It was just a game, just a baseball game.
Last night’s game in Los Angeles was one game in a 162-game season of Major League Baseball, making it even more insignificant when the money-grubbing owners and media expanded the season from 154 and added playoffs to precede the World Series so we could watch the end of the season in ridiculously cold weather rather than the way baseball was supposed to played. Summer?
It was a game between the high-priced spread Dodgers and the margarine-priced Padres. The Dodgers are supposed to win the division and challenge the Cubs in the National League to win that World Series in much better weather than in what the Cubs would play.
That remains a possibility. The Padres finishing last in everything, as predicted by everyone who doesn’t hope like me against all odds, are likely to do just that. Last.
They are young, very young, and the know-it-all, at least more than any sane human would want to know about baseball, say if you are young, you lose. The probability the know-it-all’s are right is pretty good this year. The Padres don’t have a lot of starting pitching.
Then this grandfather of the Padre squad pitched this game. This one insignificant game. The next morning, i read this account of the grandfather: http://m.mlb.com/news/article/222312504/clayton-richard-leads-padres-on-off-the-field/?game_pk=490117
Clayton Richard was the backup quarterback at Michigan before he turned to baseball for a living and who had a decent year or two some time ago before getting picked up last season and returning to the Padres after the Cubs dismissed him.
i spent a significant portion of my life thinking about leadership. It was my job for over twenty years, and then i facilitated others thinking about it for a while more, even wrote a column about it. When i read the account of Clayton Richard communicating to his young teammates before the season started, i thought, “Now that’s leadership.”
Even if it’s only a game, it still makes me feel good.