on heroes and villains
Jimmy Piersall's infamous career
If you went to the Korner Store deli in Wheaton, IL in the early ‘90s, chances are the same man served your sandwich every day. He’d tell you about the characters that had swung by for a minute too long, the rest of his day. Ask you about yours. Talk about the Cubs bench, why the bats aren’t moving like they used to.
He’d played for them way back when, he said. Back in younger, spry days. How’d you end up here?
You ever see my face on a baseball card?
What Jimmy Piersall, the all-illusive cook, won’t tell you is that he signed his first professional contract at 18, making his debut just two years later. That two years after that, he had become the team’s starting center fielder and set the Red Sox club record for hits in a nine-inning game (six!).
And that by the time he was twenty-three years old, he was in a mental hospital.
This, by all metrics of American stigmatism, is where the story is supposed to end. This is where the hero falls and is doomed to spend the rest of his life in darkness, remembered as nothing more than a has-been or wasted talent.
In 1952, America did not have a language for what was happening to Jimmy Piersall. Baseball, in all of its supposed complexities, was not a game of vocabulary. It was a game of bodily injuries, of speed, of skill, of the innate human skill to put the ball in play. The mind was never in play. The mind was supposed to stay out of the way and let the body do what bodies do.
There is not much more to say about Piersall’s story during this time of his life. We know that Danvers, Massachusetts was his home. We know that bipolar disorder was the classification given to his thoughts, his actions. We know that he was placed in a straightjacket and parts of his memory were erased.
This is the part of the story that gets condensed into one paragraph. The part deemed too uncomfortable for the mythology, the precursor for what is to come. It’s the often-written rule of American heroism: you can break, but only if you come back stronger.
Jimmy Piersall was yet another entry into the book of American mythology. In 1955, he published an op-ed with sportswriter Al Hirshberg titled “They Called Me Crazy–And I Was.” Later that year, the pair published "Fear Strikes Out," an even more personal account of his struggles. And two years later, Anthony Perkins would play him in his very own film adaptation.
The line between spectacle and suffering, between patient and celebrity had been blurred on his own fruition. We stand in the bleachers watching lives unfold like innings, cheering the dramatic plays, leaving during the quiet stretches. How quickly we forget that beneath every uniform is a body trying to make it home.
There is no sense of “bad” that people are uncomfortable with. It is the same reason why evil is considered such a redeemable quality. Once people become comfortable with something taboo enough to be considered “bad”, it is no longer taboo. It is no longer “bad” if and only if they can understand its motivations.
It is the reason why almost 30 years after Barry Bonds set the homerun record, baseball fans and non-fans alike still sympathize with his steroid usage. It was common for his time, they will say, there were others using as well. Not one analyst will bring up the greatest-of-all-time discussion without mentioning Barry Bonds–despite being recognized internationally as someone who very openly broke the rules of the game. What was once scandalous becomes, with time and understanding, merely complicated.
There is no better way to describe it than a national disillusionment of sorts. For heroes we can celebrate without qualification. For villains we can condemn without empathy. For stories with clear beginnings, middles, and ends, rather than the ongoing, unresolved nature of actual human experience.
After his playing days ended, Piersall moved to the broadcast booth. First with the Rangers, then alongside the iconic Harry Caray with the White Sox. The very qualities that had once marked him as unstable—his impulsivity, his candor, his refusal to filter—were so swiftly rebranded as refreshing honesty, as color commentary. The same behavior that had been deemed symptomatic was now celebrated as personality.
The world never quite understood that Piersall’s greatest achievement was never athletic at all. It was surviving in a world that had no language for what he was experiencing, that preferred silence to truth, that wanted its heroes simple and its villains simpler still.
In fact, as Jimmy said, it was a blessing to have such an ending, “the best break [he] ever got was getting fired by the White Sox back in 1983.”
Fear Strikes Out describes Jimmy in three declarative statements:
“Jimmy, who fell in love with the same all-consuming energy that he lived.”
“Jimmy, who faced the teenage problem of a boy whose father drove him to the edge of desperation.”
“Jimmy, who balanced on the ragged edge of rage and violence, twisted and trapped by a world he never made.”
How easy it is to reduce a life to poetry. To capture a human being in amber phrases that sound profound but miss the breathing, bleeding reality.
It is so easy, in fact, that we just fell victim a few pages ago. Jimmy who made sandwiches. Jimmy who remembered to call on birthdays. Jimmy who cried at unexpected moments for reasons he couldn't articulate. Jimmy who fought his teammates. Jimmy who took his medication every morning for fifty years.
This is what gets lost in our desire for memorable phrases, for stories that read nice. The messy humanity. The contradictions. The fact that we are all, at different moments, heroes and villains in our own narratives. We will never meet professional baseball players in our lives, and some of us have never even played the game. It is both heroic and villainous that we have made a spectacle of them. We are both the heroes and the villains of their stories.
As I said earlier, it’s not easy to watch something die. The stadiums where Piersall played have been replaced with palaces of gambling. The lithium he took has been supplanted by newer medications with different mechanisms. The language around mental illness has evolved from "nervous breakdown" to something more representative.
Jimmy Piersall did not die a comfortable death. His death was not celebrated as much as a stigma breakthrough as much as a stigma validator – he was the MLB’s crazy guy that became famous through Hollywood success.
Jimmy Piersall did not die a comfortable death. He died consumed.
In 1963, just eight years after his return to major league baseball, he hit his 100th career homerun. He dropped his bat, looked towards the dugout, and slowly, definitively started to run the bases backwards, trying to balance himself while wondering if this time maybe – just maybe – someone would see him.
