What Is It About Felix?
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Load up on guns
Bring your friends
It’s fun to lose
And to pretend
She’s overboard
And self-assured
I know I know
A dirty word
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M-Pops axs,
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Doc, I would love to read your take on what specifically makes Felix such a rare and unique player/personality.
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As you know, we live to serve :- )
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=== Dirty Words, Dept. ===
Have you ever contemplated the success rates that the U.S. Army achieves with its boot camp training?
Don't think about it cynically. Think about it intelligently. I mean, supposing somebody gave you an 18-year-old punk foulup to rehab. What do you think you could accomplish in ten weeks? You got it. Nothing. Neither could I. And yet how often does the Army turn these kids into responsible adults? What is their percentage rate, and how long does it take them?
They're doing something right, kiddies. Being a U.S. Soldier still means something. The men and women who have completed boot camp have accomplished something that civilians have not, and they know it.
They spend the rest of their careers parlaying those first achievements into further achievements. Fortune 500 companies respect U.S. military service. It's no small number of women who are attracted to the man in uniform. They know certain things are included in the package when they go out with a Soldier.
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In boot camp, the U.S. Army instills seven core values. One of these is Loyalty. The Army defines it this way:
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Bear true faith and allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, the Army, your unit and other Soldiers. Bearing true faith and allegiance is a matter of believing in and devoting yourself to something or someone. A loyal Soldier is one who supports the leadership and stands up for fellow Soldiers. By wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army you are expressing your loyalty. And by doing your share, you show your loyalty to your unit.
If I were the Army, I'd have included the idea of "firm and consistent allegiance in adverse conditions," but okay.
The culture war in America, in the 21st century, rages over whether these virtues even exist, much less whether they should be ideals. Why a man would spend his time persuading his fellow men to be disloyal (or, a-loyal), we'll leave for another time. Suffice it to say that America no longer universally agrees that loyalty is important. What would have been a "given" fifty years ago is now debated, or even forgotten.
Chuck Straub put it this way:
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Honor and Loyalty, are these two virtues an anachronism of the past. Who in today’s world would put honor ahead of your personal comforts, your job, or your life?
Loyalty? Loyalties are being broken and changed all the time, throughout the world. Many of us make decisions in our lives which strain our loyalties and smear our own honor. To many, they don’t even give it a second thought. Do whatever is the easiest at the time. It suits your purposes just fine. Why worry about anyone else? Is there anyone left that keeps their loyalty through thick and thin?
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Obviously you can make an argument that no athlete owes his original club loyalty - or in fact anything at all. The club was acting exclusively in its self-interest when it prepared the athlete for stardom, right? (Wrong.)
You can make similar arguments that a Soldier owes his country nothing; the Army was acting exclusively in its self-interest when training, paying, and feeding the Soldier, right? (Wrong.)
You can make arguments that nobody owes anybody anything. People in fact do make these arguments. How many blogs are going to discuss "loyalty" with respect to Felix? It's a dirty word, seen as an unfair indictment of those who made different choices.
Hopefully we re-think the concept of Virtue when we have our first child.
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We grope around trying to figure out what it is that attracts us to Felix' personality. That's because, for civilians in America, the concept of Loyalty is all but forgotten.
Felix appreciates everything the Seattle Mariners have done for him since the age of 16. He doesn't sneer and wave it away as nothing more than enlightened self-interest. He takes into consideration the fact that they have provided him a warm, nurturing home, and he feels obligation for past loyalty they have extended to him.
Loyalty as an Ideal is fading. Here we see a sudden and vivid example of it burst into our midst, and we don't quite know what it is that warms our hearts so much, but the sportswriters stand and applaud anyway.
Believe me, I can remember in the 1970's when many writers questioned the character of a player who would leave his original team in free agency. And we're talking about sportswriters here, most of whom are card-carrying revolutionaries in the culture war.
It's perhaps going too far to question ARod's character for blowing off the Mariners the way that he did. Or perhaps not. Our point is a different one - that Loyalty is Good.
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Loyalty is a concept that carries great beauty. Hachiko the Akita dog was in the habit of waiting for his owner at the train station each day. One day the dog's owner died of a brain hemorrhage and didn't show up. Guess how long the dog kept returning each day to greet his owner? Nine years.
That story touches nothing within you? Virtue is an invented concept? Where does the feeling come from? The right side of the brain, the side without words, was the one that told you Hachiko was a beautiful animal. Your 3rd-grade teacher did not impose cultural bias on that side of your brain. Everybody, on every continent, in every century, reacts to Hachiko the same way. (He wound up with a crowd of fans on the train platform.)
That sign outside Safeco, Edgar Martinez Way, that is an object of beauty. Sometimes we might forget what's beautiful about it ... Loyalty can be, like Edmond said in Narnia, "as if a dream within a dream," a childhood memory of a feeling that we can't quite remember the source of.
Do you think that in 2029, Felix' bronze statue will be cast with him doing his Perfect Game dance?
Cheers,
Jeff