Many of us would like to think that the Milwaukee Brewers aren’t as bad as their record would indicate. Our team has the second-worst record in Major League Baseball, and only two months into the season we can pretty much forget about any post-season games.
But these are almost all the same guys who led their division for 150 days last season, the same guys who spent most of last year competing for the best record in baseball rather than the worst. Things can turn around, right? They could still win it all, right?
Sure, in our dreams anything is possible. But the odds are extremely long. In fact, the Milwaukee Brewers have never won a championship in their entire 45-year history. They only made it to the World Series once, and that was in 1982. Even wild card playoff appearances are rare for this club. Last year a division pennant if not a wildcard playoff berth were considered all but certain. Then September came, the cold winds blew, and that was that.
So, why, with a long road of 120 games ahead and little hope for redemption, do I continue to watch these guys slog through another forgettable season?
It’s not because I think they’ll pull off a miracle. It has to be because of what’s actually attainable. Hey, they’re only three and a half games out of fourth place! What if they made it to .500 by the All Star break? They could be on the brink of achieving mediocrity.
If you are a long-suffering fan of a team like this you learn to get your joy from each game itself and from the small benchmarks that you can actually see the team achieving.
And that’s a better analogy for the rest of life than Vince Lombardi’s famous saying (which he said, but maybe didn’t quite mean), “Winning isn’t everything. Winning is the only thing!”
Nah, it’s really not, Vince. If that were the case, then almost all of us would be losers almost all of the time. The truth is that life is not much like football or baseball or any game really. We’re not often sure who is on our side and who’s on the other team and there’s no scoreboard to let us know how we’re doing. Life is full of moral ambiguities and gray areas. The good guys will disappoint, and the bad guys will surprise us.
I’ve always found too much clear-eyed certainty in a person off-putting. It indicates somebody who doesn’t put much thought into anything. It’s why I avoid evangelical Christians and political party conventions. And expecting to win all the time is not an attractive trait in a person. Look at your average Yankees fan, for example.
Sports is an escape from reality, not an analogy for life. Unless you consider the Milwaukee Brewers, where they just play them one at a time, and they win some and they lose some and some get rained out (but only on the road). And winning isn’t the only thing.
