This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's June 26 Béisbol Experience Issue. Subscribe today!
Baseball. Man, such a brutal game. Such a mean game. Sadistic, really, the way it runs itself up under your skin and makes you miserable. Hang around a baseball clubhouse and you'll start to wonder why anyone plays the damned thing. Sometimes it seems everybody in the game wakes up each morning trying to decide whether to be angry or bitter. Fittingly, the ballplayer's favorite word is grind, as if coursing through 162 games is the sporting equivalent of an 18th-century polar expedition.