What Baseball Taught Me Analysis

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What Baseball Taught me by Barry Zito is a passage he wrote after he retired from the game of baseball. Barry Zito had a long and historic career of fifteen years in Major League Baseball. He reflects on the ups and downs of his career in the Players Tribune. He starts off the article with some powering words about the game of baseball. "Baseball is such a wonderfully unique game. It doesn’t require some extraordinary physical prowess or stature as much as it requires hard work. People of all shapes and sizes have been some of the greatest in our game." These quotes ring true to baseball players all around the world. Baseball is such a unique game in many ways. For example, the concept of the game is unique itself. A player is challenged to …show more content…
"My baseball career has been a mirror to my life off the field, full of euphoric highs and devastating lows. I’ve been at the top of a rotation and the 25th man on a roster. I’ve started Game 1 of a World Series in one year and I’ve been left off of a postseason roster in another." This is one of the major themes of baseball all over the world and also relates to life in general. You can be on top of the world one day and cruelly get kicked down to the lowest depths of the Earth the next. As most baseball people will tell you baseball is a game of failure. Even the great of the greatest succeed three out of ten times, which in any other sport is horrible. The game can leave you wondering why one even plays it in the worst of times and leave you invincible other days. What Zito described above about being the top pitcher one year and barely making the pitching staff the next thoroughly describes baseball as a whole. The game can truly chew one up and spit them out. The game doesn't care who you are or what you've done it will forever come down to which man has worked diligently and the hardest that’s the man that will win the battle. "I’ve been labeled as both drastically underpaid and severely overpaid. I’ve been praised as a savior and deemed a curse." I thought there was a lot of underlying meaning in this quote. This quote could be a reflection of all the fans and all the media in baseball. He might have taken a shot at the media and anyone who has ever talked bad or good about himself. This quote can really have a relation to life people are going to say some things one likes and one doesn't likes. I believe the point he was trying to get across here is there will be some nasty things said or some bright complements said about oneself, but in the end it's their choice to take it or leave it. One can let it ruin themselves or let it go in one ear and out the