A Player In His Prime
The year was 1990. The scouting report looked good. He was 6’3”, 205 pounds and thirty years-old. He was coming off a career year and you could assume that he was one of the top ten batters in the league. I say this because he was in the top ten in the league for homers. He was top ten in the league for RBIs. He was top ten in the league for extra base hits. He was top ten in the league for total bases. And he was top ten in the league for slugging percentage. So I guess I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that he could be considered one of the top ten hitters in the league that year. Sure.
And at the end of the year, he had collected 19 points in the AL MVP voting. That put him ahead of players like Wade Boggs, Nolan Ryan, and Mark McGwire. He didn’t win the award (Robin Yount did.) But he was playing well enough to receive votes. That’s the important thing.
His bat was good. His glove was fine. His arms were strong. And his legs had lots of life left in them (that season marked the first time he had ever played more than 125 games in a year.) He wasn’t a shot player. He was a player on the rise. Things looked promising. That’s the truly cruel part. From all appearances, it certainly seemed like the best was yet to come.
The Atlanta Braves signed him to a sizeable free agent contract that dwarfed his previous annual salary. He was established. He was a veteran. And he was playing the best ball of his life.
But then, the big first baseman picked up an inner ear infection. And suddenly, just like that, it was Lights Outs, Game Over, and Nick Esasky would not play the game of baseball again.
Author’s Aside
(As I was drafting the opening to this piece, I realized that over the course of working on my essays for Bill James Online, I’ve spent a lot of time staring at the thesaurus and trying to find synonyms for the word “Tragedy.” Because “Tragedy” is a heavy word that should be exercised with a sense of self-restraint, deployed only after careful consideration. Moments of great human suffering or death can rightly be considered tragedies. So I think it would be inappropriate to casually apply the term to describe a handful of disappointing baseball careers. It would speak to a lack of perspective.
“Misfortune” seems like the next best choice, but I don’t think it’s a great option. “Misfortune” seems lacking and inadequate. The difference between Tragedy and Misfortune is the sense of sadness, the emotional component that is carried by the first word but not the other.
Semantically, there seems to be a vast expanse for broken dreams and failed expectations to reside in the space between the signposts for “Tragedy” and “Misfortune.” And, if I were a better writer, I would probably find a way to bridge that gap, or maybe narrow it down a little. Instead, I’m left at a loss to find the terms that properly describe the plight of individuals like Nick Esasky. We need more words. And I need to get better at using them. End Author’s Aside.)
Summer of ‘89
In the summer of 1989, I met a girl named Susan Garrett. We were both spending the summer in Durham, NC, as part of the two-week program at the Duke Young Writers’ Camp. She was fun, sweet, and cute as a button. She was short, blonde, and she had a delightful southern twang. (I believe that she was from Marietta, Georgia, but it’s been 19 years so it’s hard to keep everything straight.) Listening to her talk always brought a smile to my face. We would hang out in my room, and I would teach her how to play songs on the guitar, like “Stand” from the R.E.M. album, Green. Yeah. I liked her a lot.
But there was a problem. Duke Young Writers’ Camp confused me. It was like being on another planet. Cute girls I didn’t know would come up to me and start chatting with me. I wasn’t exactly prepared for this. I thought I was going to be spending two weeks working on my writing fundamentals. Instead, I was getting a crash course on flirting. It was crazy. Awesome, but completely overwhelming.
I liked Susan. But I was distracted. Distracted by Bonnie, and Holly, and Sarah. I couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t know how to focus. I spent a lot of time during that two week session running around in circles. And I loved every minute of it.
(Pictures of the author at the Duke Young Writers’ Camp, Summer of 1989. This has never, ever happened to me again since then.)
When camp was over, Susan and I wrote to each other a couple of times. This was life before the internet. I would take a pen and paper, write her an actual letter, then mail it off to her. And she wrote me back once or twice. Penpals. Why not? She was a sweetheart. It was fun. I looked forward to getting mail from her. It was a good summer.
Definitions: Vertigo
Vertigo is an excellent movie masterfully directed by Alfred Hitchcock, featuring Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak. It stars Stewart as a slightly unhinged gentleman, trying to transform his new girlfriend into the spitting image of a dead woman he once loved. Laden with the twisted psychology of obsession and despair, the movie benefits from virtuoso performances by all the principals involved. Of the dozen or so Hitchcock films I’ve seen, this is one of my personal favorites (I am also partial to North by Northwest and The Birds.) Vertigo is widely considered to be among the most powerful examples of Hitchcock’s legendary technical mastery, and with good reason.
