2011 was a tough year for me both inside and out of the baseball diamond. So would you think bad memories of a spring tornado and a fall losing record would taint the greatest love of my life?
This off-season was a test in my search for a new sense of normalcy and as the year anniversary to a public and private disaster comes closer, yes, baseball comes to rescue me again.
Some of you will read this and say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, stop bringing it up.” Some of you will shake your head trying to get the awful taste of September memory out of your mouth because you only just got it out.
So let me save you the torture of the long drawn out blow to your chest: I mention the Red Sox disasterdly September swoon of apocalyptic proportions that history will never forget and neither can we.
Okay, maybe I dramatized it but only in true Red Sox angst.
No, the real story here is not Jonathon Papelbon’s departure, its not necessarily about the fried chicken and beer. It’s about appreciating the here and now, something we forget to do until it’s gone. Not everyone has a tornado that teaches us that but that’s why we all have a gift called baseball.
Game 162, 2011
I remember being in Atlanta, in the fifth inning I smiled up at the MLB scoreboard. The Sox were winning, the Braves were ok and the Rays were down seven runs. That’s when I looked up at that gorgeous full fall moon.
Momentum has gathered all it could from 161 games of the past. So, now when it switches, it’s drastic. We humans are always surprised when momentum changes, so thank God baseball is there to show us why it does. Baseball gives us so many lessons.
Few things are simple, even though sometimes they are disguised as such.
A simple out- there’s no such thing. That’s why you never count them… but most of the time it’s just too easy to.
6,5,4 away… 3,2,1 away
Because what isn’t attainable in baseball remains just that in baseball- oh thank you for being the perfect metaphor for life.
Each year, baseball’s characters, whether they be organizational entities or individuals that make them, they all go through something. Something heroic, something disastrous, something sad, something joyful, or something so utterly human like winning and losing.
There are no perfect records in baseball because there are no perfect records in life and yet we still strive for it and that’s what makes us so human, and the game so beautiful.
Opening day reminds me that I’m alive. Opportunity is a blank canvas begging to be painted and those pitches in October are so far away, but you know they’ll be there, waiting in that fall moonlight- even if you’ll be watching with a heavy heart watching someone else’s team. At least its still baseball, and I’ll still smile in those crisp October nights, because the culmination took what felt like a lifetime to get there.
But I won’t lie, I’m not thinking past April for my Sox. No sir. I won’t take the lessons of last September for granted, and so for Boston the pressure is off in that regard. We are literally playing for our dignity this year.
Oh baseball, thank you for being the perfect metaphor for life.
Game 162, September 28, 2011
Someone on TV called this day the greatest day of baseball.
Yeah. Try telling that to the Red Sox fan sitting in Turner Field watching the final seconds of demise tick away effortlessly in the perfect storyline of a speeding train whose inevitability is a fiery crash. It’s that feeling, but in seconds, it’s that in 161 games, it’s that in one pitch, in one rain delay, one out, and one game where one Red Sox fan sits in a different city at a different game watching the league scoreboard lights flash an ‘F’ next to a losing score.
Final nail in the coffin and I am not sure if I want the F to stand for final or fail, because to me it is both.
Oh baseball, thank you for being the perfect metaphor to life. And Opening Day, thank you for bringing us back from the dead.
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