By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2017/02/10/prince-fielder-from-the-fire-to-the-kitchen/Those who were there swear even now that Sandy Koufax was close to tears when he announced his retirement at 30 in November
1966. Prince Fielder, forced to retirement fifty years later at 32 (yes, that was Koufax’s uniform number) because of two spinal
fusions in his neck,
was in tears when he announced it.
That was six months ago. This is now. Fielder shuns any comparison to Koufax, but he does have one thing in common with the Hall
of Fame lefthander. After coming to terms with the end of one life in which he shone when healthy, Fielder seems to believe not that
there are no second acts but that a man is a fool who isn’t determined to have one.
“To me it’s kind of an awesome movie,” Fielder told ESPN’s Jerry Crasnick this week. “It’s kind of glorious to say, ‘Oh man, this guy
had his career cut short.’ I’m not calling myself Sandy Koufax by any means. I’m not in that caliber at all, but sometimes it has to end
different. You don’t need to have a perfect ending to be happy. Write that down.”
Koufax didn’t have quite the perfect ending to his career, either, despite his off-the-universe regular season. Forced to pitch the season-
ending 1966 pennant winner on two days’ rest, after Don Drysdale faltered in a doubleheader opener, Koufax had to be saved for Game
Two of the World Series, where three Willie Davis errors undid the shutout he was working and threw the Dodgers toward a loss and a
sweep.
A player who once admitted he’d rather win than pad his statistics, Fielder didn’t get a final chance at postseason play. But like Koufax
in the years following his departure from the mound (and from NBC, where he worked uncomfortably on the network’s old
Game of the
Week broadcasts for a few years), Fielder seems to be developing a kind of renaissance personality.
He is about to co-host
Fielder’s Choice, a gourmet cooking television show, with his wife. He doesn’t say whether he himself will wield
knives and pans (Koufax, according to a few chroniclers, has made himself into a gourmet cook, among other things), but he admits to
a passion for food programs deep enough to take a dip himself.
“A friend of mine asked me a question at the end of 2015,” Fielder told Crasnick. “We were going over my finances and setting things
up for the future when she said, ‘What do you want to do when you retire?’ I always wanted to do a food show. I thought it might be a
cool thing to do when I retired a few years later. Then retirement came slightly prematurely.”
Fielder plans for
Fielder’s Choice to premiere next month, streaming on Netflix and Hulu. He cops only to such coming guests as Yankee
pitcher CC Sabathia, actor Chazz Palminteri, singer Jose Feliciano, and rapper Xzibit.
The former first baseman whose calling card was home runs that threatened the trajectory of orbiting satellites says he has no particular
favourite food show and often used what he saw to decide his and his family’s dining choices during his playing days.
“When I was playing, my wife and kids would go on the road with me, and we would go to different lunch spots that we saw on
Diners,
Drive-Ins and Dives,” says Fielder. “She would look something up on the internet and find the best restaurants and these little sandwich
and taco spots, and we would go there.”
He still loves baseball but admits that, from the moment he walked away following the retirement announcement that had to come too
soon, he was almost entirely on his own when coming through the withdrawal players from scrubs to greats must endure when they shed
the uniform for the final time.
“Everybody else was busy playing, so I didn’t have many people to talk to like that,” Fielder says. “My main goal now is waking up healthy
every day and going on with life. There are maybe one or two hours a day when I think I can play, but I get over that real quick once I
realize the risk and my wife tells me, ‘Just take a seat’.”
Fielder and his family traveled to southeast Asia for three weeks over the winter holidays. He says he can stay in shape with vigorous enough
workouts, but that’s a world away from playing higher impact sports even for recreation. ”I definitely don’t want to run any 5K races anytime
soon,” he says. “I stick to safe, controlled movement. If it’s not safe, I just won’t do it. I have nothing left to prove. I’ve already done enough
to my neck.”
Before his neck issues, the six-time All-Star was a literal horse, playing all 162 games of a season four times in his career and missing only
thirteen games in eight seasons. He thinks that contributed to the early end of his career, and some think his bulky upper body may have
had something to contribute, too. But he knows now how foolish it was not to want the periodic day off, or to fight against the ones he did get.
Even if he led his league in win probability added three times and ended his career in the top 100 there.
“I never asked for any of the days off in my career. I fought every one of them. I guess you need days off, but I just didn’t want them. A lot
of people probably say I’m stupid, and they’re probably right, because there are people who take days off who are still in the league, and
I’m not. But it’s easier for me to accept that I can’t play anymore because I literally gave it all I got. That allows me to be a little bit more at
peace.”
Fielder is far more open now than he was during his playing career. His apparent public stoicism sometimes left him a reputation for
indifference, especially after bad moments in big games (
Most notoriously, in the 2013 American League Championship Series.) But he was
also known inside his clubhouses as a terrific teammate who wasn’t afraid or unwilling to mentor younger players. He loved the game without
being a public blather box.
When Rangers manager asked Fielder to become a full-time designated hitter, allowing Mitch Moreland to play first base, Fielder didn’t
flinch. “Mitch is a better first baseman than me,” he said soberly. “The team is better if he’s at first.” Fielder had previously joined Adrian
Beltre in policing the Rangers clubhouse, giving Banister and his predecessors Ron Washington and Tim Bogar each one less headache.
He was also known for his longtime estrangement from his father, Cecil (the estrangement is said to have ended a short time back; both
men retired with the same number of major league home runs: 319), and doing everything he could think of to make sure his own sons
didn’t experience anything close to it. As Fielder got when his father played, he made sure his sons got plenty of clubhouse time with him
and credited them for helping ease the pain of premature retirement.
Fielder also anticipates returning to the Rangers in one or another mentoring capacity, perhaps working with their minor league players.
But that can wait. Right now, his priorities are his family, his health, and his new culinary venture. While he misses the actual play of the
game and the prep to play, he admits he doesn’t miss the traveling or the crowds.
His neck will probably keep him out of the Hall of Fame. (He missed most of his first Texas season after having to undergo the first fusion
surgery.) He meets 27 of the Bill James Hall of Fame standards and scores 85 on the James Hall of Fame monitor. Even three more healthy,
unobstructed seasons would have put him across the line, even if they wouldn’t have been quite the kind of seasons he hung up in
Milwaukee and Detroit.
Right now it’s the least of Fielder’s burdens. He knows the kind of player he was, and he hopes people remember, too. ”I was a guy who
came to work every day,” he says, matter of factly. I was there.
“When my manager got to the field at 12, I felt like there was no reason for him to ever wonder if I was playing,” he continues. “For me,
that’s a big deal. I teach that to my kids. I’ve always said, ‘You make a lot of money in major league baseball, and it’s all guaranteed, so
what do you have to lose by going all out?’”
Fielder had a career to lose too soon, and he lost it. “But that’s why they do it — so you can give all you’ve got.” He’ll wait until his post-
playing life continues and swells before he lets himself philosophise on whether it was really worth it, to his team or himself.
All he’d like now is to show what more he’s got, and might yet get, away from the field, away from the clubhouse, away from the road,
and with the family he once had to struggle to keep together. It almost seems easier than launching a baseball into orbit. But it may
not be quite as simple as deciding whether it should be garlic powder or oregano for the kind of seasoning he loves most these days.
Fielder’s known worse struggles than those in the kitchen, or the television studio, or the withdrawal from baseball’s bright heat. Few
greats retire so young, fewer do it well enough. So far, it looks like his chances of doing it well are bigger than any intercontinental
ballistic home run he ever hit.
