Sometimes people do get better with age while others getting older ain’t much fun. Look at Melville whose Moby Dick was published when he was 32 and that was about it. Or on the flip side, look at Clint Eastwood who has directed several masterpieces after the age of 60. Timothy Eagan, a political writer, has a piece in today’s NY Time that looks at people who blossom when they age like the Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Jamie Moyer who this week became the oldest pitcher to EVER beat the NY Yankees.
But then there is Jamie Moyer, the slow-throwing tosser for the Philadelphia Phillies who at 47 this year became the oldest pitcher ever to beat the Yankees. Almost 20 years ago, Moyer was told he was through — to get out of baseball. That was followed by 10 productive years in Seattle, where I watched the ageless Moyer befuddle the steroid-bulked behemoths of the performance-enhancing-drug age.
His advantages were experience, deception, guile — skills that usually come with added years on the odometer. He could be the athletic prototype for the kind of late-season bloomer that Malcolm Gladwell described in a New Yorker piece on great second acts. For endeavors that require knowledge of craft, and constant experimenting to get it right, age may actually be a benefit, Gladwell said.
It’s nice to see in our country where the pop culture is obsessed with being young that there are many who do something new, something great when they age.