Vertigo is a fascinating comic book imprint from the publisher DC Comics. Influenced by the modern horror tone introduced by the mad wizard Alan Moore in his early run on Swamp Thing, the comic book line has produced some of the most sophisticated and thought-provoking comic stories in recent memory. Placing an emphasis on the darker aspects of the supernatural, the titles most associated with Vertigo Comics would include Preacher, Hellblazer, and the landmark Neil Gaiman fantasy series, Sandman. All three titles are superb, and I would also suggest adding Peter Milligan’s underappreciated run on Shade, the Changing Man to the “Recommended Reading” list. All good reads.
Vertigo is a fun song by U2. Starting with Bono’s gleefully mistaken Spanish count-off, the opening track from How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb storms out of the speakers with a charging guitar riff that echoes back to the sound of Achtung Baby (the seminal album released by the band thirteen years earlier.) Take a hook-centric chorus featuring a bi-lingual call-and-response, toss in a healthy dose of airplay across several forms of media, and the song manages to comfortably take its place with the other classic songs in the U2 catalog. The track was a clear wake-up call announcing U2 was still artistically relevant, even in this chaotic new millennium.
Vertigo is a medical condition. You get dizzy. It’s what ended Nick Esasky’s career.
Not Just Another Story
So. Why write about Nick Esasky? Good question.
Starting as a kid, I’ve always been pretty fixated with the concept of closure. I like to trace the arc of narrative trajectory, the slow, perpetual march towards catharsis and conclusion. I guess that I’m a fan of traditional story structure. It’s gratifying. It’s rewarding. I don’t care if it’s formulaic. It’s a pretty damn good formula.
We are creatures of habit. It’s fascinating how often we shape the world into a three-act structure. The way I see it, we want all our stories to make sense: we want them to have a Beginning, Middle, and End.
I bring all this up because my most vivid memory of Nick Esasky’s saga in the summer of 1990 was the troubling lack of closure. Everything about it felt empty and unfinished. This was life before the internet. I would scan the sports section on a daily basis, looking for signs of his progress, trying to find out when he was coming back to crush the ball like he did previously, trying to figure out when he was coming back from his vertigo.
How much time did he need? When would he recover? When would he be back? You get used to timetables, players rising up from the DL from ailments big and small. Day-to-day for a contusion. Two weeks for an oblique. A year for Tommy John. Jon Lester came back from cancer to close out the World Series. That’s how it works. The medical team identifies the source of physical discomfort, it gets fixed, and the player gets back on the field to try and win another World Series.
But, defying all my expectations, Nick Esasky couldn’t get past that inner ear infection. It got the better of him. The formula fell to pieces. There was no third act. That inner ear infection took him down.
Like a Glacier
You can’t keep track of everyone in your life. When I got out of college, I took pride in my ability to keep in touch with everyone. A phone call here, a visit there. I was a good friend. But my life was far more contained back then, the radius of my days far easier to circumscribe. Now I look back at friends like Sarah Lorge and Chris Cheavers who used to be my lifeline, the people I would talk to on a daily basis, and I am resigned to the fact that our lives have taken different paths. Every day, we take a step in a different direction. It’s hard to keep everyone on board. People fade in and out. We all drift. That’s life.
I spent two weeks in Durham with Susan Garrett in the summer of 1989. I thought about her a lot back then. I still think about her every now and again these days. Pleasant memories. We wrote to each other a couple of times that summer, then we drifted. I never heard from her again.
Looking back now, I realize that I never consciously gave up on Nick Esasky. I just forgot to stop checking. Like an imaginary friend that you leave behind as you grow up, or the girl you wrote to regularly for months after summer camp, sometimes you spend less and less time thinking about someone until they fade out of your life uneventfully, without a trace. At some point, down the line, it must have finally dawned on me that he wasn’t going to be the same player he once was. This is Vertigo. Nick Esasky wasn’t coming back.
After his brilliant 1989 season, when he hit .277 with 30 homers and 108 RBI, Esasky signed a three-year contract with the Braves. He ended up playing nine games for them over the course of that three-year contract. Those were the last nine games of his Major League career.
Nick Esasky was one of the top ten hitters in the league in the summer of 1989. Then he got an inner ear infection. I thought about him a lot back then. I still think about him every now and again these days. Pleasant memories. But people fade in and out.
We all drift. That’s life.
If you have any thoughts you want to share, I would love to hear from you. I can be contacted at roeltorres@post.harvard.edu. Thank you.