Eric S. Asks!
I just read your recent post that mentioned Jason Heyward1 and it led me to his bbref page, where I saw that he'd been an All-Star as a rookie but never again. So, two questions:
Do you think this is rare or possibly unique, particularly for a career of his length and success?
Say you had a ~15 year MLB career with a lone all-star appearance. Would you rather make it in your first or last season?
I thought about no. 2 for a while and I think I have my answer. Well, maybe.
SM: Excluding the 2023 rookie All-Stars, 65 players have made the All-Star team in their first full season and never again, ranging from Frankie Zak, Dave Stenhouse and Jeff Zimmerman (three-year careers) to Wally Joyner (16 years), Álex González (16 years) and Ron Reed (19 years).
Jason Heyward is about to play his 15th season in the majors. He’s likely to play a few more, and he’s very unlikely to appear on a second All-Star team. As a rookie, he was voted in as a starter, with the second most votes in the whole National League.
A.J. Burnett played 17 seasons before he retired. He made one All-Star team. But it was in his final season. It wasn’t some sentimental lifetime-achievement nod (if those even exist). He had the National League’s second-best ERA at the time, and he finished the season with a career-best ERA.
Eric’s question is which of those scenarios would be more satisfying. I bet I can predict his answer. The answer seems obvious. I bet his answer is that Burnett’s experience is more satisfying. I bet Eric knows or intuits something fundamental about the human psychology, which is that happiness—or, to use the clinical jargon, hedonic well-being—equals reality minus expectations:
Raise expectations beyond reality's capacity to meet them, and misery follows. The reverse applies, too: you can make people happier, studies suggest, by delivering bad news, then withdrawing it. Relief triggers happiness.
So Heyward raised expectations beyond capacity to meet them, while Burnett’s All-Star appearance was a last-chance relief. That was my first answer, at least, but I kept thinking about it, and decided there’s a lot more to it.
The Parents vs. Kids issue
When you make the All-Star game as a rookie, you are basically still a kid. You make your parents very proud. Your parents are often part of the coverage of your All-Star appearance and/or your rookie success. (This was very true of Heyward—the first two words of his first Sports Illustrated profile, for example, were “Eugene Heyward,” his dad.)
When you make the All-Star game in your final year, you are middle-aged. You make your kids very proud. Your kids are often part of the coverage, in fact, if you bring them to the game. (This was true of Burnett, whose kids sat at his media day table with him, with hair cuts that matched their dad’s.)
With whom would you prioritize sharing this experience? Both situations have charm. I personally opt for sharing it with parents. I felt much more desire to make my parents proud when I was 22 than desire to make my child proud when I was 38. And your parents quite possibly drove you to practices and taught you how to play catch and psychologically you feel like you owe them. Your kids, meanwhile, just showed up late to enjoy all the best parts, and barely care about your job anyway.
The Which Kind Of Party question
Let’s analogize the All-Star game to going to a party. Ninety-nine nice people are there who all basically know each other. You’re the 100th. Would you get more out of that party if you already know everybody there—if they’re people you love and who love you and you’re going to karaoke-sing Float On while they cheer you on? Or would you get more out of that party if you know hardly anybody and hardly anybody knows you? The former case is way more comfortable, and probably produces less anxiety and more dopamine/serotonin/oxytocin. But in the latter case—which might seem nerve-racking—you come away from the experience having expanded yourself and your world. You walk out of that party with new relationships, dozens of new people who know and are known by you, and you are personally expanded for the rest of your career. In Heyward’s case, the party is an introduction; in Burnett’s, it’s a celebration. I think most of us would prefer to be the Burnett at a party, but probably benefit more from being the Heyward.
