Meeting great expectations a constant struggle for Rasmus
Posted: Tue Mar 19, 2013 1:53 am
To the extent that his scraggy long hair, loping stride and placid expression give fans the impression that he doesn’t care, they camouflage a tormented individual.
Colby Rasmus ought to be having the time of his life as a 26-year-old centre fielder for a Major League Baseball team, pulling down $4.68-million (U.S.) in salary, stationed securely on a roster with bountiful support on the field, in the batting order and in the front office, too.
No one in the Toronto Blue Jays administration is demanding superstar production from him, yet he carries the weight of surreal expectation as though a sack of corn is strapped permanently to his back. Staring into his locker, he portrays a person in need of sweet relief, a man besieged by the doomsayer notion that his best can never be good enough. Not for his father, not for the media, not for the people back home, not for the scouts, not for his teammates and coaches, and most grievously, not for himself.
Rasmus understands he must appreciate the privilege of what he has and where he is. Yet, like many professional athletes, he yearns for the place he came from, too, those days playing sandlot baseball in shorts and no shirt in a region of the country characterized by moonshine and unending acres of cotton and corn, in an atmosphere far removed from Twitterville.
“This got way too serious for me,” he says in drawled speech that gives away the southern Alabama upbringing.
“I never worried about nothing, just played and had fun playing. I made dumb mistakes once in a while, but that’s what made me good, because I didn’t sweat the small stuff. But the higher I got up in baseball, the more it was, ‘You got to be perfect – play every game like it’s the seventh game of the World Series.’ I couldn’t slow the game down no more.”
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