We want our favorites to be great out there, and when that stops we feel betrayed a little. They have not only failed, but failed us. Maybe this is the real dividing line between pros and bystanders, between the players and the fans. All players know that at any moment things can go horribly wrong for them in their line of work — they’ll stop hitting, or, if they’re pitchers, suddenly find that for some reason they can no longer fling the ball through the invisible sliver of air where it will do its best work for them — and they will have to live with that diminishment, that failure, for a time and even for good. It’s part of the game. They are prepared to lose out there in plain sight, while the rest of us do it in private and then pretend it hasn’t happened.
Roger Angell, in an afterword to an essay called “Quis,” about Royals closer Dan Quisenberry. It was published in the New Yorker in September of 1985, as the Royals were closing in on their first and only World Series championship. He added the afterword for a collection called Season Ticket, published in 1988, after Quisenberry had been released from the Royals.
