Being on the wrong end of drama can be devastating. It’s easy to wrap yourself up in the mythology that surrounds anything, be it some childhood football game, a startup business with big dreams, or a major league ballgame. There’s so much more of a maelstrom of content around everything these days that it’s easy to inflate the importance of any one thing, and lose sight of everything else. Ask the family of Donnie Moore, or anyone that ends up with an entourage whose primary purpose is to insulate the eye of the storm from reality. The more insulated one gets from reality, the less important and clear reality becomes.
The Mets didn’t lose the NL East because of a failure of character. They didn’t lose because they were somehow less virtuous than the Phillies. They didn’t lose because of some grand plan of an incomprehensible God. They lost because they just didn’t play good baseball down the stretch, and they got beat. Tom Glavine’s got some postseason experience (if it matters — I don’t know if it does), and has proved his worth in the game a thousand times over. No matter how big the strike zone was for him during his career, he’s a deserving Hall Of Famer. And today, he just got pounded. Not because of some mystical rubbish that allows those of us with access to a keyboard or microphone to pass judgment on players like some sort of meddlesome scold, but because he just got beat up.
It happens. We notice it more when it happens at the end of a long drama. If this game had happened in May, it still would have counted the same in the standings.
Congratulations to the Phillies. I’m on a plane to Denver in a bit. Happy postseason, everyone. I hope no one from my office is reading this. Need to come up with a plausible illness. Scurvy, I’m thinking. Does scurvy give one a cough? Ricketts?
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