Haley playing in MLB All-Star Celebrity Softball Game

[My Alter Ego]

Musicians who play instruments that require great "digit" dexterity, typically try to avoid doing things that might put them at risk!

“Rhythms of the Game: The Link Between Musical and Athletic Performance,” soon to be issued by Hal Leonard Books. Written by the former baseball player Bernie Williams and two musician friends, Dave Gluck and Bob Thompson, it is a grab bag of inspiration, self-help, history and anecdotes that focus on the kinship of baseball and music.

Mr. Williams, who gets lead billing, is certainly qualified to write it. During 16 seasons as a New York Yankee he played the guitar seriously and released an album in 2003. Since his baseball career ended in 2006, he has become an active jazz guitarist, performing regularly in clubs and releasing a second album, “Moving Forward,” that was nominated for a Latin Grammy.

Baseball (like other sports) has long had music makers. They go at least as far back as Eddie Basinski, nicknamed the Fiddler, a trained violinist who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1944 and 1945. The ill-tuned fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers Sym-Phony are part of its lore, along with a tradition of barbershop quartets.

Denny McLain, who pitched for the Detroit Tigers in the 1960s, played the organ, and Carmen Fanzone followed four years as a Chicago Cub in the 1970s with a jazz trumpet career. More recently, Bronson Arroyo of the Cincinnati Reds released an album as a vocalist.

Mr. Williams, in a recent telephone interview, spoke of “that relentless pursuit of perfection” of the professional ballplayer and the serious instrumentalist.

“You can see it as far as the way that you react to a low-and-away pitch, the way you have to wait for it and have a perfect swing and hit it on a line drive the other way,” he said. That swing is the result of detailed practice.

“It’s an art,” Mr. Williams added. “It’s poetry in motion.”

The two fields have common sensations. A perfectly hit ball, right in the sweet spot, is “very similar to when you improvise over a set of chords, and you’re in a zone, and you nail every note and hit every pattern,” Mr. Williams said.

“It’s like you’re in a trance,” he added.

The chief commonality of music and baseball is rhythm, Mr. Williams said. “Everything in baseball for me was rhythm.”

Hitting depended on perceiving the pitcher’s rhythm, which is also the starting point for playing the outfield, Mr. Williams said. “You’re playing off the pitcher and the movement of the bat” to get the best possible jump on the ball. (Even the sound of the ball hitting the bat is a musical cue to where to move.) Making a throw from the outfield, he added, depends on a “certain pattern of steps you have to take, and they’re all rhythmically involved.”

...Mr. Williams said he never worried about his hands, and he now feels lucky he suffered no serious injuries to them. He said he also never suffered abuse from other ballplayers for being a musician, because the guitar has a populist appeal and figures in the music of the clubhouse: heavy metal, blues and rock.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/arts/m...wanted=all

Thanks, Miguel. I think to excel at most anything requires the same sort of drive and pursuit of perfection.

To me, the key statement is that while Mr. Williams never worried about his hands, he now realizes that he was lucky that he suffered no serious injuries to them.

The reason that I asked if Harry had played baseball in his youth was that it occurs to me, if one was doing both simultaneously as a kid, when your livelihood isn't dependent on one or the other, one might develop the skills in a sport, such as baseball, that might reduce serious injuries that would impact one's (musical) playing abilities.