Pineridge Blog

As I write this the Royals have only lost 99 games.

That was Wednesday. Now it is Thursday and the loss last night was number 100. (Insert sad face emoji here).
Traditionally a 100 games lost in a season is considered as the standard of a bad baseball team. In fact, with a dozen or so games left in the regular season it seems inevitable that they will cross that ominous mark on the way to “the worst Royals team in his-tory,” which would be anything past 106 losses.

My, how things change! I was looking at a t-shirt I have from 2015 with the roster of names of the players from the World Series winning Royals. This is the way most teams go. Up and down. Sometimes the ball bounces your way and a team truly comes together that is bigger than the sum if its stars. Other times things go wrong and it nev-er seems to click into place. Of course it is more fun to win, but that isn’t realistic. In fact this year most of the Royal’s losses were in the first half of the season. A great rebuilding project is under-way. We are still learning the new, young players names, but there is a lot of hope. The best may be yet to come.

Many times we are lulled into thinking that tomorrow will be pretty much like today. If we are winning today then we hope it will go on forever. If we are losing now, then we are afraid that is our new normal. The truth is often somewhere in between. I would imagine the story of each of our lives is that we have won more than we think we deserve. We have suffered some painful losses. But when you get right down to it we are neither defined by our wins or our losses but by the grace of living to play anoth-er day. And as they say in baseball, “There is always next year!”

Jim