Chapter 24 The Thief Who Traded Ted Williams - A Curse and a Neurotic Dragon Slayer

Boston, a historic city on the east coast of the United States, was the location of the largest riot on the eve of the American Revolutionary War, the "Pau Massacre" (in fact, only three people died, which is less than the number of innocent citizens who heroically died on the road in Taipei City in a single day), and also Like many historic cities, it has diminished in importance in the uninteresting real world.For example, the Celtics (also known as the Celtics), the greatest team in NBA history with a green sorrel leaf as its team logo, has gradually become a vertical team that neither made the playoffs nor its stock price fell sharply. The team is old, which means that Boston is no longer a big city that attracts attention with a big market. The good free agents are always New York and Los Angeles.

It's already evening, as the "Bible Old Testament" says. Compared with the Celtics in the NBA, the tragedy of the Red Sox, the oldest team in the major leagues, which also has a touching tradition, came earlier. As early as nearly a century ago, Boston City was still in a good era. Therefore, it is not The fault of the city itself, but a legend related to the ancient baseball kingdom, an unintentional but ignorant mistake, a curse, and since then, a century-old tragedy that has not yet been resolved-so Bostonians Say, Red Sox fans are like schoolchildren at school, the hottest summer break with the long days is always the best time to cheer them up, but as the days go by and the cold rain falls, the inevitable In autumn, when the red leaves are falling from the sky, sadness comes.

The MLS championship game, also known as the October Game, is the time when Boston fans, like schoolchildren at the end of the holidays, begin to burst into tears. For Bostonians, the last good autumn day, when this team last won a championship, is no longer heard, that is, now it is 1918 at the beginning of the last century, That is to say, in the city of Boston today, which is like a Sleeping Beauty sleeping peacefully for a hundred years, if you want to visit the elderly and listen to people tell about the autumn of a golden generation, there may be only a few century-old people left in the whole city of Boston. The senior old people have seen some with their own eyes, but they must be incomplete and omissions, because they are already lost memories of their dim childhood; moreover, if you are a citizen who has settled in Boston, it means that since you lived in this At the beginning of the world, you have never had a better October. Therefore, Bostonians cannot read Eliot's famous poems. Their October is far more cruel than April.

Like all legends, the terrible misfortune always follows the good luck of the gods, so as to show the stubbornness and insatiability of people-Boston's good luck was born earlier in 1914, and the other The baseball god of the time incarnated in the form of a stout, bohemian, bulldog-looking, unsightly young man named Babe Ruth.In the Red Sox, Ruth appeared as a talented pitcher at the beginning, and it took four or five years to slowly transform into the majestic home run king. In total, he was in the Red Sox for six years, throwing An astonishing record of 89 wins and 46 losses, and hit 29 home runs in the final season (the major leagues did not pursue home runs at the time, so this was unprecedented).Yet just as Judas Iscariot sold Jesus to the Romans for thirty denarii, so the foolish Red Sox sold Ruth to New York's rising team, the Yankees, was on January 3, 192, and the tragedy officially began on this day.

Ruth, who went to the Yankees, hit 659 home runs in the next 15 years of the Yankees, led the Yankees to win four major league championships, and created a record that was recognized as impossible in the history of the major leagues. The Yankees' first dynasty; as for the Red Sox, which made a big mistake, it was the leading power in the major leagues before that, and it had just been won in four years in a row in 1915, 1916 and 1918. Three-time champions, but because they offended the god of baseball, they were collectively cursed. The names of this city and this team have been erased indefinitely from the book of fate of the major league champions.

In the next hundred years, the bitterness is that the Red Sox did not fail to recover, but were always as strong as before. Every few years, they were full of power to win the championship, but knocked down again and again, and what was even more strange was that they In four consecutive October competitions in 1946, 1967, 1975 and 1986, they all lost by one step with three wins and four losses—the most unbelievable one was 1986 That year, the Red Sox not only scored 3 wins and 2 losses in the first five games, but also took a 5-3 lead in the first half of the 10th inning in the sixth game. In the last half of the game, the Red Sox closer Shi La As soon as God came up, he successfully resolved the first two bats of the Mets, and the victory was almost equal to his hand. However, the angry God intervened at a moment that could not be sent.The Mets suddenly came back with three singles in a row, and the Red Sox immediately sent Stanley to the rescue. However, after Stanley hit two consecutive strikes, he hit another big wild throw to give away One point, the two sides were tied, and in the end, Wilson, who was hitting, hit a slow roll ball that was so weak that even Taiwan's Little League players could easily hold it, but it strangely passed through the crotch of Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner , The battle situation was completely reversed, and the Red Sox also lost the seventh game, losing the best chance to break the curse-but the heartbroken Bostonians knew well that the key to the loss was not Buckner's ridiculous mistakes, But the distant 192.

