The word is shōgakkō. Japanese writer Haruki Murakami first used it in his 1986 essay “Afternoon in the Islets of Langerhans,” and loosely translated, it means “a small but meaningful happiness.” It’s less about the word than it is about a way of life. Acknowledging and appreciating the small things — think the smell of your morning coffee, a favorite landscape or the smile of a loved one — as important, knowing that they add up over time to a larger sense of fulfillment or contentment.
If you’re confused about why I’m quoting Murakami in a column about Adrián Beltré, it’s possible you didn’t follow the Texas Rangers from 2011 to 2018. When Beltré arrived from Boston, he was meant to be the finishing piece of a roster that was coming off its first World Series loss, favored to win the whole thing. By the time he retired, the team was mired in a rebuild that felt interminable. There were very few “big happiness” moments available to Rangers fans in his later years.
So when he created small ones out of nothing — a seemingly impossible defensive play, a home run hit from a knee, a bit of silliness with an opponent or teammate — it felt like magic.
Watching Adrián Beltré was like watching magic.
In his Dodgers years — from his debut as a 19-year-old in 1998 through his final season in L.A. when he hit 48 home runs en route to a second-place finish in the 2004 NL MVP vote — Beltré was a very good player, hitting .274 with a .794 OPS, but lurked just below the surface of the conversation about the game’s biggest stars. He signed a five-year, $64 million deal with the Mariners before the 2005 season, and while he won two Gold Gloves in Seattle, his offensive output — he hit .266 with a .759 OPS — wasn’t enough to make anyone think he was on a Hall of Fame trajectory. It wasn’t until his “pillow deal” in 2010 with the Red Sox that he got back to the sort of star-level production he had flashed in 2004.
But when he arrived in Texas, it all clicked. He went from “very good player” to Hall of Fame lock in his eight years with the Rangers. It was also when he really began to let his personality shine on the field.
There is one moment I keep coming back to when I think about what it meant to me to cover Beltré’s Rangers, which I began doing in 2016. It was the bottom of the eighth inning on July 26, 2017, and the Rangers were losing 18-6 to the Miami Marlins. At that point in the game, there were two storylines worth paying attention to. First, Giancarlo Stanton had hit a home run in the top of the eighth off Jason Grilli. He demonstratively slammed his bat to the ground and skipped to first base — a response to what he perceived as Grilli’s overexuberant celebration the night before when he closed out a Rangers win. Second, Beltré was 3-for-4 on the night, putting him four hits from 3,000.
He wasn’t going to pass the milestone that night, but with six games remaining in the homestand, every hit counted — fans, players, writers and team employees alike wanted him to get No. 3,000 in front of the home crowd.
As his teammate Elvis Andrus dug in to take his at-bat, Beltré stood in his usual spot in the on-deck area, but closer to home plate than the actual on-deck circle. He would later explain that after 20 years of experience, he found that he was safer there, less likely to be struck by a stray foul ball. He’d been doing it for most of his career. But on this night, second-base umpire Gerry Davis intervened. He told Beltré to move back to the circle. After a brief exchange, Beltré demurred. If Davis wanted him to stand on the circle, he would do just that.
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Davis immediately ejected Beltré, seemingly unable to find humor in the moment (or at least unwilling to acknowledge it — Davis did admit in a recent interview with MLB.com that he did, in fact, find it funny).
But for as funny as this moment was, the truth is that I could have chosen any one of a dozen moments to illustrate how Beltré, in his later years with the Rangers, defied convention in favor of joy. Running into left field to avoid a tag, bickering with teammate Andrus (and opponent Félix Hernández), playing patty-cake with the second-base bag after a close play, dancing as he took his lead at second base … the list goes on, as any number of YouTube compilations will show.
You might notice something if you watch those two linked videos: Beltré is wearing a Rangers uniform. It’s not that he didn’t have fun before, but late in his career, he acknowledged that he spent a lot of years feeling like he couldn’t show that side of his personality to the fans. It wasn’t until he came to Texas that he felt comfortable letting his inner comedian join him on the field. (He credited Andrus for some of this shift.) Correlation is not causation, but it bears noting: five of his seven most valuable seasons, per bWAR, came as a Ranger.
This willingness to inject levity into a game that has traditionally embraced stoicism and decorum was not, in and of itself, what made Beltré magic. There have been other players who brought similar childlike joy to the game — look no further than Andrus to find another example. But none had the baseball bona fides that Beltré did.
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His numbers speak for themselves: five Gold Gloves, two Platinum Gloves, 477 home runs, 93.5 bWAR, 636 doubles and an .819 career OPS. Again, you’ll find players with comparable numbers, but did any of them approach the plate wearing their batting helmet backward when facing a switch-throwing pitcher?
And then there was the side that seems utterly incongruous to the class clown persona: Adrián Beltré was arguably one of the toughest men to ever play the sport. From the appendectomy that threatened his life in 2001, through the 2009 ruptured testicle (of note, he did not leave the game after that injury, eventually scoring the winning run in the 14th inning), to the thumb, back and hamstring issues he faced (and often played through) in Texas, Beltré was the walking embodiment of fortitude.
Dave Magadan was the Rangers’ hitting coach in 2015, when Beltré’s back injury threatened to keep him out of the ALDS. He spoke to Chad Jennings about Beltré earlier this month.
“Most people wouldn’t have even gotten out of bed, and he played a major-league game,” Magadan said. “And he got a couple of hits, and I believe he drove in a run. But he could barely run. He had to swing and kind of gather himself to run to first so that he wouldn’t just buckle under the pain and collapse on the field. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen on a baseball field.”
To hammer home a theme: were there other steel-tough players? Absolutely. But often, the toughest of the tough can feel a bit like a one-note song: grit for breakfast, hard-nosed relentlessness for dinner. Somehow, Beltré matched that steel will, but did so with a playful orneriness that built a camaraderie with his teammates — one that was evident even to those watching from the upper deck.
If you want a good comp for Beltré, you could do worse than leaving the baseball world entirely. My best attempt: watching Beltré was like watching John Wayne win an Olympic gold medal in stand-up comedy.
In his final two seasons, when the losing years made the long baseball season seem even longer, he found a way to bring some shōgakkō to the experience, not just for himself, but for his teammates, coaches, journalists and fans — even his own family, as it became routine to see Beltré throwing batting practice to his son A.J. before the other players got to the field for warmups.
Small, but meaningful.
When it’s done right, I think the idea is that the small moments of happiness start to stack up, a little at a time, until they amount to a big one. An ornery glare here, a clutch home run there. A side-arm cannon throw today, a playful shouting match tomorrow. Day by day, Beltré chose one small happiness after another and did so in a way that shared them with those in his orbit.
Today, the stack was measured, and found to be sufficient: Adrián Beltré is a Hall of Famer.
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