When Cee first asked me to contribute to Baseball-Prose I knew exactly what I was going to write about, so I started a piece about my beloved Cubbies. Hopefully, one day those words will also be published here, because this contribution is about something completely different.
Since I don’t get into the NFL or fantasy football nearly as deep as I do Major League Baseball and fantasy baseball, I was very excited two weeks ago when my 2012 Baseball Forecaster arrived in a nice brown Amazon box. After I had a chance to read through the Abstracts (truly my favorite part of the book) I went ahead and started player evaluation for my long time NL-only keeper league that I play in locally.
I always go through position-by-position, usually starting with the first basemen. When I came to Ryan Howard’s player blurb the first words I found were, “The decline has started…” Now like most of you I thought, yeah of course it has. Actually, what I thought was, “It probably started in 2010.”
Jump forward now to the outfield evaluation and the words of encouragement I found about Jayson Werth – “An across-the-board decline that just wasn’t unlucky…” That is not very encouraging at all, especially when they end with, “Pay only for a partial rebound.”
These profiles did not stick with me because I own Ryan Howard or Jayson Werth – I don’t. (In fact, I don’t plan on owning either of them, unless I can get Werth for about $12 and Howard shows no sign of Achilles issues this Spring.) The reason these words stuck with me is because I had the great opportunity to compete against both athletes when I was growing up and playing summer baseball in my late teens. In fact I faced off against Jayson Werth in the final seconds of the 7th grade IESA Quarter Final State Basketball game as well, but that is another story for another time perhaps.
Farmington, Illinois’ American Legion Post 140 put me on the field against a few players that made it to the big leagues in fact. Included with Werth and Howard are also Ben Zobrist and the lesser known Josh Rabe – who also attended my alma mater Quincy University at the same time as I and major league pitcher Josh Kinney.
I am not trying to just name drop, or prove that I was an above-mediocre baseball player at one point in time in my life. Instead I am trying to just rationalize in words what it would be like to be labeled as “on the decline” or “on the downside of my career” at age 32. The thought is mind boggling to me.
I don’t know if it is because I know that I have a solid 20-plus years in front of me before I can even think of the word retirement, or the fact that in many ways I feel way too young (note my twitter feed some late nights) to think that I would not able to perform to my peak ability at my job. Granted the physicality of a school administrator is not nearly as demanding as that of a professional athlete, but to think all the time and effort that I have put in – same as them – to be good at what I do, would be for not in seven years or less seems depressing to me.
Maybe the millions of dollars that they will have in the bank when they retire will comfort them when their career is over – something I definitely will not have – but the feeling of being wanted because you are good at what you do, and worked so hard at, has to be worth quite a bit too, right? I know it definitely does and will to me.
Nate Springfield is a proud father of three, devoted husband and a fan of the game of baseball in that order. He started writing at BaseballPress.com, and hosting the sites podcast, at the start of the 2010 season. Living in central Illinois as a Cub fan his entire life, his love for the game grew more from fantasy baseball than the success of the team he roots for. You can follow Nate on Twitter, @NateSpringfield.