The world-famous green wall in the left field of Fenway Park, the home of the Red Sox, has become an insurmountable symbol of the Red Sox - Bostonians call it the Hulk, also known as the Boston Wall, and they sadly point out that this is the Wailing Wall of Bostonians , the tombstone of baseball, the burial place of the Red Sox Warriors, and the place where ghosts linger for generations.Offended by the sky, there is nothing to pray for. Why did you suddenly tell such a sad story?Because this time our book is titled The Thief Who Traded Ted Williams—Ted Williams, the greatest player ever to play the Red Sox, the greatest dragon slayer, only Unfortunately it didn't work out.

How great is Ted Williams?Many, many people believe, including myself, that Williams is the greatest "pure" hitter in the history of human baseball. The so-called pure hitter means comprehensive and comprehensive hitting skills. It's not just the batting average, or the number of home runs, or the number of RBIs, etc., but all of them are added up, and all of them are included in the calculation. The best hitter selected from this, in plain words, is the best hitter in the history of the human world. One of the best strikers. How good Williams is, we'll just give a general idea here—Williams' 22-year baseball career has a total of 521 home runs, a total batting average of 0.344, and a slugging average of 0.344. 0.634, hit rate 0.483, etc. Among them, the hit rate is the first in history, and the slugging rate is second only to Babe Ruth. In addition, he was in 1942 and He won the triple crown in both 1947 and 1947, which is the first in history; in 1941, he had a batting average of 0.406 in a single season, which was the last person in major league history to hit 40% in a single season , As for other total hits, total RBIs, total long hits, various hitting titles in a single season, etc., it is very convenient for those who want to know the details. You can find a baseball encyclopedia, and almost every item can be found in the baseball encyclopedia. Find Williams' name within ten.

Such an extremely skilled hitter has power, a precise and solid hitting point, and a sharp and unparalleled ball selection ability. It is really unfortunate that pitchers of his generation but on different teams-in the actual battlefield, The pitcher's frustration strategy has this to say: "Did they ever tell me how to pitch against Williams? Of course they did, great advice, and really inspiring. They said he had no weaknesses, He never hits a bad ball, has great eyesight to see through everything, and often takes you down with one hit, he never hits a bad ball, but you never throw a good ball to him."

However, experienced old fans know that Ted Williams can actually be better. There are two reasons: one is that Williams's baseball career unfortunately ran into the bad era of human collective neurosis. In addition to the competition of baseball, he also had to fight the injustice of World War II and the Korean War , He ruined four peak seasons because of his service on the battlefield, otherwise his hit content would be more terrifying and unattainable, for example, 600 to 650 home runs probably would not be able to escape; the second is The so-called "dead ball period" before 1992 was an era when everyone just wanted to hit the base without swinging a big stick, so they produced a group of players with extremely high batting averages (Ty Cobb, Barefoot Joe, etc. ), if this period of "partial eclipse" is not included, then his various attack rankings will go even higher.

