The baseball playoffs are no good for me. Every single pitch weighs on my body like a 5-pound earing. I stand about 3 feet from my TV with my arms folded bracing for each one. As soon as it hits the mitt or the play ends, I turn around, take a breath, then get back in position for the next one. This goes on for the entire ball game unless it gets out of hand. This is how I was Saturday, how I will be tonight, and how I will be on Wednesday. It’s awful.
I’m sure I’m not the only one that has some kind of similar…ritual? Defense mechanism? Complex? I don’t know what you’d label it, but with palpable anxiety and no control over the situation there isn’t much else to do. It’s not like any of us can simply enjoy the game. I don’t even understand such a suggestion. We aren’t programmed that way.
All that being said, I’m not feeling good about tonight. I feel about the same as I did on Saturday. This has nothing to do with the Dodgers. Yes, I know they are good, and they fixed their biggest weakness by simply deciding to no longer have a bullpen and just use starters, but that’s not it. I have the uneasiness of wanting something so bad and having no idea how to obtain it.
The Phillies themselves seem to have this same problem. I know they want to win. In fact, maybe they want to win almost too much. Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber want to win so much on every pitch that they are trying to basically will the ball on to their bats by swinging as hard as possible. It didn’t work in Game 1. At least this is how I assume they are playing. See, I have no idea what these guys are going through and it’s not helping.
For all the hand wringing and anger we throw at athletes, none of us have any idea what they are going through. They are not regular people like us. Yes, they have feelings and emotions, but they have not experienced failure on the levels that all of us have. More directly, we have not experienced success anywhere close to the levels they have. I might be a more well-adjusted father or husband than one of them, but these guys have all made it to the absolute pinnacle of what they are doing. Not me. Probably not you either. If I had to throw a pitch, swing a bat, or even write a word in front of literally tens of millions of eyes knowing that my entire legacy and life was coming down to that ability, I would probably turn into a literal puddle of stuttering Ed goop.
Jhoan Duran is going to throw a pitch at 100+ mph tonight to Shohei Ohtani who is going to swing his bat around that same speed. He is going to throw it into the exact place he wants despite it moving all over the place, with an inch in any direction deciding whether the best player on the planet makes contact or not and changes everyone’s lives one way or another. The margin for error is nothing. This is what they are dealing with.
My heart will be beating out of my chest when that all happens. Hell, it might even burn out completely and stop. That’s all I can do. We have to hope he hits his spot and Ohtani or anyone else doesn’t hit theirs. It will make all the difference to everyone involved, just that little inch. Do you know what that all means? We get to game 3 tied at 1. We have to do it all again…and again…and hopefully again. I can’t even fathom a next series even though we literally made it to the World Series 3 years ago and I saw a winner in 2008. It’s a red and white abyss to me.
My heart is now beating faster just thinking of this. Phillies, I need you to win. We need you to win. If you don’t, life will go on. We know this (unless the whole heart thing, you know… ATTACKS!). It means more than that though. My heart is beating because I can’t do what you do. Just by reading above, I think you know that I can’t even really imagine it. We can only watch. The winning means that we get to experience just a little bit of your victory. That means that we made it too and that all those crazy heart beats were worth it.
Philly Front Office 
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