Streak the Truth

Apologies for the hiatus on my weekly newsletter. Over the past months, I was shuffling around work responsibilities and moving into a new apartment. My focus on writing my next essay about sports fandom was depleted.

Today’s article will be a two-part essay. The first part is about our fascination with dominant streaks in sports. The second part arriving next Friday August 30th is about my personal and professional association with a certain players’ streak from nearly 20 years ago.

Sports fans, listen up.

It’s our responsibility to assign meaning to the spectacle of sports. If sports are nothing more than entertainment, a vehicle for water cooler small talk, or an excuse to gamble, then we’re missing out on a whole lot more. Those are the visible parts of the iceberg, where under the surface lie deeper significance for the athletes, teams, and games we watch.

For every prosperous career, team dynasty, or instant classic game, we can extract lessons - or as I like to call them, mirrors - to apply to our pedestrian lives. Otherwise, nothing in the world of sports has to mean anything. 

I gain my spark, my joie de vivre, from discovering these greater lessons. I care as much about why we like sports as why we are like sports, while making Feuerbachian projections onto athletes, applying their statistical and career narrative to my non-sports life. 

The Hall of Famers' careers teach me about maximizing potential with consistency and longevity; The veteran who has enhanced his statistics from his first team to his second team teaches me about the importance of environment to success; The player who moves from starter to reliever teaches me about adaptability. 

These athletes - along with their lessons - enter and exit my life, as ephemeral as friends I made in my teens and 20s. Like friends, these athletes are in our lives for a purpose, or as the chuegy-like phrase goes “for a reason, season, or lifetime.” 

But sometimes the lesson gained from the athlete will come later in life,  years after his career ends and yours begins.

You may be driving your car, having a friendly exchange, moving into your new apartment, where in one moment you think, “Oh, this reminds me of him.”

Today, I’m thinking of MLB journeyman Kevin Mench. 

Kevin Who? 

I wouldn’t blame the casual fan, let alone a baseball die-hard if they haven’t heard of Kevin Mench. 

The goy with a Yiddish sounding name played in the majors from 2002-2010, retiring without much more than a whimper.

Yet once in a while I still think about his career, one capped off by a single historic week.  

In April 2006, the fifth-year Mench was a starting outfielder for the Texas Rangers when he felt some pain. He had badly sprained his toe and thus removed himself from the lineup for five games. During this recovery, he visited a podiatrist who recommended Mench change his size 12 shoes - a size he had worn his entire big league career - into a 12.5. 

Mench’s ensuing return to the lineup catapulted his Cinderella story…. not only because his shoe fit! 

His newfound comfort propelled him into a slugging juggernaut. After sporting zero home runs and RBI in his first 11 games, he returned to the lineup proceeding to homer and drove in at least two RBI in each of his next seven.

Within one week, Mench was in the MLB record books. His seven game home run streak was a record for a right hand batter and his multiple-RBI streak was a record for the American League. 

Mench’s magical run captivated baseball fans and media, all trying to make sense of his torrid stretch. A week ago, this outfielder had been anonymous but now he’s ESPN’s top headline. 

Mench had achieved an apex of consistency excellence that few had matched. The seven consecutive games with a homer was one shy of the record eight straight set by 50s journeyman Dale Long, Yankee icon Don Mattingly, and baseball icon Ken Griffey Jr. His seven straight games were tied with two of the game’s great power bats - Barry Bonds and Jim Thome. 

But as quickly as this streak ascended Mench’s lore, it descended his career. 

After his streak netted him seven homers in April, he would only hit five in the next three months before being traded to the Brewers. He hit just nine homers in 200+ remaining games of his career, one that ricocheted around the majors plus an interspersed season in Japan. 

Only four years after his streak, Mench retired. 

Let’s return to the aforementioned group of baseball elite that Kevin Mench joined. 

Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey, Jim Thome, Don Mattingly.

