This Is The Life We Chose...

What can I say about Friday night?

Nothing.

This is baseball. This is the deal. We wanted a team of our own here in D.C.

And we got it.

Now we've got this. To forever burn in our hearts. One out. One strike.

Disaster.

I'm not going to bother second guessing anybody, or anything.

Did they overuse Storen? Should they have walked Kozma? Strasburg?

Nah. Let it go. We needed a strike. ONE strike.

We'll just sit down in the sports bar of woe, and order our beer next to every other fan base that was one out, one strike away. Slide over, Indians fans. Scoot down, Rangers fans.

As somebody - ahem - "helpfully reminded me on Twitter: "This is what you signed up for."

True.

But having never had a baseball team to live and die with, you have no idea just how cruel the game without a clock can be to you. Hell, they stole our champagne. That ain't right.

But it's part of the deal in baseball.

Like the great scene in Godfather II:

Hyman Roth:

There was this kid I grew up with; he was younger than me. Sorta looked up to me, you know. We did our first work together, worked our way out of the street. Things were good, we made the most of it. During Prohibition, we ran molasses into Canada... made a fortune, your father, too. 

As much as anyone, I loved him and trusted him. Later on he had an idea to build a city out of a desert stop-over for GI's on the way to the West Coast. That kid's name was Moe Greene, and the city he invented was Las Vegas. 

This was a great man, a man of vision and guts. And there isn't even a plaque, or a signpost or a statue of him in that town! Someone put a bullet through his eye. No one knows who gave the order. 

When I heard it, I wasn't angry; I knew Moe, I knew he was head-strong, talking loud, saying stupid things. So when he turned up dead, I let it go. 

And I said to myself, this is the business we've chosen; I didn't ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business!