Ted Williams also has another "strength" that is almost unmatched, that is, he is very handsome, a rare handsome man. In my personal memory, there is no one in the history of major leagues. Players who have shown their faces a little can be compared. The thief who traded Ted Williams?No, this time the Boston Red Sox learned their lesson and dare not do it again. Williams played from 1939 to 1996, from the beginning of the Red Sox to the end of the Red Sox, but unfortunately it was too late. What really interests me about Ted Williams is not his great achievements and attractive appearance, but his personality traits-according to historical data, Williams is an extremely neurotic person, and his name , the chasing reports of media fans, and the heavy goals he set for himself (Williams himself said that the goals he gave himself were, "Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived"), he Therefore, he has been suffering from neurasthenia. This is completely contrary to my original perception of low-level playing. Since elementary school, my baseball coach and volleyball coach have repeatedly warned us to relax and be more nervous. Don't guess the next ball, it's better not to think about it, so imprinted, so I always feel incredible, how can a person with such nerves be so tense all the time, how can he deal with the ball that is changing, hitting point, and speed ?How can you make a correct response to the sudden flash of light that usually takes less than half a second?How could it be possible to become the world's number one striker? It was Mr. Liu Daren, a billiard player in the literary world, who opened up this knot in my heart, or to be more correct, gave me the clue to continue thinking. During the chat, I mentioned that because billiards is too fast and relies too much on immediate reaction, when mainland China selects potential children for training, under the same qualifications and physical conditions, they will give priority to those who are more neurotic. player. I then guessed that this is a matter of levels. Neurotic people are "forced" (forced by their own mental tendencies) to distinguish the subtler and more detailed levels of things at the same object and at the same time, so that they have the opportunity to To make a more subtle and detailed response, the scale of their mental ruler is divided into finer parts, and the magnification of their mental eyes is adjusted larger than that of ordinary people. People's five senses and mental perception ability, we have seen or heard of some people who can be called wizards and supernatural powers in different professional fields and life fields. For example, perfume masters can distinguish the mixed ingredients of various fragrances, and even almost Perfume worn by a lady who passed by an hour ago, whose scent molecules have been diluted in the air; for example, a first-class technician in a steel foundry can clearly see it in the white light of steel juice, which is pure white and dazzling to us. There are hundreds of different whites; Zhong Acheng, a famous novelist who was sent to Inner Mongolia during the "Cultural Revolution", told me that for the Mongolians who have raised horses for thousands of years, the color of horses is not our white, black and gray. The brown thorns are classified by color, and we see the same color. For the Mongolians, where horses are the supreme wealth and living resource, there may be more than a dozen subdivisions. Such subdivision is to reveal the subtler and richer levels of things. Some people are gifted and know it from birth; some people learn it because of work and life; And know it. Neurotic people know that they are troubled, and this trouble is also dangerous. In the simplest and most direct terms, neurotic people are the kind of strange people who are always worried about imminent danger and the imminent disaster. Fear of water, fear of the dark, fear of elevators, fear of airplanes, fear of cars parked on the side of the road that will suddenly start to hit you, fear of someone committing suicide on the top of a building and jumping off the building just to crush you passing by, fear of strange or sudden people and things, fear of sudden The phone rings (is there a phone that will ring in advance?), anything can be feared, and it is worth fearing. So exposed to endless and endless dangers, they have to look left and right from time to time, soaked in a high degree of vigilance, sharpen every nerve ending in themselves, and maintain a state of alert mobilization to receive the weak but affirmative surroundings. There are various danger messages.This is a kind of non-stop sharpness. Even when ordinary people are snoring and sleeping, neurotic people still cannot sleep like owls with wide-eyed eyes, or even if they are temporarily trapped in sleep, they often have to sleep. Struggling in nightmares in order to react the fastest and most frequently to the dangers that do not require deep sleep and come at any time-in the bright universe of the world, neurotic people, we paraphrase Benjamin's words, always live strangely. A certain precarious life. To use a nondescript analogy, neurotic people are very similar to today's TV sets that are designed for immediate display. Consuming energy is not environmentally friendly and unhealthy, and this is an unavoidable price. From here, we seem to have found a path back to the novel. The energy consumed excessively by neurotic people is their own, and they pay for it in the form of unhappiness and foreshadowing the future life. We should be grateful for pointing out dangers, layers of richness and possible ends to things, even though we often find them irritating and disturbing. We respect them, but are a little afraid of them.People in the world turn around when they hear this, like the east wind hitting a horse's ear-isn't such a typical relationship between the two parties exactly the emotion of ancient writers, including poets and novelists?And they often go beyond the eloquence of the present, pinning their confidantes in the future, even thousands of years later, are they just realizing with frustration that the information they perceive and reveal is too much for normal people at this moment? It is weak, at least it is not credible. The people of the future generation are actually not smarter and more sensitive, but the information that cannot be hidden will be strong in the