I'm not sure if all my readers are familiar with baseball or not, so allow this brief digression before I get into the actual metaphor. In professional baseball's current economic system, so called "small market" teams (that is, teams from smaller cities) can't compete with larger cities like New York, Boston, Atlanta or L.A. because they don't get the huge local TV revenues that these teams in larger cities do. The end result is to create several teams that never have a chance of making the playoffs, spend very little on payroll, and tend to be mathematically eliminated from the pennant race sometime in July. One such of these teams is the Minnesota Twins.
Sometimes, I feel like the Minnesota Twins. It's mid-August, and I still have weeks left of games to play, but they don't really matter. I was knocked out of any meaningful participation in the game long before. Now, I'm just playing out the string to pick up a paycheque and keep whatever shred of pride and dignity I have left. I don't always give it my best anymore, because there's really no reason to risk getting hurt at this point in the season. Unfortunately, I don't think management wants to bring me back for another year. Maybe the team will move to Phoenix or something...
I used to play baseball a lot as a kid. One time, when I was ten, I hit this massive homer up on that field on Mount Edward Road, the one that never used to have a fence. It was a grand slam, too. I knocked that thing about 35 feet up, off the trunk of a tree. We won the championship that year. I wish I was 10 again.
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