Know Exceptions

“That’s a balk!”  Top of the seventh, tie score, bases loaded and no outs.  The very definition of “a bit of a jam” in high school baseball.  Blue Number One got us into the jam and now Blue Number Two has a brain snap and decides a pitcher can’t take the ball out of his mitt while standing on the mound.  Not on the rubber.  Nowhere near the rubber.  On the mound, just after catching the ball tossed back to him by the catcher.  Nowhere near the rubber.  Nowhere near getting set to pitch.  

Never one to argue with an umpire (seriously never, not once) I blurt out “What!” from my perch in the dugout.  Blue Number Two gives North County the winning run as others blurt out four letter words starring the vowel “u”.  Someone shouts they know the vehicle the umps came in, which I take to be a friendly offer of escort assistance after the game, seeing as though the two aged gentlemen have spent the last two hours demonstrating a rather alarming degradation in visual acuity. 

At North Salinas, the home crowd throws rocks.  At Seaside, we offer to help people find their way home.  How nice.  I’m guessing, the calming influence of the ocean view being the difference.  Or maybe it’s the ball diamond is set into a cypress shaded sand dune, and there’s just no rocks underfoot.  I’ll go with the benefit of the doubt on the ocean view thing.    

It’s hard to make it to my advanced age without figuring out some general rules.  The process isn’t so much deep, contemplative reflection as it is getting whacked upside the head with something obvious a few hundred times.  One of the general rules is that umpires can never cost us a game.  It’s a maxim I’ve spouted in dugouts for years, and I believe it. 

I more than believe it, I believe in it.  Play your best game.  Score so many runs that a call or two or three that doesn’t go our way can take away our win.  We control our destiny.  Not those old dudes in blue.  Not that scheming hunk of meat on the mound with his weak sauce slider.  Not that doofus parent, yelling at us, because he can’t yell at his boss.  Not even the Baseball Gods themselves, with their vexing ball lost in the sun or pebble placement that ricochets a ball away from us at the most inopportune moment. 

We control our destiny.  Not them.  Play hard.  Practice even harder.  Play with integrity.  Play with humility.  Play with joy.  Audacious, impervious, unabashed joy.  

Umps can’t cost us the game.  They can't cost us the game, because they aren't playing the game.  We are.  They are working.  We are playing.  They have rules to enforce, order to keep and brain-snap balks to call.  We have the joy of play.  Would that every workplace not balk at the joyous, productive power of play.