Day Twenty Four: Ryon Healy
When I was a kid I was always decent at baseball. I thought about baseball pretty much 24 hours a day so I am glad that I wasn't outrightly terrible (that might have been easier come to think of it), but I was never a top player by any stretch of the imagination. I was talented on the basketball court, I could pass a football really well, but top level baseball play was never in the cards for me. It being my favorite sport made this all the more difficult for me to swallow as a youngster. And at the core of my struggles in baseball were my issues of self esteem and internally directed anger.
In baseball it is very difficult to carry anything negative from your last at bat with you and have any degree of sustainable success. If a guy strikes you out, the next time you need to forget that this happened, learn from the actual real time events, and have enough determination and self confidence (really the amount of confidence a hitter needs is absolutely insane) to push through that wall and have a successful at bat. Even then, the likelihood of being successful is pretty slim. Even the masters: Ichiro, Tony Gywnn, Wade Boggs, only went 5 for 5 on rare occasions. A shooter in basketball might regularly get hot and hit 100 percent of their shots. But for a hitter to be perfect over a full nine frames is pretty wild stuff. So you better get real used to going 0 for 5 or 1 for 5 or 0 for 4 or some other ugly number. And sometimes those outs can be really ugly and they hurt the ego. That never worked well for me. I used to get so mad when I would strike out that I would throw my helmet and do all kinds of other useless self flagellation. I would probably still end up doing this if I played baseball now at age 37. It's just not healthy for someone with my delicate sensitivities to step into the box. But man! I really wanted to be good at baseball. Like I would have given anything to know how to harness that emotion and become a good hitter. But it was never meant to be. Still, I admire baseball hitters more than any other athlete and believe that what they do is far and away the most difficult thing in sports. Not because hitting a baseball is the most difficult thing, but not hitting a baseball will fuck your mind up so very much that it almost seems like it's impossible to hit a baseball.
And that brings me to Ryon Healy. I remember watching Healy play for the Athletics in 16 and 17 and thinking, wow, this kid is just a step away from being a good hitter. But his plate discipline was awful and he seemed overmatched in many crucial situations. He put up weird 1980s numbers that wouldn't hold up for a corner infielder over the long run in the vicious era of three true outcomes. I figured he was going to fade out pretty quickly. Little did I know that I was going to get the opportunity to watch him do more than that in person!
Healy arrived in Seattle for the 2018 season with a bag full of potential and all the previously stated difficulties. Watching him that first season it was clear that the biggest stumbling block for young Ryon was going to be mental. He couldn't control an at bat. He would actively lose himself in the middle of an ab and just basically fall to pieces. It's an awful thing to witness. To see someone just mentally overmatched in such an extreme way that you can't help but feel sorry for them. Especially if you (as I most certainly have) struggled with the same shit as a player. And Ryon would just give abs away that first full season with the Mariners. He wasn't always awful, but between him and Kyle Seager they were evidently both very eager to just give up. But here is the distinction between Ryon Healy and Kyle Seager of 2018. Every single time that Healy lost his shit and fell into a K Hole of offensive suffering do you know who was most angry at Ryon Healy about doing so? You guessed it, Ryon Healy himself. That was the most tragic and brutal thing to watch. To see Healy just bludgeoning himself after striking out badly on three straight balls. It was too much! I couldn't handle it. It was too personal. Often times it was best to look away. I can watch Kyle Seager sandbag an ab and gleefully trot back to the dugout to think about his next home remodel without batting an eye, but to see Healy suffer in that public and personally relatable way. I couldn't stand it.
So I was rooting for Ryon Healy to have figured it out in 2019. He seemed super confident those first few weeks that the Mariners were playing out of their gourds. He talked the talk. He looked smooth and was raking like a player with Ryon Healy's talent and without Ryon Healy's mind could always have done. But he was still Ryon Healy and he still possessed Ryon Healy's mind. So when the wheels started to fall off the illusory well wagon last year it was no surprise that Ryon Healy collapsed into a writhing purveyor of misery for both himself and fans. There are a ton of other useful ways to imagine how abruptly he fell to shit, but for this thought experiment lets just look at one stat: In March and April he had 11 walks. That's pretty good. And it showed his improved approach at the plate. In May on the other hand, Healy had 2 walks. And then he had an "injury" that ended his season and he is no longer a Mariner.
And for that I am grateful. I hope that this extended break from the Golgotha of the major league batter's box will give Healy a chance to reimagine his mental approach. I hope that when he plays a game next it is with the vigor that only an ex-Mariner can muster. And I hope that he will find self-love in the game of baseball. But baseball is a really hard sport.
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