Liquid Life - Just Add Water

Only the Phillies could manage to be ten outs from a World Series championship, lose the lead and then have the game postponed due to the same drenching rains that had apparently been okay to play in for several innings before that.

I have been dutifully wearing my Phillies hat to show my support of late. The Phillies are my favorite baseball team, after all, even if baseball is no longer my favorite sport. It used to be, way back when. I followed the Phils though losing years, more losing years and the occasional winning year because it was a great game and they were my team. I watched the entire '93 Series while living in a town whose TV reception was so bad that I generally couldn't see the ball through the video snow on the screen and had to rely on watching the players react. I assumed they could see the ball, and certainly the Blue Jays could, alas.

But then they went on strike the following year. For a while I was just too annoyed at baseball to care, and I refused to watch even when the strike was over. But that didn't last - they did what they did, and so be it. But I never went back to baseball.

Life is liquid. If you remove baseball from it, don't expect to see a baseball-sized hole there later on, waiting to be filled up. Other things rush in and take that space, and baseball - or whatever it is that was removed from your world - has to figure out a way to slip in edgewise. It rarely does, at least not to where it used to be. I didn't watch television for almost nine years at one point in my life. It wasn't a moral decision - it wasn't anything to do with television really. I just got too busy with other things, and television simply fell out of my world. And when I did have time, after those nine years, there was no tv-sized hole in my life for it to fit back into. I watch it now and again these days - there are some good things on - but it fills in the edges now, not the middle.

So now baseball runs behind football, hockey, and at times even soccer. Usually I've got on my Eagles hat if I'm wearing a hat. Nobody in Wisconsin knows who the Flyers are, but sometimes I wear that one instead. My usual mug for tea is from the Sons of Ben, who supported the drive to get a Major League Soccer team in Philadelphia - I got it for the logo, which has a skull with Ben Franklin glasses and hair, and a Liberty Bell crack in it. It's cool, even if nobody knows what it signifies even in Philadelphia. But the Phillies are doing well - they're still only nine outs and one run away from winning, and even though I continue not to expect anything good to happen (when the Rays got a baserunner in the 9th inning of Game 4 I was sure it would lead to disaster even when Kim reminded me that the Phillies were leading at that point by a score of 10-2), the odds of my being pleasantly surprised are going up. So I'll watch and cheer, and if they manage to screw up and not lose, I'll be happy.