B.J. Upton’s first two years in Atlanta have been famously, catastrophically bad, and I’m not going to linger too long on the specific numerical details of it. Mostly because after two years, we’ve passed the point where B.J. Upton is evaluated as a baseball player, and we’ve moved on to B.J. Upton the symbol.

For some, he’s synecdoche for an argument in favor of a particular form of team-building: pay a free agent, and he will suck the life out of your team. For others, he’s the avatar of Frank Wren’s tenure in Atlanta: solid trades, extensions, and bargain-basement signings, but huge whiffs on free agent gambles. And for some he’s the face of the franchise right now: just slogging out the next couple of wretched years until everyone moves on to new ballparks and contracts.

B.J. Upton is a symbol to me too though. He embodies one of the things I fear the most, and so there’s a bit of a horror-film element to watching him continue to patrol center field in Atlanta.

I’m a lawyer by day. Ten years ago I went off to a well-respected law school; seven years ago I passed the bar. Since then, I’ve worked in a position in which I attempt to make the legal situations of average people better. I can easily craft a narrative of achievement: graduation, bar passage, entry position, promotion, promotion, the occasional anecdote where things went charmingly right, etc. It looks good on paper, the way B.J.’s resume did prior to arriving in Atlanta. Second overall pick, debut at 19 years old, an All-Star-caliber season, a 28-homer season, all by age 27!

But the other truth about it is there are days I’m convinced I don’t even know how to lawyer at all. It’s minor things, like someone casually name-dropping a case or a statute I’m not familiar with, or asking how to handle a situation I’ve not dealt with. Or even just struggling, college-kid-with-an-8-a.m.-class-style, to wake up early enough to get into the courtroom before the judge takes the bench. It’s easier than you might think to fall into a feeling that all these other people in the room are lawyers, and I’m just a guy in a suit making things up as he goes.

The psychological term for this is impostor syndrome, and while I’ve learned to shake it off and let the results speak for themselves, I still have a baseline dread of some hypothetical day where I’m called to show a particular skill, an audience is watching, and I flop. This background nightmare of mine is B.J. Upton’s actual reality, and the thing I’m most curious about right now is how he’s handling it mentally.

Both Upton and the Braves organization wrote off 2013 as an aberration, perhaps caused by trying too hard to live up to a big contract and/or the hype of “Upton Here, Upton Here”, and B.J. vowed that 2014 would be better. It wasn’t. In mid-season he made a mechanical adjustment to hopefully quiet his hands as he loaded his swing. It didn’t. By August, it was harder to find a direct B.J. quote and the line coming out of the organization was that he continues to work hard, and what else can you do?

Indeed — what else can you do? That’s the scary part. I’d be quite curious to read a follow-up interview to that above-linked Marietta Daily Journal piece, because after the reasons 2014 was supposed to be better than 2013 turned out not to be true, what can B.J. Upton tell himself to pull out of this funk in 2015 and beyond?

He’s not old (this will be just his age-30 season), he’s not lazy** (a common thread in almost any B.J. writeup is how much time he puts in the cage), he’s not injured (that we know of), and he’s not untalented (#2 overall pick with universally acknowledged elite tools). By process of elimination, that means we have to at least consider the idea that B.J. is lost in his own head, which is a much more difficult place to be than just on an improper swing plane or hand position.

He’d never admit it if that were the case, of course. One of sports culture’s most sacred tenets is that self-improvement is always available to those willing to make the sacrifices necessary, and every B.J. interview out there indicates this is the path to redemption he’ll attempt to follow until he’s shown the door. Granted, that didn’t work last offseason, but do you have a better idea? We’re talking about mechanical adjustments at a level of precision none of us with office jobs can comprehend; the difference between being one of the best 0.01% of baseball players in the world vs. just one of the best 0.02%, that sort of thing. Whatever dropped him off that thin edge — physical, mental, or otherwise — I’m still rooting for him to fix it.

I’m not saying this just as an armchair GM hoping to move him for more productive widgets in the future. B.J. Upton is publicly living your nightmare and mine in which we’re performing in public without pants on, and if he’s able to pull himself out of that, it could be the most positive thing to come out of what will likely be an otherwise dismal season.

**To the extent that there are fans who put the “lazy guy who got paid and stopped working” narrative on B.J., it probably says more about our need for a universe that has clear causes and effects than it does about B.J. himself. It’s emotionally cleaner to boo a guy who isn’t trying (Melky Cabrera, you still suck!) but this is a stranger case without a clear cause, I think.