When you write about baseball for a living, it’s difficult not to constantly contextualize your own life and experiences through the baseball lens. However serious the personal stakes or how imperfect the parallel, it’s just where the default of my mind goes these days.
I had my first ever MRI yesterday, and whatever the seriousness it bore for my life, I couldn’t help but think while in that pounding, enclosed tube: so this is what those baseball players have to do every time they get an MRI, huh? Interesting experience.
Ah, so why was in an MRI tube yesterday? No, I hadn’t strained my hamstring like Justin Steele while performing a badass play in the Chicago Cubs’ season opener. Instead, I’d felt something pop in my back while performing a completely inconsequential squat at the gym.
The pain that followed was unlike anything I’d ever dealt with before over the previous 10+ years of seemingly minor back strains, which typically improved in relative short order. After a couple days of simply trying to rest and recover, the extreme pain on the backside of my body expanded into extreme numbness on the frontside of my body. That, uh, was extremely new. It was concerning enough that I wound up in the emergency room for most of my day yesterday, and got multiple scans to see what the heck was going on. Unfortunately, there were a number of issues, ranging from relatively minor to more alarmingly serious, the particulars of which I won’t fully know until I’m able to get in to see a spinal surgeon.
I shudder a bit typing those last two words, as I’d never really ever conceived of having that kind of issue. That degree of a problem. It took one day for me to completely rethink the longstanding issues I’d had with my back, and to become wholly unnerved about what lay ahead.
And for the first time in my life, I was not able to watch the entirety of a Chicago Cubs Opening Day.
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Every year, I “joke” about the relationship between Opening Day and the day off that follows, as MLB tries to ensure weather will not prevent a club from getting a true Opening Day on one of the first two days of the season. Specifically, I talk about how we will absolutely treat that first game like a referendum on the season, and spend the ensuing off-day over-reacting, hyper-focusing, and entirely too optimistic or pessimistic, depending on the outcome. I say “joke” in quotes, because, I mean, while it absolutely IS a joke to treat a single like it means everything, it’s not like I have ever been able to kick the habit.
And yesterday’s first game was a freaking doozy when it comes to overanalysis.
First of all, it was an extra-innings, one-run Cubs loss, which BY DEFINITION will be chock-full of individual moments that, had they gone just a teeny bit differently, would’ve completely changed the game outcome. A booted grounder here. A foul ball there. A pitching change here. A rocket that gets caught there. A poorly-located pitch here. A shortened starter outing there. You’ll always be able to find stuff in a one-run game, and last night was no exception.
Second of all, the game was full of things we’d ALREADY been primed to overanalyze by way of an offseason of conversation: who should play third base, who should be on the margins of the roster, how should the Cubs handle platoons, which relievers pitch when, do the Cubs have enough back-end relief arms, how much of a difference will Craig Counsell make, and how concerned should we be about the starting pitching depth?
Third of all, yeah, that last one. Justin Steele hurt his hamstring halfway through the game, and it seems sufficiently serious that the Cubs will probably be without their ace for some measurable period of time. That is one of the few things that can happen in a single game that DOES justify worrying about the longer-term implications.
In other words, it took one day for all The Things to happen, and to test the limits of my ability to “joke” about overreacting to Opening Day.
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I expect I’ll always remember Opening Day 2024 for the Chicago Cubs, thanks mostly to the whole hospital thing, but also for it’s relationship to this “it took one day” idea that’s been rolling around my head.
We all understand, as humans, how much can change in a single day. But we also know that it can be very difficult to know, as of that day, how much has actually changed.
Is this back injury actually as serious as I think it could be? Is what happened in the Cubs’ opener actually as impactful as we think it could be? Like I said, I can’t help but contextualize the things in my life through that baseball lens, however trivial on one side or the other.
In these moments, we want to jump straight from that first day instantaneously into everything that comes after. We want it all to happen right away. All that it meant and how it will translate. How it will all go. What’s waiting at the end of it, and what that will mean for us thereafter. If it took one day for everything to change, we’d love for it to take only a second day for everything to change back.
But that doesn’t happen. That can’t happen. So we’re left to live through the uncertainty as a process plays out, time slowly revealing how much that “one day” did or did not matter.
I don’t know where my situation will be at the end of September, as I don’t know where the Cubs will be in the standings at the end of September. I do know that yesterday was just one day, and it’s up to me to do the next day and the next day and the next day. They all count just as much as the first one, and the first one doesn’t have to define everything that follows. Easier said than done, and the same will be true when I breezily say that was just one Cubs loss and we don’t have to over-read its predictive power.