This Week For Gotham Baseball: Transactions

Here's a portion of this week's article that I wrote for our pals at Gotham Baseball.  Click at the end to get to their site and read the remainder, which you're bound to love because it's from Jimmy.  Your Jimmy. 

And that's me.

____________________________________________________________________

TRANSACTIONS

It’s always hard to say goodbye.  Some of us are traded.  Others are waived.  Some are demoted while others outright released.  The newspaper calls these moves “Transactions.”  I call them possibly the worst time in a person’s life.  In the real world, there are layoffs.  Restructuring.  Baseball teams never downsize, at least not on the field.  Look at a 25-man roster on opening day.  Then look at it at the All-Star break.  On October 1, glance one last time.  The one consistency? 

Movement.  Players will always come and go, but the team will remain the same, at least in name.  (Quick Trivia: What’s the oldest MLB franchise still in its original city?  Answer somewhere later in the article, but not necessarily at the bottom.)

From a player’s point of view?  Being released is obviously the worst.  Imagine going home and telling your wife, who very well may have married you because you could throw a ball harder than any of her other suitors, “Uh, hon, the team let me go today.”  Not only is it embarrassing, but it squashes an ego, which, for professional athletes, can be a major death blow.  What makes us able to hit or pitch or catch fly balls coming at us out of the bright night lights in front of a live crowd of 55,000 people and one that’s televised in front of anywhere from 100,000 to 55 million?  Our egos, man.  You know that.  Ballplayers aren’t just babies.  We’re egotistical ones.  

Then hang out with one who’s just been released.  Not fun.  Even worse?  Imagine being married to one of these guys.  Want to know why something like 90% of marriages terminate after a professional sports career ends?  The end of an ego.
_____________________________________________________________________

For the rest, including the trivia question answer, click HERE.