The Preservation issue
I once interviewed Rick Hanson, a senior fellow at the University of Berkeley and author of Hardwiring Happiness, about the distressingly short-lived effects of happy developments. (This is known as the hedonic treadmill; we adjust to new circumstances and find our way back to our default mood.) He said the key to extending the window of a happy event "is unbelievably simple: Have it, enjoy it. Neurons that fire together wire together. The longer you stay with it, the more intensely you feel it." Regardless of who is happier in the moment they become and All-Star, it seems clear the final-year All-Star has the advantage when it comes to staying with the experience. Heyward, a few months later, started a new season with new pressing ambitions and was immediately not an All-Star anymore, could never even let himself think about it again lest he become complacent. Burnett, retired, freed his brain of the illusion that constant growth is possible and necessary. He got to be a All-Star forever.
The Late-Stage Capitalism calculus
We know from the premise that both of these players will play long careers and presumably attain financial security. But they won’t know that while they’re living the careers out, and for several years early in their careers will live with the anxiety of long-range financial insecurity. Frontloading an All-Star game helps resolve that. Jeff Zimmerman, for instance, is one of the 65 major leaguers who made an All-Star game as a rookie but never again. Unlike Jason Heyward, he had only a three-year major league career before sudden injuries stopped him from ever throwing another big-league pitch. But thanks to his early success and his All-Star appearance, he got an eight-figure extension before the injuries hit. He made $10 million as a big leaguer instead of $800,000, and he was able to live without some of that constant financial unsteadiness while he was doing years of rehab. All things being equal, early success pays better than late success, and if a 20-year-old today had Heyward’s immediate success he’d probably be in position to sign a $200 million extension, if he wanted that.
The False God problem
Regarding those 65 players who made the All-Star game as rookies and never again: Some never had a season as good as their rookie season, especially the relief pitchers. But many did, and of the long-career-havers like Heyward, most did. Kent Hrbek, for instance, hit .301/.363/.485 in his first year and finished second in Rookie of the Year voting. Two years later, he hit .311/383/.522 and finished second in MVP voting. He just didn’t make the All-Star team that year, because a bunch of other AL first basemen had great first-halves. (One, Alvin Davis, was a rookie. Davis never made it again.) The All-Star game is a blunt, inconsistently awarded honor. Players make it or don’t make it based on noisy statistics, based on how strong the competition at the position happens to be that week in history, based on narrative, based on inconsistent voters, based on overvalued stats, based on the requirement that every team gets an All-Star, etc. Wally Joyner made it as a rookie, in what would turn out to be his… arguably seventh-best season. Ron Hansen made it as a rookie but not five years later, when he had double the WAR. Ron Reed made it as a rookie in a year he had a 90 ERA+. In a 19-year career, he had a far-superior 108 ERA+, yet never made it again.
If you’re going to get a kinda fake honor, is it better to get it before or after you learn it’s kinda fake? Probably before. Jason Heyward got to feel all the good feelings that come with youthful naïveté, when one can live in the warm glow of comforting illusions. On the other hand, Burnett—who’d lived through a couple All-Star snubs in his career—got to appreciate the honor for what it was, on its own limited terms. This bleeds into:
The Underwhelmingness issue
Eric asked if it’s rare, what Heyward has done. At the major league level, everything is pretty rare. For instance, only 13 percent of players who appear in the majors will make an All-Star game at all, at any stage of their career. Both Heyward and Burnett, the minute they were selected, ascended into a tier of ballplayers that’s 7/8ths smaller than the one they were in before.
But what’s even rarer than making an All-Star team is having a career as long as Heyward and Burnett’s. Heyward’s about to play his 15th season. Only 4 percent of players make it 15 years, let alone Burnett’s 17. Even players who make the All-Star game as rookies—a truly special group—only average 10 years in the majors. (They also average about half of Heyward’s career WAR.)
So, by the time A.J. Burnett made the All-Star game, what could it really say about him? He’d already surpassed the ASG’s level of exclusivity. He was one of the top 4 percent of baseball players in history. What could he learn from being told he was also one of the top 13 percent? For Heyward, 20, the All-Star game was a hat. For Burnett, 38, it was a hat on a hat.
