Can’t resist commenting on this story: Mussina Finds Out That Less Can Be More.   When I saw the headline this morning I thought, great, another example of an accomplished sportsman following Way.  But not quite.

     Mike Mussina, veteran pitcher for the New York Yankees, has gotten off to a good start this year.  He is getting older, 37, and has had some difficult times in the past couple of seasons.  Last year I watched him suffer through the worst single inning of the Yankees season, giving up eight runs in a single frame.  Ouch.  It is fairly common to hear people belittle his skills, arguing that he is a weak spot in the Yankees rotation.

    So, what do you do when you have confronted the limits of your abilities and realize the inevitability of your own decline?  You adjust.  You open your eyes to the circumstances and, instead of forcing a predetermined idea or plan onto a recalcitrant reality, you accept the conditions that surround you and shape yourself to them.  That is what a Taoist would do, in any event.  And that is, by and large, what Mussina is doing:

"I think he’ll pitch for as long as he wants to, because he has the
ability to make adjustments as his ability changes," Manager Joe Torre said. "There are a lot of pitchers and players who get a little stubborn and try to do the same things."

Torre mentioned Carl Yastrzemski, the  Boston Red Sox hall of Famer, as a player who adapted over time, changing batting
stances to stretch his career. The secret, Torre said, is "having the
intelligence to give in to the fact that things are different."

    The intelligence to yield to circumstances: there’s a good Taoist idea for you.  Not to give up and "do nothing."  The "do nothing" notion of Taoism is not a command for complete inaction but, rather, a suggestion to not undertake an action that so obviously pushes against the emerging reality.  Do nothing that pushes against Way.   Mussina is not trying to be a power pitcher, which he cannot be.  He is expanding his repertoire of pitches and following along the path of his remaining abilities.

     But he is not quite a Taoist sage – maybe none us will ever be.  His problem is that he wants to think too much.

When Mike Mussina’s curveball is especially sharp, he can hear it break as it slices the
air. "Sometimes," he said last week, in the straightforward way he says
almost everything, "it just makes a fft-fft-fft.

Mussina, who starts tonight for the Yankees against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays,
does not relish those days. He fears them. Those are the days that can
trick him by removing the best of his many weapons: his mind.

"You think to yourself, ‘This is great,’ " Mussina said, and then you forget about thinking."
If there is one thing Mussina has always done well, it is think. He is a
Stanford graduate, but this is less about being brainy and more about
his personality.

     He is worried that he will stop thinking.  But not thinking is the epitome of skill.  Not thinking would not necessarily imply continued reliance on one particular pitch.  Rather, real not thinking, real deep not thinking, would be a complete yielding to circumstance, an absolute abandonment of conscious plan, an embrace of instinctual response to the immediate circumstance based upon great depth of experience.

     Maybe if he gets to that type of not thinking, he’ll pitch until he’s 45 and get his career 300 wins.

     I just wonder: did Chuang Tzu have a split fingered fast ball?