Full Circle: A Baseball Player’s Lessons About Life and Justice

The nightmare

He said he had the same nightmare every spring. According to my father, favored baseball players were given coveted lockers closer to the field. Lockers were assigned based on performance and seniority; for the best players, locker location represented prestige and star power.

But for my father, who simply hoped to stay with the team for another year, a better locker meant something more basic: job security.

In his recurring nightmare, my father would arrive at the locker room and look for his locker. Excitement turned to disappointment when he learned his locker wasn’t near the field. And disappointment turned to panic as he realized his locker wasn’t even in the locker room.

Searching frantically, he would eventually find his assigned locker outside the ballpark and down the street. Then he would wake up.

Lessons for the future

My father, Carmen Mauro, played professional baseball. He played for the Chicago Cubs, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Washington Senators, and the Philadelphia Athletics, among other teams. Later, after he had retired from baseball, he would tell me and my brother stories about his baseball days, stories like the one about his spring nightmare. The stories may have been somewhat embellished or altered over time, but we always loved hearing them.

It wasn’t until later that I realized they were more than just good stories; they were lessons about life and justice.

Sure, my father’s story about his recurring nightmare was always good for a laugh, but it also conveyed his feelings of anxiety during his baseball career.

Fig. 1.

Carmen Mauro in his Brooklyn Dodgers uniform.

Some of that anxiety was due to the baseball contract provisions at the time, and his stories offered an intimate glimpse into the circumstances of a typical ballplayer. For example, on one occasion my father first learned he had been traded when a sports reporter approached him in a restaurant and asked him for comment.

As he looked back, however, my father wished he had been more patient, more appreciative of the opportunities he had received, and more skilled in navigating the relationships and politics of baseball. He wanted his sons to learn from his experiences.

His parents were Italian immigrants who were not familiar with the American baseball system. When Jack Sheehan, the head scout for the Chicago Cubs, came to my father’s home in the spring of 1944 to offer him a professional baseball contract, my grandfather was reluctant and fearful. My father was seventeen years old at the time and had been playing for the Morton High School Mustangs in Cicero, Illinois. My grandfather thought it was too soon for him to head out into the big world.

But when Sheehan mentioned that my father would join a farm team, my grandfather reportedly exclaimed, “Working hard on a farm will be good for you! You’ll drink fresh milk and breathe fresh air!”

Anticipate the Play

Having secured my grandfather’s blessing, my father began playing for the Cubs organization, and soon started learning those baseball lessons that he would eventually pass on to me. One such lesson was to “anticipate the play.” He had been trained to anticipate the upcoming play in his mind before every pitch, and later explained how important it is to anticipate the play in baseball and in life. In other words, think ahead to what might be coming and prepare adequately for what might need to be done. I have followed his advice and it has served me well in my legal career as a lawyer and now as an Associate Justice on the California Court of Appeal. When I speak to law students, I encourage them to anticipate the play.

Play to Your Strengths

When my father began his Major League Baseball career with the Chicago Cubs in 1948, he was quite fast. I understand that in high school he ran the hundred-yard dash in under ten seconds, and in baseball he could run from home plate to first base in...