A blessing of The Corona Lockdown has been the chance to look around the dusty corners of my past, unearthing the various trash and treasure I've left behind for long-forgotten reasons. I'm not talking about my stuff piled in the corner, I'm talking about the half-assed first drafts from back when I started TOA, and most of the time I've left those right where they belong. But I thought one half-post I'd abandoned about Diasuke Matsuzaka - 'Dice-K' - was worth another try, albeit in a new direction.
My first draft was based on this article that outlined some of the injury problems Dice-K was dealing with during his third season in MLB. His woes were a major disappointment, considering my excitement in 2007 when he first signed - I was so pumped up I watched his introductory press conference! Things did not go smoothly, however, his career trajectory plummeting like his famous gyroball - a pair of inconsistent seasons, an injury-plagued third campaign, public sniping over training and rehabilitation methods.
I initially started writing because I was interested in translation's effect on the dispute. Was 'savings' the right word, particularly in a country not known for saving? In short, Dice-K saw training as one half of a saving-spending dichotomy, the equivalent to depositing money into an account for future use. On the other hand, the Red Sox seemed to view training as one end of a spending continuum, like making the minimum payment on a credit card bill to retain as much cash as possible for tomorrow. Maybe Dice-K (or his translator) should have said he'd reached his credit limit
But clever analogies about word choice only go so far - it makes the training disagreement appear like a trivial matter of financial philosophy, but that wasn't at the core of the issue. In hindsight, I see that the real dispute is much more elementary - Dice-K was thinking about this entire career while the Red Sox were thinking about their six-year contract. Until the player cared about the team getting value for their money or the team cared about preserving health throughout the player's career, this argument was going nowhere.
What happens during an argument when both parties fail to recognize the main dispute? Nothing, and that's exactly what ensued, though it did make for entertaining sports radio fodder. Dice-K essentially blamed the inadequate Red Sox training program for causing his arm problems while the team fired back and accused Dice-K of not training hard enough. If you aren't so into sports, the chatter sounded a lot like other famous recurring arguments from history:
Person A: I keep jumping, and coming back down!
Person B: You haven't jumped hard enough!
Person A: I keep praying, and everything still sucks!
Person B: You haven't prayed hard enough!
Person A: I keep listening to U2, and it still sounds like rubbish!
Person B: You haven't listened hard enough!
At what point does someone stop jumping, praying, or listening? I don't know. I believe in gravity, have some theories about God, and listen to Bono quite often, but I don't know when I started doing those things. You should ask Dice-K if his gyroball broke, or when it did. The inflection point always fascinates me. I used to think that eventually we realize we are wrong about various things and change our ways. But sometimes it's the road itself that changes, a sudden curve appearing in the blink of an eye, and we move in a new, unexpected direction, the surprise unfolding ahead, the unrecognized image in the mirror, forever humming the same tune, with no choice but to remain loyal to the path we've traveled all along.
