athletes aging before our eyes

It’s somewhat difficult to gain a good perspective on the whole human life cycle, since we ourselves are implicated in it. Schopenhauer advises us to make sure to live to at least 60, an age when all masks have long since fallen away and you can see who you’ve been dealing with all this time– you can fake a life through age 40 and possibly even through 50, but not through age 60. So goes Schopenhauer’s idea. But this implies that we’re just as old as those we’re observing– as for those who are now around 60, I wasn’t there to see all their earlier masks, so it’s hard to learn much in that respect. And by the time I reach 60 myself, my early memories of my peer group will be pretty hazy anyway, so once again it becomes difficult to command a panoramic view of the entire life cycle.

The main exception is when someone we know dies young. Last fall, someone I had known well since infancy died tragically of a drug overdose at age 32. That was one of the rare cases where I was able to observe the course of an entire life, though at the prohibitive price of an early end for him.

But in sports, since “lifetimes” are so compressed, it’s more feasible to observe the entire cycle, even if it’s a rather long one by normal standards. Such is the case with TIM WAKEFIELD, the ancient knuckleball pitcher who retired yesterday from the Boston Red Sox.

Ancient? He’s only two years older than I am, but 45 is extremely old for a baseball player. I remember his debut for Pittsburgh in 1992, his total collapse with the same team in 1993, and his promising return with Boston two years later. Then I lost track of him a bit, but all that time he was piling up near-historic career numbers on the Boston team leaders chart.

Baseball fans will miss Wakefield, though he was never a superstar– just above average and exceptionally durable.