The Mendoza Line
By Cindy Layton
Mario Mendoza was a baseball short stop in the 70’s and 80’s who struggled on offense. His own teammates began to taunt him when his batting average sank below 200, and thus began the widespread use of the derogatory “hitting below the Mendoza Line.” It marked the benchmark as not just bad luck or poor offense, but shameful. Since then, the moniker of The Mendoza Line spread to describe a range of undesirables – women’s looks (a man wouldn’t date a woman whose looks ranked below the Mendoza line), and less derisive applications such as stocks or academic grades that sank to unacceptable levels.
The measurement of anything as below its lowest limit defines that point as the single most critical factor of any performance in its field. Mendoza had all other aspects of his baseball career disregarded, despite the fact his sub-200 batting average wasn’t his lifetime average, and, it belied the fact that baseball is a sport of failure to begin with. Most excellent hitters never sustain an average above 300, meaning, seven times out of ten, they will fail to hit the ball. Failure is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.
Yet every time Mario Mendoza took the field his performance was on view for all to see. He would dig deep into his character to connect with his confidence. He played for the love of the game.
So all this memory lane-ing is just an opportunity to view writing, once again, in the vein of sports, mainly because writing, too, is a sport of failure. How many manuscripts have been rejected? How many short stories have been returned, defined as “not what we are looking for right now?” Or “our direction is different than your vision.” And the ever present “This is not a reflection of you as a writer.”
It’s hard to stand tall when the rate of rejection feels Mendoza-worthy. Tougher to hold on to pride in what ever accomplishments there are if the definition of success hovers ever so close to some perceived benchmark.
Each time a writer submits their work they’ve put a piece of themselves out into the world. Maybe not everybody can or will see it, but it’s still a small act of bravery.
Every writer who submits (think of the meaning of that word) opens themselves up to a process that is inherently rife with subjectivity, reflections of personal taste, and opaqueness.
Better to have failure, or success, defined by you, rather than for you. To accomplish that it’s helpful to understand why you write rather than your rate of acceptance. Sometimes the writing itself is the reward.
Besides, there’s no real measurement for failure. If a manuscript is rejected sixty times who’s to say the sixty-first won’t be the charm? There is no numerical Mendoza Line in writing.
There’s only the ever-present love for the game and the hope for a base hit.