time, become clear and the wavelength frequency is suitable for normal human ears, but this conversion process, It also usually means that we normal people have to pay varying degrees of suffering in exchange for the qualification to listen. This is what the Chinese idiom story of Qu Tu Yi Xin tells. The person who warned early on to bend the chimney and move the firewood is a neurotic person and a poet and novelist. We see the fire burning Normal people who just went to help. Therefore, although the novel has changed with the times and shrunk under the division of labor system of the capitalist society, as Lukacs resented, it can no longer look beyond the suffocating bureaucratic system and look at the wide and unobstructed sky. Writers no longer play the role of prophets and so on as in the past, but even so, good fiction today still contains prophetic elements-not the single, devouring, final judgment such as the explosion of a thermonuclear bomb in the Apocalypse or Marx. The big prophecy, but some kind of ubiquitous future growth and change that will naturally condense and take shape in your heart when you are aware of the emergence of things.And danger, isn't it just a certain passage, a certain demolition, and a certain chaos and loss of control that accompany the growth and change of things? The prophecies of novels are usually not knowable, but sensible. And precisely because the novel prophesies in such an obscure, fluid, non-predictive form that returns to things themselves, it is rather healthy and safe than the religious concept of Christianity. It breaks you, it doesn't ask you to become another person, it doesn't call for believers who confessed their sins in tears and realized overnight (do you believe that there are such dramatic things in life?), it just gives you, not takes go you. It is, however, the essential humility of fiction that, relatively speaking, it always appears too underpowered and drawn out to build explosive action on top of it. Fiction, therefore, is incompatible with religion. Religion is basically a well-intentioned relief system that makes people nervous, responsible for eliminating people's suspicions and ghosts, and obtaining peace and joy. Therefore, religions are generally born in troubled times, as the Bible says, and let those who work hard and bear heavy burdens It can be removed here.What kind of burden?It is mainly a kind of overwhelming mental load, which is layered by the sense of imminent danger, the sense of confusion and uncertainty of how to choose among the many layers of things, and the resulting sense of isolation. combined.This is indeed necessary, because there is always a limit to the endurance and extension of the human mind, and the nerves that are too subtle and delicate are always in danger of snapping off at any time. This is the most obvious and immediate threat to neurotics. The dismantling methods of good-hearted religions are basically not derived from them. They transform the unknown future into an unshakable certainty through the introduction of God, the introduction of an almighty wise man with great will, and thus construct the A set of clear and easy-to-use explanations for everything like a software package. As for the rich layers of things that are too complicated and contradictory to be closed, religion teaches us to eliminate them by avoiding the face. Simple and effective, people don’t have to suffer from their own nerves, but such novels will probably disappear. As we all know, the British Graham Green, who is known as the representative figure of religious novelists, does not come from religious devotion. On the contrary, it comes from questioning religion and leaving. However, religion that comes with good intentions (although in human history, such good intentions have often turned ugly, such as the medieval or post-Calvinist Protestants) is nothing. In fact, more often than not, the intention of the novel ends. Although they also imitate the religious method of "confirming the future, smoothing the present, and maintaining the existing order of everything", their concern is obviously not the intolerance and relief of the neurotic, but the uneasiness and relief of the overly sensitive. Hostility, fear of erosion and subversion of the established real order (power order, economic distribution order, and even moral order) that one's own ideology or direct interests depend on. In comparison, this is a relatively hateful thing in our normal world. A group of people. Because of this, the novel basically has to be in a fateful and tragic position for a long time, that is, the opposite side of power, the edge outside the mainstream ideology, and no vested power and interests will like them (for those with vested power and interests For example, indifference is already their greatest tolerance and civilized behavior), and even some petty citizens who don’t have much power and interest, and only worry about the threat of the established order and their own interests. For example, in today’s Taiwan, We can still see a bunch of absurd critics of novels who use the old Confucian dogma of "gentleness and honesty" or the new dogma of "identity with the current order", as well as those middle school Chinese teacher moral defenders who are furious and write newspapers. But it really doesn’t have to be like this. As we said earlier, novels can’t call for clear and immediate action, and they run counter to the essence of destructive force—it moves towards complexity rather than simplicity, doubt rather than certainty, and hesitation Instead of firmly believing that, like the second law of thermodynamics, it disperses energy on the entities and details of everything, instead of sacrificing everything and condensing energy to explode at once.It is also sad to say that the destructive power of novels to reality is at most only as good as the "gadfly" mentioned by Socrates in the past. We stare at the cracks of things again, let us wake up, let us reflect, and let us not become automatic machines and walking fossils under all the natural obsessions—of course, the Greeks decided to kill Socrates back then. I suggest that we appreciate them, after all, if someone is expending their own life energy, paying the price of unhappiness, and sharing the fruit with us generously, if saying thank you can close such a transaction, I can't think of it What could be more cost-effective in the world.