michael-dean-k/

There is a viral video of Milwaukee Brewer pitcher, Jacob Misiorowski, throwing a 104 mph fastball to knock an apple off a teammates head, who is sitting on a chair at home plate, arms crossed, back to pitcher. Yes, it's edited, but will everyone tell? What if 5% can't? How many hundreds of kids will try this stunt? Reminds of me of William S. Burroughs thinking he could drunkly shoot a beer bottle off his wife's head and missing. I guess the allure of virality can poison anyone.

Starring out into a baseball field in late November, puddled and unkept, it struck me how, at one point in life, baseball was the whole frame of my existence: watching it, talking about it, playing it, traveling for it, dreaming about it, collecting cards, making Excel spreadsheets for those cards, memorizing the statistics of every starting player on every team, etc. Obviously, I’m nostalgic about it. That was just what I was into. I do wonder though, was that whole phase of my life a natural part of childhood that I was meant to get stuck in and grow out of? Or, was it mostly a big waste of time, spirit, and attention? I guess what I’m questioning is, is there a version of my childhood where baseball only took up 20% of my psyche instead of 100%, and would I be better off for it today? Would I be similarly nostalgic? Would a lesser obsession have freed up more bandwidth to develop in other areas? Or am I who I am today because of that obsession?