As baseball's spring training is just a few weeks away, I have been reading the sports headlines with renewed interest as major league teams are signing players and shoring up their rosters. Given that only one team can win the World Series championship each year, most fans are left to lick their wounds over the long off-season. However, as March comes creeping up, most folks have managed to wipe the slate of their team's losing fully clean. They now have a renewed vigor and sense of hope regardless of which team they pull for. A friend of mine who roots for a perennial also-ran told me that, in fact, the beginning of the baseball season is the most interesting for him given that this is the only time of the season when his team will be within a few games of first place! How is that for perspective?Yet with all of this palpable excitement about the start of the new season, it occurred to me recently that my window has passed for playing professional baseball. It's not just that I have no talent whatsoever and have not played in a game of baseball since I was a l'il nipper, it's that I am just too dang old. That thought has kind of weighed on me for a bit. I know it makes no sense, but that is beside the point. In my mind it just doesn't seem that long ago when I was running off to Little League practice or dreaming the dreams of youth listening to the Boston Red Sox on my old AM radio. But even if I could somehow get offered a Major League contract, I would have to turn it down, because at my age I would look ridiculous in a baggy polyester uniform.
