I’m guessing most people think I shouldn’t feel bad for him. But I do. Tim Johnson was a baseball lifer. He played minor league ball. He played major league ball. He scouted. He was a minor league manager. He was a major league bench coach. Then, when he finally realized a dream and became a surprisingly successful major league manager, he was fired after a single season. Because he lied. Well, okay, lots of managers lie. Baseball people lie all the time. The difference was, Tim Johnson lied about things that you are not allowed to lie about. And in the blink of an eye, he was exiled to the Mexican Baseball League, a pariah in the sport he loved so very much…
Who gets forgiven? Who gets to redeem themselves? Who gets the chance to walk away from the wreckage of their mistakes? Former Dodgers closer Steve Howe was suspended from baseball for drug abuse. Seven times. After his sixth suspension, they didn’t kick him out the door and ship him out to the Mexican League. No. After his sixth suspension, they gave him a contract, a glove, and welcomed him back to the majors with open arms. He had a problem. A disease. He was struggling with his inner demons. People understood.
Tim Johnson? Different story. Tim Johnson wasn’t lucky enough to get a seventh chance.
Uncle Mike
When I was a kid, I would make stuff up. Constantly. I remember the time in third grade that my mom came home from her first parent-teacher conference since moving to the States. The kids in my class had been asking me if I was related to the Red Sox pitcher, Mike Torrez. I didn’t really know who he was. I was new to the country and we didn’t follow baseball in the Philippines. I told them, “Yes.” It was crazy. Our names weren’t even spelled the same way. Torrez, Torres. I said “Yes”, then forgot about it. I had no idea my teacher, Mrs, Hardy, had even heard about it. But of course she had. And she asked my mom about it. Which of course caught my mom flustered and unprepared. She was prepared for a conversation about how her son was adjusting to the American elementary school system. She did not expect to be answering questions about imaginary relatives pitching in the Majors.
When my mom got home, she confronted me about it. She wasn’t mad at me. Not really. I’m sure she was embarrassed, probably a little surprised. But I was nine years old. What did she expect? That’s what nine year-olds do. They make stuff up. Right?
My mom asked me not to spread lies to my classmates. More specifically, she asked me to stop telling people we were related to Mike Torrez.
Okay. No problem. He was a relatively mediocre starting pitcher anyway.
Looking back, it would be easy to justify my tendency to stretch the truth as a sign of creativity, the mark of a vivid imagination. And I think there’s something to that. But deep down, I know the real reason I used to lie so often.
I wanted to be liked. I wanted to impress people. I wanted people to think I was cool.
I was an overweight nine year-old son of an illegal alien, I didn’t speak English as my first language, and I had immigrated to the United States nine months ago. That was reality. But lying could change that. Lying could alter the facts. Lying could make me better than I was.
(How much damage do you think has been done by insecure young men trying to impress someone? How much havoc has been caused by misfits and outsiders trying to find a way to make people think they were cool? And conversely, how much peace of mind do you achieve that moment when you realize that it doesn’t matter whether people are impressed or not? That it doesn’t matter if anyone thinks you’re cool? Wouldn’t it be great if we could quantify all of that somehow? Measurements like “Throughout history, insecure young men have wasted so much energy trying to impress people that, if harnessed, it could power a million suns…”)
The Job
Major league managers lie all the time. I think we all know this and accept it. If your centerfielder shows up hung-over and smelling like sex because he spent the night club-hopping and getting hammered while chasing skirts, you’re allowed to tell the press you’re giving him a day off because it’s a long season and you’re trying to preserve his health. And if your shortstop and your starting pitcher hate each other with a burning animosity, you’re allowed to lie through your teeth and tell the media that everyone gets along in the clubhouse. Sure.
Whenever the government embarks on a large-scale public works project, they calculate the number of deaths that will come as a direct result of building the final product. They’re inevitable. They’re called “Acceptable losses” and everyone recognizes that they come with the territory. By the same measure, we have “Acceptable lies.” White lies. Harmless ones. We’re all adults here. We get it. We know the rules of the game. It’s only when someone oversteps the unspoken, invisible boundary lines that we end up staring at the ground uncomfortably, shuffling our feet, trying to figure out how to extricate ourselves from the suddenly awkward situation.
