Dear baseball, thank you.

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, our compass, our spirituality. The way that baseball feels like home and brings a comfort like no other sport can.

Welcome home.

When you create something bigger, your failures are given context

The first chunk of my life was dictated for me. I went to school and I was told what to do in school. I got a job and I was told what to do at that job. I went to college and I was told what to do in college. I found a better job and I was told to do in that job. My success in those different contexts was some milestone, goal, or achievement that was given to me by those different contexts. I didn't have to think about what the goal was - it was merely given to me. In some sense, that's great - I appreciate that someone was training me. But the problem is that no one told me that I was merely being trained. Without necessary communication and context, I kept drifting through the days thinking another goal or milestone would magically appear. Well, it didn't. And it took me a few years to figure this out - more than I'd like. What did I learn in the process? That you must set those goals for yourself - even if those ...

The More Good Days than Bad Days Principle

There are seven days in a week, about 30 days in a month, and 365 days in a year. Not all of those can be good days. No one has 7 perfectly good days. Likewise, I've never gone through an entire year without a single bad day. I have two reactions to that: The first reaction is the whole "control what you can control" thing. You can control your effort and your attitude. And that's absolutely true. But sometimes a day is so bad that no amount of effort or attitude will fix it. The second reaction is that, in any given week, if you have 4 good days and 3 bad days, you're still winning. Even if you have a few "meh" days, but the good ones are still outnumbering the rough ones, I think we're in a good place. The same goes for our practices with our little leaguers. We've had some truly rough and awful practices. The coach's didn't show up with patience, the kids didn't show up with their attention spans, a...

Fantasy Baseball: A few weeks in, how do we adjust and adapt?

We are several weeks into the season and, at this point, we can all agree that everything we knew going into the season was thrown out the window as soon as the games started. That said, there is still a lot of baseball yet to play and for us, as fantasy nerds, a lot of in-season management to navigate. As we move forward into summer, here are a few things I either have done or am thinking about doing. Use your FAAB to get the young pitchers and sell them, almost immediately, for impact bats. Put this one in the category of "shiny new toy." Sure, I have preyed on our inattentiveness, but in re-draft settings, I see no issue with snagging these higher-end rookie pitchers and then flipping them. In two different settings, I was able to flip Bibee for Miguel Vargas and then, separately, Mason Miller for Jordan Walker. Will these trades work out for me? Probably not, but I have a lot more faith in Vargas and Walker, particularly, than I do in Bibee and Miller....

inthedougout

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