selfish as fuck. “Cortés, to me, is the Pacifics, telling other leagues’ managers that their players aren’t good enough to move up, keeping them all stuck here. “That’s not us. That’s not our team. “We want to do everything we can to get you guys out of here, and we pay for that. We’ve lost a lot of good players because of it. But we’re not going to be Cortés. Cortés was a bad guy. “There’s a different story I like a lot more. It’s about a guy named Hugh Glass. “Hugh Glass was a frontiersman in the 1800s, before the West had been settled. He went to the coldest parts of the country, to North Dakota and Montana, where the Indians were violent and the winters were cruel and the grizzly bears were everywhere. In 1823, he surprised one of those grizzly bears, and she charged at him, threw him to the ground, mauled him, and left him near death. The party he was with was sure he would die, so they left him. Only two men stayed behind, to dig his grave, and to bury him. But after they were attacked by Indians they fled, too. They took his rifle, his knife, and all his supplies. Hugh Glass woke up abandoned. He had no food or supplies. His wounds were festering. They were so deep you could see his exposed ribs. He was two hundred miles from another American. “Glass could have given up. Instead, he looked around and said fuck it, because Glass knew one thing: There is no such thing as almost dead. There is dead, and there is alive, and if you’re alive you have a chance. “He set his own broken leg and began crawling. To prevent gangrene, he laid his wounded back on a rotting log and let maggots eat away his dead flesh. With no weapons, he still managed to drive two wolves from a dead bison and ate the meat. He fixed his eyes on an isolated mountain far off in the distance and crawled toward it. It took him six weeks. He survived mostly on roots. “We know this story because he lived. And we know it because people remember. Records get left and stories get told. Your story will get told. Baseball men in major league front offices will know it and scouts will know it. People you know will know it, and people you meet in the future will find out about it. Everything the world remembers about you as baseball players is happening right now. “Right now, we get to decide whether they’re going to remember a team that got frustrated, that felt abandoned, that gave up and let San Rafael be the heroes; or whether they’re going to remember a team that said Fuck no, patched themselves up, and made themselves the heroes. “There’s always a part where the hero looks defeated. Always. Every story has it. Where you guys are now is not new and it’s not unusual; it’s the starting point for every third-act turnaround that this world has ever known. “A couple days ago, I was listening to a tape recording of our dugout during the third game of the season. That was the game when we fell behind five runs in the first, and then we were down 9-2 in the fifth. The amazing thing about that recording was how loud our dugout was; we were talking, we were encouraging, we were rattling the other team. We sounded like a team that knew it was going to win. You might be thinking, yeah, we had Feh in the dugout, and Feh brought that energy. And it was Feh that I heard on that tape. But it was also Baps. It was Gonzo. It was Schwieger. It was Sean Conroy. It was Kristian. It was Moch. And even though I didn’t hear him, I’m sure that Hurley was there doing his death stare the whole time, freaking Pittsburg out with how intense he was. It was Hurley who singled in the tenth, stole third, and scored on a wild pitch to win that game 10-9. “You guys have this in you. I swear to you, I see it, Theo sees it, Yoshi sees it, and everybody’s going to see it. When you go out there today, you just need to see it yourself. I want to hear that dugout that’s confident, that never stops talking. I don’t care if you’re a rookie, I don’t care if you’re new, I don’t care if you’re hitting .200, I don’t care if you’re scared: I need to hear you today, and every day for the rest of this season. Don’t worry if you sound stupid. The only rule is it has to work. So let’s do this.” - Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller