Yordano Ventura and Andy Marte Have Died

Andy Marte died in a car accident in his native Dominican Republic. He was 33 years old. Yordano Ventura died in a separate car accident in his native Dominican Republic. He was 25 years old. Those are the facts, and those are the ages, but the ages are presented as if they mean anything. Any lost life is a life lost too early, and there exists no formula to calculate a level of sadness. The baseball community is in mourning, as it has been too many times.

It’s natural to feel as if you’re appropriating your heartbreak. To whatever extent we ever know our athletes, we never know them as family or loved ones. We don’t know their inside jokes, we don’t know how they like their eggs. The Venturas and the Martes are devastated, and theirs is a devastation that is unsurpassable. Yet your own sadness is valid, validated by its very existence, and there should be no room for guilt in grief. How you receive this news is yours.

Do not feel bad, either, if your first thoughts are of baseball. Even if they’re of disappointing baseball. Baseball is how we learned of these people at all, and there are certain things the two people are known for. That’s where your minds are going to go; it’s where your minds were always going to go. Let it happen, because it’s part of the process. I don’t know how we ever accept the death of a baseball player, but it begins by working through their baseball stories.

The stories here are somewhat similar. They’re stories easily interpreted as stories of unfulfilled potential. Ventura might’ve had a better chance of fulfilling his, still being so young, still being so raw. Ventura was a kid with an 80-grade fastball and a league-average ERA. He made some headlines for his on-field temper. That’s not who he was, but it was reflective of his competitiveness. Many of us have been in our 20s. It can be a cocky decade. Maturation for Ventura was almost inevitable, and the sky was the limit. I suppose everyone leaves the world with unfinished business.

Marte got to write a few more chapters. You know Marte for two things — you know him as a top prospect, and you know him as a bust. There’s no sense in ignoring it; that’s how his career’s remembered after being one of just 22 players to show up in Baseball America’s top 15 prospects at least three different times. Marte was going to be one of the best. You could even say he was one of the best — he just wasn’t one of the best among them. We hold our players to difficult standards.

In one sense, Ventura and Marte fell short of what they could’ve been. But then, Ventura was once a teenage construction worker. By the time he was 24 years old, he was a world champion and a millionaire. Marte made more than a million dollars in the majors himself, and he appeared in parts of seven seasons. When things didn’t go the way he wanted, he took an opportunity to live in South Korea, and he became one of that league’s better baseball players despite what must’ve been an unfathomable culture shock. Ventura got to celebrate MLB’s greatest achievement. Baseball allowed Marte to see more of the world. Both of these players were tremendous successes. You just have to remember where they were starting from.

It doesn’t get easier. I don’t mean to blend different accidents together, but baseball is still recovering from the loss of Jose Fernandez. Ventura had been a close friend of Oscar Taveras. To put it grimly, we’re all gaining experience with events like these, but that experience doesn’t make anything any smoother. Any loss of life feels like a stunning punch in the gut. Baseball players are invincible; professional athletes are superheroes. We cling to these beliefs, despite the evidence to the contrary.

Ventura’s last tweet noted there was just a month to spring training. Which was true, and there could be no conceivable interruption. Sports and athletes are our consistencies, in a life that can otherwise be so unpredictable. As much as we celebrate the unpredictability of baseball itself, what’s predictable is that it goes on at all. Every team plays in every season. Every team has the same shot. Every player will get another chance. Every injury is temporary. Every slump is a fluke. Baseball’s future is a given, right on down to every last participant. Marte and Ventura would continue to play, and there was nothing there to be questioned. What could possibly get in the way? That’s not how baseball works.

Every so often, that is how baseball works. It’s how baseball works because it’s how existence works, but baseball is supposed to let us forget about that. This loss of life once again shatters the illusion that there’s anything we can actually depend on forever, that it’s possible to exist in defiance of the most fundamental of universal truths. We feel the illusion shatter, and we’ve seen the illusion shattered before. It makes us need the illusion all the more, because it buckles the knees to be confronted by our own fragility. When we’re reminded of what baseball really is, we most need to believe that baseball is what it isn’t.

Our world is governed by the reality of impermanence. It’s a tough thing to deal with, so we focus on other things. Yet the truth is inescapable, and it can find you in the last place you’d think. Baseball doesn’t go on with its own set of rules. Today, the greater community is a little bit broken, having suddenly lost two of its members. There’s nothing in here to get used to. The illusion shatters, and, one by one, we put the pieces back.