Matthew Taylor: Seeing players as human beings

The appeal of sports is built on emotion, and the past week has delivered plenty of it for Orioles fans. The highs and the lows have served to humanize the players for whom we cheer and have reminded me of how limited my perspective on them actually is.

If there's a common thread for me between the elation provided by the O's clinching their first division title since 1997 and the disappointment produced by Chris Davis' suspension for Adderall use, it's this: Both moments afforded me a fuller portrait of players as human beings.

First was the Davis news last Friday. Generally speaking, drug suspensions produce immediate condemnation or defense. The choice between the two reactions is often correlated with the jersey the offender wears. As I waded through the muddy split-decision verdicts in the court of public opinion last Friday, I was fortunate to locate Jayson Stark's commentary on the matter.

Stark seeks neither to pummel Davis nor to pardon him. Rather, he introduces the complexity of the issue of Adderall use among athletes and, for that matter, students. His writing enabled me to think beyond the team's fortunes as a result of the suspension and to hope for the best for Davis off the diamond. His superhuman performances don't preclude him or other athletes from facing human challenges.

A decidedly more positive moment a few days later reminded me once more of the limits on my perspective. There amid the swell of joy that enveloped the Orioles and their fans was a giddy Adam Jones embracing teammates, coaches, groundskeepers and fans. The spontaneity of the moment provided a rare glimpse into Jones' joy. Frankly, it surprised me. Jones' blunt sound bites and unabashed tweets in the past produced an image that ran counter to the one seen in this unguarded moment of release.

Here again, a writer helped broaden my viewpoint. Eddie Matz explored Jones' love-hate relationship with social media and revealed the pressures heaped upon athletes in this and other forums. Jones is quoted in the story as saying, "What I put out there is 1 percent of what I even care about."

There alongside Jones on the warning track victory lap this week was his former Morse High teammate, Quintin Berry. Had they tried a similar maneuver in high school, there would have been no outfield fence and, as Matz tells it, there likely would have been cars parked in the outfield. It's a study in contrasts that is otherwise masked by the players' current fame and fortune.

In this age of information overload, we can easily be fooled into believing that we know more about players than we actually do. Abundant analytics empower us to examine their performance and to reduce them to their past, present, and future worth. Meanwhile, social media channels and mainstream media narratives make us feel closer to them as people. Along the way, we often mistake what the players do for who they are.

The reduced portraits we produce from an outsider's perspective tend to function like the concave and convex mirrors that inhabit a Funhouse. They elevate players to outsized versions of themselves in one moment while reducing them to lesser people than they actually are in another moment. Jones is no larger than he was prior to winning the A.L. East; Chris Davis is no smaller than he was prior to his suspension. They only seem that way because we rarely have a chance to see them as they actually are.

Matthew Taylor blogs about the Orioles at Roar from 34. Follow him on Twitter: @RoarFrom34. His ruminations about the Birds appear as part of MASNsports.com's season-long initiative of welcoming guest bloggers to our site. All opinions expressed are those of the guest bloggers, who are not employed by MASNsports.com but are just as passionate about their baseball as our roster of writers.