June 4, 2007
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Baseball is the Cruelest Sport
Post-Game Column By Rod Williamson
Baseball is the cruelest sport. It teases, it flirts, it seduces and the next minute it breaks your heart.
One minute you are wondering about Omaha hotel reservations and the next instant you realize you have lots of time to water that parched lawn or pull tall weeds in the garden.
One second you think you are watching the best baseball player in school history in the midst of his most heroic performance and then you are watching a .188 freshman pinch hitter circle the bases with an improbable home run.
You hold your breath as the most feared hitter in college baseball launches a bomb to left center and you blink in disbelief when a 6-foot 5-inch left fielder steals that dream 380-feet away.
The men in Maize and Blue earned this regional; they made the plays that merited advancement. In a few days, those of us who hoped so much for the gallant guys in the splendid throwback Vandy uniforms to get their just due will more clearly see what happened this year. More importantly, so will they.
I seriously doubt anyone reading this cyber eulogy has ever worked harder to achieve an extreme goal in their life than this baseball team has this year. Game after game, practice after practice, wind sprint after wind sprint… it was the hardest working, most focused and perhaps finest team this campus has seen in decades, perhaps ever.
We hurt for those warriors and are reminded of words spoken in 1910 by President Theodore Roosevelt:
“In the battle of life it is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of a deed could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who, spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end, the triumph of high achievements and who at worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
It is now time to mow that lawn, pull those weeds and rejoin the rest of the world. But as we do, some of us will be visualizing David bounding out of the dugout to congratulate a teammate, Dominic diving for a sinking liner in right field, Carter getting those relief pitchers ready to purr in the bullpen, Corbin bounding out to meet the umps.
There is no joy in Mudville tonight. But the sun will rise tomorrow.