If you watched these players growing up or have a general idea of their overarching body of work, their home run streak probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. Nor is it the second, third, fourth, etc.

You think of awards like gold gloves and MVPs. You think of their monster individual seasons or brilliant multi-decade careers. You think Hall of Fame. 

If you think of these players in terms of just home runs, you think of an overall moniker of “home run hitter”. After all, three of them are top ten in career home runs, and Mr. Bonds holds the all-time record.

In other words, their home run streaks of seven and eight games were mere footnotes on their robust resume, almost a fleeting byproduct of their greatness. 

For Mench, however, the streak was his resume and appeared to be a byproduct of, well, randomness. 

Records in sports are revered because they exemplify highest achievement at the highest level. They can lead to analysis of which noble virtues and variables these record-holding athletes must possess. Was the accomplishment founded on the rote cliches for hard work - grit, discipline, and dedication to one’s craft? Or is there something else working behind the scenes? 

When some achievement of great magnitude occurs, we may diagnose it as a piece of artwork derived from the artist. The piece may be representative of the artist's greater portfolio - their theme, stance, or viewpoint they’re trying to convey or it can be an outlier, perhaps discarded as nonrepresentative of the artist’s portfolio. 

Just as with the ballplayer, the foundation of the achievement may be judged as earned or a product of fortunate happenstance. 

I’ve decided to bifurcate the two types of achievements as merit and fluke. Merit pertains to achievements founded on skillsets and the culmination of burgeoning potential. Fluke refers to achievements representative of other factors outside the ballplayers’ agency.

We’ll put the merit vs fluke pedagogy aside for now, because I want to talk about the achievement at hand. The reason I’m talking about Kevin Mench isn’t because he had any ol’ hot streak; He achieved the creme de la creme of statistical achievements - the streak. 

Sports fans are fascinated by streaks - win streaks, hit streaks, scoring streaks, etc. 

Ever since Joe Dimaggio’s hit streak in 1941, fans have been captivated with the concept of the streak. Terms like consecutive, back-to-back, and straight have become omnipresent into the sports lexicon. They appear in games’ broadcast graphics, fantasy draft cheat-sheets, and Cooperstown plaques.

Sometimes streaks produce fallacious thinking towards future outcomes, like when fans believe in the “hot hand” in basketball or how a batter is “due”.

Monitoring streaks is a simple way to evaluate greatness in sports, but the streak’s backbone of consistency also has importance in evolutionary and modern psychology. 

In order for our homo-sapien ancestors to survive, they needed to trust each other. The trust came through familiarity, knowing the different appearances, mannerisms, and language between your tribesman and your enemies. Noting distinct features created a sense of identities of each group and in order for that identity, to provide a calmness and security, the identity had to be one of consistency. 

While we’ve evolved socially, the evolutionary part of our brain still desires consistency. In visual art and other interpretations of beauty, we’re drawn to pattern recognition - appreciating symmetrical faces, bodies, and structures. In music, we enjoy repeatable melodies and songs with words that rhyme. 

Besides auditory and visual consistency putting us at ease, the interpersonal aspect of consistency creates societal order. Scripts and schemas provide societally accepted guidelines on how to initiate and behave in certain situations, so that common interactions don’t evoke tense or nuisant behavior (Larry David notwithstanding).  

Despite chaos within sports competition and our mirth towards the occasional underdog story or upset, we more so appreciate consistency. We want to know which athletes we can rely on, who’s worth re-signing or releasing, which teams should contend or rebuild. The worst thing you can be in sports is unpredictable. 

All this psychological undertone leads back to my fascination with Kevin Mench and his streak.

I look at the gestalt of his career - how seven out of his eighty-nine homers occurred within one week - and question whether celebrating records should be reserved solely for the merits or if we can also praise the flukes. 

Perhaps it’s okay for any platoon player to exemplify what David Bowie once sang.

“We can be heroes just for one day.”

In Kevin Mench’s case…just for seven.

Part II Next Week