The Brewers Make the World Series

When you’re fourteen, the future seems limitless, both in time and possibility. After my buddy John and I watched the Brewers take a three-games-to-two lead over the Cardinals in Game 5 of the 1982 World Series, we were certain that we’d be celebrating a championship in a few days’ time. It was not to be. But at a school assembly later that year, Bud Selig himself assured us that the Brewers would return better than ever the following season.

Forty-four years and many life lessons later, I know that the future isn’t limitless and life rarely unfolds as imagined, in baseball or otherwise. There will be gut-punches, heartbreaks and disappointments along the way. You’ll learn to manage, adapt, reframe things and make the best of it. Every so often, usually with a sad song playing on the stereo and a bourbon in hand, you’ll look back on your youth, when everything seemed possible. When that wrong turn hadn’t yet been taken. When you hadn’t yet failed to live up to your potential. And when your baseball team whose radio broadcasts captivated you from a young age hadn’t yet fallen short in heart-breaking fashion, again and again.

I think of all the games I took my kids to. Those hapless teams of the early 2000s, when my daughters fell in love with Brady Clark, Ben Sheets, Scott Podsednik, Geoff Jenkins and Bill Hall. So many losses. So many trips up to Milwaukee without the luxury of a fun post-victory broadcast to listen to. And then there are the playoff losses we attended: Game 2 of the 2011 NLCS, followed by two in 2018 – Game 4 in Los Angeles with my daughter and Game 7 in Milwaukee with my son – and finally a 2025 loss in Milwaukee against those same Dodgers.

Yes, I loved baseball as a game and the Brewers as a team, but dang, it had been a rough ride. Sports can be so exhilarating, so inspiring and fun, but often they merely echo the hard life lessons of having to endure hardship and disappointment. And honestly, who needs that reminder? Isn’t life hard enough?

But then last night, when the Brewers completed their sweep of the Dodgers, all of those disappointments were excised. Even some of the personal ones.

The future isn’t limitless, but man, it sure has potential.

A Christmas Carol and Embracing the Good We Do

Imagine attending a performance of the Dickens play, A Christmas Carol, except that this time it contained new information. Yes, Ebenezer Scrooge still finds his redemption toward the end of the play, but in a brief narrated postlude we learn that his kind and loving employee, Bob Cratchit, made a serious moral blunder just before dying at a young age. What moral blunder, you ask? Something short or child abuse, rape or murder, let’s say, but a detestable thing nonetheless, a very regrettable act. Which character – Scrooge or Cratchit – would we view in a better light? The one who brought misery to others for most of his existence except for a flash of philanthropy towards the finish line, or the one who lived a noble and loving life except for a flash of regrettable conduct toward his finish line?

Finish lines matter to us. When it comes to sports, it might be all that matters. I’ve often thought it’s a shame that as a fan you can experience jubilation for 8 ½ innings of baseball or 55 minutes of football, only to sour if the opposition scores six runs in the bottom of the ninth or two touchdowns in the final minutes of the fourth quarter, as if the previous joy you experienced never happened. It’s the ending that matters; the team that performed well for 90 percent of the game is a failure, and the team that performed poorly for 90 percent of the game is a success.

But what about human life? Is the finish line the be-all and end-all?

About twenty years ago I composed the following couplet:

Are we measured at the grave?
Or by the weight of equal days?

I had been contemplating the ability for humans to redeem themselves, to make up for past transgressions and finish life morally strong, perhaps with the hope that posterity will judge them for how they’ve completed the race rather than how they ran it. By contrast, if each of our days is weighed the same, then a poorly-lived life can never be overcome. If this is the case, then the legacy of a character like Ebenezer Scrooge would be far different than the one portrayed in the Dickens classic. Sure, we might applaud the miser’s late-life efforts, but we’d still condemn him for everything that preceded it.

I like to think that when it comes to the art of being human, we can view things less black and white than we do a sports game, granting ourselves and others a bit of latitude and allowing us to have it both ways.

Are we measured at the grave?

Yes. How horrible it would be to live life without believing in redemption, the ability to correct our errors, steer back on course, make up for past transgressions and strive to finish life with more wisdom and better conduct than preceded it. Without this, all of us at times would be unable to face another day.

Or are we measured by the weight of equal days?

Yes. How horrible it would be if we couldn’t take stock of the good we’ve done even after making a terribly regrettable act and happening to discover that our time has run out, that we’ll be unable to finish life the way we’d hoped.

As we begin the new year, let’s try to have it both ways: embrace all the good you’ve done and strive to do more good, and embrace all the good others have done, regardless of where they end up. After all, some never have a chance to redeem themselves. If Ebenezer Scrooge had died at the first site of Jacob Marley’s ghost, he never would have had a chance to rectify all the wrongs he’d committed.

Life can be tough. Let’s try to grant ourselves and others all the generosity we can muster.