inthedougout

Baseball, we've missed you. In fact, we've missed everything about you. The hard grounders, the home runs, and everything in between. The double play, the wild pitch, the foul tip, and a strikeout looking. The small of the grass, the sound of the bat cracking, the agony of leaving runners on base.   The kids with their gloves, hoping to catch a home run.  The diehards scoring the game and listening to the broadcast with their earbuds.   All of it. The agony of an opening day loss, the thrill of being 1-0, and everything in between.  The new prospect that was just called up and the old, savvy veteran that continues to produce year after year. The sunflower seeds, batting gloves, and radiant glasses.  Awkward shadows, mid-day games, rowdy games. New beginnings for new players, yet another season for locked-up veterans, and hopeful wishes for several extensions. We've missed you, baseball.   For almost six months, we've been without our religion, o

Over the course of the past few years, we've purchased several baseball bats that didn't quite work for us.  Sure, my kid was hitting the ball, but he wasn't hitting taters.  The bat was too long, strangely shaped, or too heavy.   But none of that really matters.  I refuse to run up the credit card bill on youth sports gear.  In fact, I've gone so far to say that I will never spend more than $100 a season on baseball gear.  I don't want baseball to become a sport that you have to spend a lot of money just to play.  In lieu of paying top dollar for the newest gear, we get awfully creative, relying on eBay or purchasing something on Amazon with damaged packaging.  Just in the past year, I've made several purchases off eBay in an effort to (1) get good equipment but (2) not overspend.  $15 for a worn-in glove in great condition.  $20 for a quality hitting tee.  It can be done.  But here's the thing... I am not sure if there's a relationship between the

We live in a fast-food, on-demand world.  We get pretty much anything and everything when we want it.  Burgers?  Pull up to the second window, please.  Music?  There's Spotify, Pandora, Youtube.    TV?  Who watches TV?  It's all about the DVR, Netflix, Hulu, and instantaneous streaming of virtually any show or movie you could ever want.  It's all on demand, all the time. Even the way we interact with people, and the different platforms available to us, are intended to be short-little snippets.  A status update here.  A tweet there.  An instagram post or a Snapchat. It's almost a miracle that something like baseball has survived.  All of the things listed above make our lives better and more enjoyable. They're also signs of productivity and prosperity.  The question here is whether baseball can survive the test of this era of instantaneous everything. It's not clear baseball is necessarily dying, but it's also not thriving, either.  Viewership is on t

The yips. A funny-sounding name for something that takes a serious toll on athletes.  You've probably heard about a few of the more famous stories .  Players at the top of their game suddenly can't complete a basic task.  The jump shot no longer falls ( some say Markelle Fultz is suffering from the yips).  A catcher can't make a routine throw back to the pitcher's mound.  A golfer can't make a put.   To the average person, with an average job, this is likely a routine occurrence.  We trip, stumble, and even fall throughout our career.  It often happens unexpectedly, and often.  Something basic can seem difficult and at times, impossible.  It could be talking to a certain person or a certain group of people, but the yips kick in, you freeze, and fall flat on your face.  Luckily, our careers are longer and we don't have a few million people watching us (nor will our failures be memorialized on YouTube for eternity).  For a professional athlete, a case of

Marie Kondo fever has taken over the United States. If you haven't caught the fever yet, don't worry, it's likely working its way to you.  The fever is quite contagious and the concepts are universal: only keep what you need and keep it simple.  The goal is to eliminate unnecessary clutter -- don't hold onto more than you need.  Accomplishing that is a different story, however.  While the concepts are simple, they are by no means easy to implement. For starters, it requires you to let go.  To throw out the thing you've been holding onto for so many years, despite not having many reasons to keep it.  Maybe it's an old table that doesn't fit quite right in your living room, a shirt that you've held onto from college, or a baseball card collection that sits in your basement (becoming a haven for your little basement bugs). Letting go was, and still is, really hard. We had moderate success implementing these concepts in our house, even if there

Details are slowly coming out about Bryce Harper's new contract and several of the failed negotiations that took place between Harper, his agent (Scott Boras), and other teams that were interested in signing him.  Bryce will officially be introduced as a Philadelphia Phillie today and he's already announced that he's wearing #3 (maybe because of all of the 3s in his contract?). Bryce ultimately signed a staggering 13-year, $330 million dollar deal with the Philadelphia Phillies.  This contract now represents the largest contract in North American sports history.  Of the 10 richest contracts in history, 9 belong to baseball and 1 to boxing.  Regarding that boxing contract, Canelo Alvarez has the largest contract (a contract that calls for about $33 million per fight).  His contract now exceeds Giancarlo Stanton's previous record of $325 million over 13 years and Manny Machado's contract of ten years for $330 million.  Bryce's contract also exceeded Alex Rod