Sowing the Seeds

This morning I ventured out into the snow to pick up a prescription that ran out yesterday.

On my way to the pharmacy, I passed the magazine rack. There on the middle row, amidst all the "Car & Driver", "Sports Illustrated" and "Tattoo" magazines (I made that part up), and the Word Search/Sudoku/Crossword Puzzle books, was the "2010 Fantasy Baseball Preview" (not the guide pictured). A few weeks ago, I decided to crawl back to the guys in the Busch League, grovel, and ask if they'd have me back in their Rotisserie baseball league. Somehow they agreed (I doubt the vote was unanimous, but since the last guy I had a major conflict with is no longer part of the league, time healed that particular wound) and I was accepted.

Then our good friend Joe, an original member of the league, a total class-act, and someone everyone loved, passed away. And suddenly the prospect of playing for keeps this season seemed somewhat empty. Before he died, I was thinking of renaming my team the Natinals, after the uniform blooper on the Washington Nationals' shirts:
But at his passing, my instinct was to name my team after his, the Bookies. I don't like to be maudlin, however, so I've settled upon something that honors his team while looking to my own past. When I left the league my team was called the Bridesmaids, for my numerous second-place finishes. Now I'm planning to call my team the Bookish Bridesmads, honoring Joe, the Bridesmaids, and the Natinals. It's a classic case of overthinking the team name (Lou's "Irish-U-Bluebirds", anyone?) but I'm pretty happy with it.

Anyway, back to the fantasy guide. It dawned on me that this is very much like the seed catalogs I get this time of year, where I look at the varieties of vegetables in their best light, idealizing their beneficial aspects and downplaying their shortcomings. When I say "If I start those watermelons indoors during April and put them out in the first week of June, I should have a great harvest in late August", it is akin to saying "If Mike Lowell's thumb is okay, and his hips are back to normal, he could be an undervalued starting third baseman this year". Both statements are true, but they are colored heavily by the optimism of mid-winter.

But that is the point of both of these exercises, I think. My seed catalogs and my fantasy baseball publications are largely superfluous. They are merely props for the activity itself: I could very easily look through my Fedco catalog and pick out the varieties I want in about 15 minutes. I could probably go into my baseball auction/draft and do fairly well right now. But it's the studying and the fantasizing, the idealizing, and the analyzing that take me to those days in summer. The actual "doing" isn't the most fun part for me, it's the mental exercise of anticipation and looking forward to the spring, summer, and early fall, and what they will bring.

Winters in these parts can get pretty long, these things remind me that, as Gordon Bok so aptly put it, "the world is always turning toward the morning."