I’m in quite a few pools this year:
- My standard rotisserie pool “Sandlot”
- A Beat the Streak pool – pick an MLB player each night hoping he gets a hit. Beat the magic 56 and win a cool 100 g’s. (not as easy as I thought it sounded)
- An elimination pool
I’m not just an observer. I also play baseball as I’ve eluded to in previous entries. The NCR league has started up again and the Sybae Sluggers are defending champs. So far we’ve beaten the teams we’re supposed to beat. But we have lost a couple games to teams that we just simply cannot seem to beat — and for no good reason. One team is the Manulife Mudhens. They are a bunch of no-good beatniks but they seem to step up and feed us a good helping of whoop-ass each time we play them. It’s the classic case of that one team that has your number. The other loss came last Monday to the Flyers – perennial top place finishers who usually end up with 1 or 2 losses a season at the most? How do they do it? They’re experienced. More so than us. And it shows. We were winning and in good position to take the game. Instead of them succumbing to pressure, they stepped it up while we crumbled like a pack of saltine crackers. The end result was an inevitable loss.
Typically we are a confident, optimistic bunch. That is how we won last year. That is how we won 3 seasons ago. But Monday brought out the worst in this team. We’ve made mistakes in the past. This game was not any particular anomoly in terms of number of errors made. It was how we dealt with them. A good baseball club does not lay blame, does not add undue pressure to themselves when mistakes are made. They are dealt optimistically during the game and then practiced and re-hashed afterwards. It was an embarrassment and a disgrace to watch the fingers being pointed and the under-the-breath utterances made when balls were hit to certain positions during the game in expectation of errors occurring. This reminds me of the bad old days when we were striving to break through but just couldn’t quite make it.
That approach didn’t work. That’s why we lost. When we re-structured and changed our attitudes, we starting winning championships. Last Monday was a step in the wrong direction. The team needs to change its attitude sooner than later or it will once again lose players that have been around through the good and bad and the team will fail.
Remember this: the season is for fun. The playoffs are for winning. Stay fun and the wins will take care of themselves throughout the summer. I never again want to hear that it would be more ideal if we keep the number of girls to a minimum for certain games. Every player on the team has a right to play any game. Period.
Anyone up for some golf? I soon could very well have more dates open that need to be filled.