We expect major league managers to motivate their team. I don’t know why, exactly. You would think that athletes playing at the highest level of the game for the highest compensation and the greatest stakes would do just fine motivating themselves. The players motivated themselves in Little League, in high school, in college, in the Cape League, in the minors, in the Arizona Fall League, in the Dominican Winter League, and finally the majors. And these players need someone to fire them up? Can’t we assume their natural competitive tendencies will serve them just fine? And even if they aren’t all fired up, does it really matter? Isn’t a supremely talented slugger who’s just going about his business going to dominate due to his superior natural talent when compared to an undersized utility infielder who’s always scrappy and fiery and hustles down to first on a routine ground ball? It sure seems like it to me. It sure seems like talent wins. I don’t put a lot of stock in motivational speeches, inner fire, and scrappiness. Your mileage may vary.
Still, there are societal expectations on a Major League manager. It’s not enough for him to maximize his bullpen resources, or to exploit the opposition’s extreme platoon splits. He’s supposed to motivate the troops. I mean, have you ever seen a mainstream sports movie where the head coach doesn’t give a big game speech to fire up the team? Hell, in some movies like Any Given Sunday, the entire point of the movie seems to be about the big speech. Motivating the guys. It’s what leaders do. That’s Hollywood for you.
Tim Johnson tried to motivate his team. As manager of the 1998 Toronto Blue Jays, he had a tall task ahead of him. He played in the same division as historic super powers Boston and New York. The team had only won 72 games the previous year, good for fifth place in the division. It was his first season ever as a Major League manager. He needed to find a way to turn things around. He needed to find a way to help his guys believe. He needed an edge.
So he lied. Some lies, not so egregious. He told his players he was a star basketball player who turned down a scholarship to UCLA. That seemed reasonable. After all, Tim Johnson was a good enough athlete to be the starting shortstop for the Milwaukee Brewers in 1973. It wasn’t too big a stretch for him to claim he could make the cut for a Div. I college basketball program. No worries. No harm done.
Tim Johnson also claimed that he killed people in the Vietnam War. Which he did not. He never served in combat in Vietnam. But he told his players that he did. And when the truth came out as he was about to begin his second season at the helm for Toronto, he was fired in the middle of spring training.
Judgment
I’ve told many lies in my life. Lies to people I barely knew. Lies to the people closest to me. Lies about how much money I’ve made. Lies about the girls I’ve slept with. Lies about how happy I am with my life. I even lie to myself sometimes, and if I do it well enough, I can almost re-shape my past, re-arrange my memories into a manner more convenient for me. The power of self-delusion. It’s almost infinite.
I’m not here to tell you that lying is fine. And I’m not here to tell you that I had excellent reasons to justify my own lies. No. No, I’m not. But I am here to tell you that no matter how wild and implausible and prolific my lies were, no matter how habitual or damaging – I was always given a chance to make up for them. Always given a chance to make the truth more substantial than the lies. Always given a chance to make good. And for every exaggeration I told to make me look like a caring and compassionate person, I had countless opportunities to step up to the plate and actually prove it. And I’m appreciative for that.
In the end, I feel like we should judge a person not by their words, but by their deeds. Don’t pay attention to what a man says, but what he does. Does he claim to be a good man, or does he actually do good things? The difference is everything.
Tim Johnson took over a fifth-place club in the American League East and helped them improve by sixteen wins in a season. He has a .543 lifetime winning percentage as a manager in the Majors. That’s better than Terry Francona, Jim Leyland, or Tony LaRussa. His players competed hard and his team won games. Tim Johnson proved he could manage in the big leagues, and succeed.
But he lied. He lied about killing people. In Vietnam. And in a league that accepts drunken drivers, ‘Roid users, and cocaine addicts back into the fold, he crossed that unspoken, invisible boundary line which makes us stare at the ground uncomfortably, shuffling our feet, trying to figure out how to extricate ourselves from the suddenly awkward situation. It makes us feel dirty. So someone has to pay. For how long? That remains to be seen.
As for me, I’ve already forgiven Tim Johnson. I have. I figure it’s the least I could do, considering the way the world has forgiven me.
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.