Myles Cullen was what some folks would’ve called an absolute dude; he’d worked harder on the diamond than most people dreamed. He scrapped and clawed, parlayed every ounce of athleticism he possessed to wrangle fifteen seasons in professional baseball. He was easy, focused, and switchblade-sharp. Even at age fourteen, I recognized that when Myles spoke about baseball—and especially when he talked about hitting—every word was both precious and valuable.
When I first met Myles, I was just barely getting started: naive and optimistic to a fault. I wanted like hell to be a ball player, to grind until I either made something of myself or spent all my chances.
***
I played for Myles for two years, then he left to coach hitting at Delmarva, a single-A affiliate in the Baltimore farm system. Those two years with Myles—the way he coached, carried himself, and went about things—sparked a change in me. Myles lit a fire, and I went from a talented kid who thought he wanted to play baseball at a high level to a kid with talent who knew what it took to play baseball at a high level. Of course, there’s a big difference between knowing and doing, but by the time I turned sixteen, I’d put myself in a position to possibly be what I said I wanted to be. I still had a bunch of things learn and a whole hell of a lot to do, but I was poised and hungry, and pro ball was well within my grasp.
***
“Time,” Myles told me as I finished a February hitting session, “will tell.”
I squinted at him through the cage netting—a sheet of mesh that hung from thick chains anchored to the rafters. “It’ll tell,” he continued, “if you’ve got it, if you’re gonna get it, or if you’re just gonna get chewed up. Plain and simple.”
Myles Cullen didn’t pull punches, and his honesty was something I tried to emulate. His comments didn’t always draw blood, but they cut through comfort and entitlement and challenged me and my teammates to develop a sense of accountability; we had to learn to accept a certain amount of discomfort if we wanted to develop. Myles’ intention, I eventually realized, was to push us to tune our mental game as much as—if not more than—our physical.
“Ultimately,” he said, “it’s what separates. Talent, movements, power, speed—all that stuff—are tools, but the mental aspect is what drives everything. Plus,” he added, “it’s what keeps you connected—dialed and in-tune—when games get long and the season just starts to beat on you. You gotta train the mental aspect with more intensity than the physical. Gotta be absolutely deliberate,” he continued. “People too often forget that, but lucky for you fellas,” he smiled, “I haven’t.”
Myles wanted us sharp; he urged us to be a dagger in the side of contentment.
***
“This game is a goddamned jackhammer,” he said one afternoon as he stood astride a short, wooden bench and stretched his hamstrings. A wry smile bloomed then thinned across the lower part of his face. “It’ll break you to pieces if you let it.”
I swore I’d never let baseball break me, but I had no idea.
“It’ll just chip away,” Myles continued that afternoon in the clubhouse. “Hammers hardest when you ain’t ready,” he said. “I mean, you go from nothing, season just starting, all full of hope and possibility.” His eyes roamed the room. “Maybe you got goals: hit .300—.330 even—knock a bunch of dingers.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Maybe,” he added, “you’re focused on ABs or wins—strikeouts or whatever. All that hope and possibility right at the beginning—it’s intoxicating.” He smiled. “Then,” he said, his words suddenly falling slower, steadier, “it hits you. All the day-in, day-out, and you’re left with exactly what you really are.” Myles paused and an uncomfortable silence fell upon the room, settled on our too-weak shoulders. “You either accept it,” he continued, “and get pounded or you go and make yourself better.” He shook his head. "Of course,” he added, “maybe you still get pounded.” He took off his hat and ran his fingers through a mop of salt-and-pepper hair. “Baseball’s a goddamned jackhammer.”
***
Later that evening, I sat with my family, crowded around the dinner table, and flexed what I’d heard but didn’t actually know much about.
“24 games,” I said. My confidence brimmed. “24 games,” I repeated, “over the first month of the season—30 days, 24 games. Just a jackhammer, day-in, day-out,” I riffed.
My dad scoffed as he shifted a small pile of cabbage to the side of his plate. It wasn’t quite disdain he projected; it was something else.
“Day-in, day-out, huh.” The lack of inflection betrayed the fact that his remark was very definitely not a question. “You’ve got no idea what that even means, sport.“ He chewed as he spoke. “And a jackhammer?” he chuckled. “Hell, son. You absolutely don’t know how great you’ve got it.”
I’m sure he didn’t mean to be so demeaning or absolutely dismissive; there had to have been a lesson for me that simply got lodged between his teeth. But whatever it was that got lodged or maybe even swallowed suddenly changed into a story about something that happened when he was young. I wondered, as his story grew longer than it should’ve, if I’d ever gather any momentum of my own. If I’d managed some then, it disappeared there in the kitchen, lost to the food and the oil-stained frying pans, the flat-tire patter of my dad’s voice: thump, thump, thwack.
***
Of course, Myles Cullen knew about momentum. During his fifteen years in pro ball, he worked his away across six different organizations. Momentum was a necessity, and Myles knew that sometimes, if a person wanted momentum, they had to create their own. Despite all that, Myles Cullen only played ten games in the big leagues—ten games spread across four different seasons (mostly in September when the playoff races had more-or-less been fully decided).
For Myles, though, the seemingly infinitesimal ratio of big league games played to time and energy invested across those fifteen professional seasons—as well as all the falls and winters—didn’t matter one bit. For as long as he could remember, his goal was to compete at the highest possible level. Those games only served to harden Myles’ resolve; they proved he was correct, that he was, in fact, a big league player, that the absolute highest level of play was not only within his reach, but had been attained, and could be again and again and again.
***
One night, after the clock had turned to morning, I slipped out of my twin bed, crept over to my desk, flipped on the lamp, and worked out Myles’ math on the back pages of my advanced algebra notebook.
15 seasons, I wrote, averaging 150 games per season, meant 2250 games in the minors, at some level or another. I whittled 125 off that total trying my best to account for the one season he spent in Rookie ball (with a maximum of 134 games) and the two seasons he played single-A, short-season. I added a few games back to account for his move to AA during his summer with Charlotte.
2125 games, I wrote.
I paused and considered the estimate, then factored out the time. 3 hours per game, I averaged, = 6375 hours over 15 seasons.
I gazed at the page. 10 games, I wrote, again documenting the number of games Myles Cullen played in the Bigs. Based on the average two-and-a-half hour length of an MLB game in the 1970s and 80s, I wrote, 2.5 x 10, then quickly completed the easy math: 25. I paused. 25 hours of big league baseball—a tiny fraction of Myles’ overall baseball time.
I couldn’t have possibly included practices, hitting and fielding sessions, off-season fall and winter work—calculations like those were absolutely immeasurable.
25 / 6375, I scratched. The sharp pencil tip moved slower, even more deliberately as it crafted those seven characters. I stared at the equation and contemplated the tiny quotient, the dividend-divisor ratio so very askew. In the top, middle desk drawer I found my calculator and angled it toward the lamp as I keyed 25 / 6375.
I squinted at the screen: .00392157.
I closed my notebook, clicked off the lamp, and slid back between the sheets. Four-tenths of a percent, I thought, as I closed my eyes, is far, far greater than nothing.