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If you’ve followed sports for more than a few years, you’ve already seen your share of graceless, lunatic or simply depressing final statements. Sometimes athletes quit because their bodies say it’s over; sometimes teams make fateful decisions that result in botched early retirements or waiver-wire announcements or, God forbid, “Thanks for everything” tweets from the team account. Sometimes a player’s skills hit a banana peel. Sometimes guys stay too long. Sometimes they need the money and play past their expiration date. It all goes south in a damn hurry, and that’s under the best of circumstances.
Buster Posey batted .304 this season and bagged it. He had an OPS of .889, which is insane for a catcher and is bettered by only one other of his 12 seasons in baseball, his Most Valuable Player campaign of 2012. It wasn’t enough to draw him back for one more go.
He was under a team option with the San Francisco Giants for 2022 at a price of $22 million. The Giants may have wanted to talk with Posey about that price, but not about wanting him back. That was a given. Being wanted, it seems, was also not enough for Posey.
So what do we get? One of the best catchers in the game just up and quits after one of the best seasons of his life, and what do we get?
We get an exit.
Listen, that’s more than it sounds.
I’ve been at this long enough to have witnessed what feels like a million ghoulish ends to sporting careers. For the most part — and I realize you already know this — we don’t get to write our final chapters. Final sentences, maybe; but whole chapters? Nope. And this principle is applied with force times 10 in the world of athletics, a fun, cool, cut-throat, bloodthirsty, fame-making, penny-pinching contradiction of words, deeds, evaluations and remembrances.
Choosing a career in sports means choosing a short career. It means devoting your time and your intense, unswerving effort into something that may or may not pay off big, but almost certainly will be over way too soon. Buster Posey broke into baseball about two minutes ago, but that’s life. He’s 34 years old, a catcher, and it seems like it has simply been enough for him, and the people who’ve loved watching him play will just have to pound sand. Sometimes even the top players pick up their tools and go home.
Posey dropped huge hints; no one who was paying attention can really act surprised. Last year, the pandemic year, he made the choice not to play. So did others, but Posey was 33 at the time, and that’s pretty late in one’s career as a primary catcher to be standing down. But Posey did so with no apparent hesitation. Not only that, but when he returned this year, he spoke and acted like a guy who had genuinely enjoyed some time away. He seemed refreshed, but also — and I’m speculating here — a little more broad-minded.
That’s no mean feat. Athletes spend their professional lives in tunnels; they see only what’s directly ahead for them, neither left nor right, just onward. This continues for years and years. We tend to celebrate pro sports figures who we think “get it,” which is just code for saying that they sound pretty normal and well-adjusted for people who do all their work in front of cameras and fans. It isn’t many.
For a long time, Posey didn’t get it. Last year, he did. This year, he demurred when asked about his long future, and when the Giants beat the Dodgers in Game 162 of the regular season last month to clinch the N.L. West, Posey spent a long time — a long time — taking in the scene at Oracle Park when the game ended. He sure had that faraway look.
Is he a Hall of Famer? I think so, although that’s not really the point. Posey went .302/.372/.460 over 12 seasons, with 1,500 hits. He was a Rookie of the Year and an MVP. He won three World Series rings. He was a seven-time All Star and a four-time Silver Slugger. He won a Gold Glove at catcher. Hardware, he’s got. He also has four kids, a surgically rebuilt ankle and leg, plenty of money, and enough sense of self not to fret too much over whether his shortage of “counting stats” will ultimately work against him with HOF voters.
As of today, Posey has something else, too: An exit from a sport he loves that he was able to craft himself. Considering the vast wasteland of botched career ends by his own peers, that puts Posey pretty far out in front.
Nice job!