Psychic Baseball

Ted Williams, a pretty fair country hitter in his day, said "baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer." Perhaps that same standard should be applied to psychics, as well. Back in the days when I worked as a professional psychic, I had days when I was "zoned" and hit pretty much everything in sight but I've had even more days when the best I could do was hit a few weak nubbers back to the mound. Or else take the long slow walk back to the pine. That's not much fun, especially when there are people counting on you to crank a couple out of the park.

One of the biggest problems I had in working full time as a psychic was that so many people wanted to turn me into some turban clad ascetic fortune cookie, even though it seems fairly obvious, I think, that I'm a relatively normal guy into baseball and basketball as much as meditation and astrology.

One of my favorite hobbies is playing a game called Statis-Pro Baseball. It's a simulated board game that uses cards. I picked up my first game at a garage sale for 4 bucks about fifteen years ago-I got another one a year later at a Volunteers of America store for $.89-and I played through the 1985 season game by game, keeping box scores and stats for my team, the Oakland Athletics.

It was a great season, everybody got to play, even though Dwayne Murphy for some reason couldn't hit for shit, gold glove or not, and I spent hours blissfully finding a way to get Bill Krueger and Steve Mura a couple of innings of work. Everything turned out fine by season's end, even though our starting second baseman was killed before the season began in a tragic accident. (My dog ate Donnie Hill's stat card.)

There are dozens of these games out there and, believe me, they are truly a lot of fun. Many years ago, there used to be another baseball board game out called "Psychic Baseball."

Back in the mid-nineties I taught myself HTML and got a free web site on geocities that I called "Psychic Baseball". My version of Psychic Baseball (now at www.psychicbaseball.com) is devoted to the things in my life I enjoy most: sports, books, art, computers, and the Oakland Athletics. Like quite a few others in America with a modem and a tendency towards the obsessive, I tried to make a site that was fun--for me first, but hopefully if it was fun for me it would be fun for others, too.

Hence, the name for my page and an excuse, no matter how lame, for linking the terms "psychic" and "baseball" together.

But there is another reason, too. I think baseball fills a need, whether it is spiritual or aesthetic or just a way to blow off some pent-up testosterone, I don't know. But it gives me something, something in my heart, that metaphysics can never give me. Some of my most transcendent intense connected moments in life were not spent in church or doing psychic readings but playing basketball or fielding grounders by the hour in the hot summer sun. When I was truly on and the ball would go just where I wanted it to go it was like time turned to maple syrup.

Everything was slow, slow, slow, just the way you try to make things so you can do psychic readings.

And I could fly just like a bird in the sky.

What better definition for spirituality could there be?

When I was younger (and certainly more foolish) it was very common for people who met me, in the context of me being a professional psychic, to ask me about my spirituality, thinking (perhaps) that if I was so elevated as to possess "psychic ability" then I must be some highly spiritually evolved individual. My answer, each and every time, was this: "psychic ability has nothing to do with spirituality."

And, of course, I believed it was true.

I realize, now, that I was wrong. Very wrong. Psychic ability has everything to do with spirituality and when I decided to sleepwalk through ten years of my life in order to become a prognosticating robot, all I was doing was running on the steam from an engine that was running loose somewhere nearby.

Being a psychic is a wonderful wonderful thing. Choosing to take that into the marketplace can be a very foolish thing, especially if you are somewhat foolish to begin with. It has taken me a very long time to make my peace with the marketplace. Hopefully, as a result, I will become less and less the fool.

There is, as Carl Jung so elequently stated, "no coming to consciousness without pain." All the young pitchers look good in the spring. It's only after a few times around the league, though, that you know, really know, if the boy's got it or not. It's the same way with life. I don't want this to sound like some version of "Everything I Learned in Life I Learned in Left Field" but I do believe that the trials and tribulations of baseball serve as a very interesting model for the inevitable trials and tribulations of one's life.

But in realizing one's consciousness, one also realizes, as the mystics have always said, that it is through love that one finds God. Do those things you love, surround yourself with those people and toys that you love and you will be love . . . and God will be with you.

And so, once more, I come back to baseball.

The late A. Bartlett Giamatti, the commissioner of baseball during one of baseball's blackest days, the expulsion of Pete Rose, may have said it best: "It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone."

You can't hide on a baseball field. Sooner or later you gotta get it done because no matter where you are, someday, someway, the ball's gonna get hit right at ya.

Can you catch it? Can you make the play?

Can you make the play?

It is really strange to me now in looking back at all the hoopla and attention I received in my first go-round as a professional psychic twenty years ago when I look at it from the vantage point of all that has happened to me over the last 10 years. Everything in this blog before this specific paragraph was first written exactly 10 years ago, back in 1997, when I decided that I was going to put all this metaphysical silliness behind me and "go into business" and it is only now (truly) that I feel as if I really DO understand what my psychic abilities "mean" and only now, too, that I feel I can FINALLY live with them and the responsibility those "gifts" entail.

Back then I wanted to enjoy the perks without being true to the work; in other words, I got lazy. I always joked that yes it is true that all gifts come with a price; it is just that sometimes you don't realize how much they cost until AFTER you take them home from the store.

When I first "burst on to the scene", if you will, everything was cool as hell. I loved it. But eventually people began to take notice and over time I somehow became surrounded by a group of people who, well-meaning though I am sure they were, felt they had to "protect me" from anyone who would "use me" and ask me a question without first paying the requisite toll. Initially it was all fun; it was an absolute joy at first but then it became a struggle and then, eventually, it became something I hated--a lot like athletes who, over time, lose their passion for the games they once loved.

What was once something that flowed out of me like water was now "worth money" and I learned to ONLY let the cat out of the bag IF someone came cash in hand. It was the great French playwright Moliere who so eloquently compared writing to prostitution. He said, about writing, that "first you do it for love, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for money."

It has taken me a long long time to make my peace with being a psychic--a "professional" psychic and I think the primary reason for that is that it has taken me so long to make any kind of peace with myself.

Finally, 52 years in to my journey, I believe I finally understand. All gifts, all TRUE gifts, only have meaning if they can be shared.

What good is the greatest toy if you have no one to play with? That, I believe, is my answer--finally, after all these years. Peace and love to all.