That’s not to say it was worthless. “I've been through it all, and now I can say I've done it all,'' Burnett said, so that’s definitely honest gratitude.
And there’s this, from the MLB.com writeup of his appearance at the game2:
"It's special to see him here," Cole said. "It's more special that I get to be here and experience his joy and bringing his family and his kids, Ashton and A.J. What a tremendous experience. It's fun to be a part of."
Burnett would agree. It was worth the wait.
But then:
"Wish I would've done it a long time ago," Burnett said.
***
Let’s check in on Eric S.
SM: I'm pursuing my answer, and I'm going to need to know yours. Please tell me.
Eric S:
I'd take the final year. I would feel like a fraud if I could never live up to the initial success. 14 years of imposter syndrome. I'll take low-expectations with one highlight on the way out. Probably not the right financial decision, but a 15 year MLB career should set me up pretty well.
SM: Yeah, there’s a lot I relate to in that answer. At first blush, a lot of this question seems to come down to: Which is better, confidence or humility? There’s a lot of research in the past decade that humility is a foundational virtue, that humility is the virtue that allows other virtues to flourish. And, specifically, that humility quiets death anxiety. We tend to treat humility and confidence as opposite emotions—in which case Burnett’s experience, favoring the development of humility over the development of confidence, might be preferable, as I think Eric is getting at. But humility and confidence actually co-exist quite easily, and even depend on each other. The opposite of humility isn’t confidence, but insecurity. And the opposite of confidence isn’t humility, but arrogance. It takes confidence to be humble; an arrogant person, meanwhile, is almost always insecure.
So there might not be a right answer here. The more important question is how the All-Star is going to relate to the experience. Will playing 16 years without an All-Star game make them insecure/arrogant, or will it make them humble/confident? Will making it as a 20-year-old make them confident/humble, or arrogant/insecure? I wouldn’t even know the answer to that about myself, let alone somebody else.
So I’ll just go back to my first point: I’d rather share it with my parents. I’ll take Heyward’s experience.
That post, you might recall, was about Heyward having to be advised by teammates to take a curtain call after his first homer as a St. Louis Cardinal. According to the AP write-up, “the curtain call concept was new to him.” I expressed skepticism of this claim, and, in fact, the full broadcast of his first major league game—five years earlier—is online. Heyward homered in his first at-bat and took an unambiguous curtain call. So that’s resolved. (It appears that, in that occasion as well, he had to be told by a coach to step back out of the dugout to tip his cap.)
This article has one of my favorite paraphrases ever: “Burnett specifically mentioned wanting to sit with his family on the field during the Gillette Home Run Derby presented by Head & Shoulders.” Imagine if Burnett had specifically mentioned that he wanted to sit with his family on the field during the Gillette Home Run Derby presented by Head & Shoulders! Classic ballplayer dialogue.
Footnote 2 is an all-timer
Allan James Burnett. When the Yankees salary dumped him to the Pirates in 2012, he was another washed-up has been the Pirates love to get on the cheap. Coming off two straight 5+ ERA seasons and a reputation as a jackass and young phenom who never met expectations, I didn’t have much hope. All he did was resurrect his game with more off speed stuff under the tutelage of Sarge and became a staff mentor to guys like Gerrit Cole, and helped the Pirates to the first winning season in 21 years and into the NLCS in 2013. An FA in 2014, he left, shocking us all, turned his back on a city that loved him (and he loved back) to go to a shitty Phils team. He returned in 15 helping the Bucs back to the playoffs and getting that All-Star nod. Then, he retired as the tank emptied and he couldn’t work deep in games. Then nothing. Burnett, the tattooed bad boy favorite disappeared until…he threw out the first pitch in the 2023 home opener and the place went bonkers (almost as crazy as Cutch’s first at bat). I think Burnett returning, humbly, back to the Pirates was the maturation of young man’s crazy career and the regret he expressed was why he didn’t mature earlier. Don’t we all want that?