The Big Inning — September 8, 2024 – John Agliata

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Avril Again🎶
Ghostbuster Reference👻
Bad News Baseball⚾

THE DAILY UPDATE

Three Things I Am Grateful For Today:

Unexpected beach trips.
Chess.
When someone you work on in baseball practice is executed perfectly in the next game.

Pursuit of Wordle Godhood: Today’s result: Five. Meh

Wordle 1,177 5/6

⬜⬜🟩🟨⬜
⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Pursuit of Connections Godhood: Today’s result: Six. But I’m calling BS on the use of Beat.

Connections
Puzzle #455
🟩🟩🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟪🟪🟪🟨
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟨🟨🟨🟨

The song in my head when I woke up today: When You’re Gone, by Avril Lavigne, for the second day in a row.

Sept. 7: When You’re Gone, by Avril Lavigne
Sept. 6: I Will Not Bow, by Breaking Benjamin
Sept. 5: It’s Been Awhile, by Staind
Sept. 4: So Far Away, by Staind
Sept. 3: Banana Boat, by Harry Belafonte
Sept. 2: One Love, by Bob Marley
Sept. 1: Welcome to the Black Parade, by My Chemical Romance

Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: When you’re gone/The pieces of my heart are missin’ you

Baseball & Date Tunes: The drive to and from the baseball games yesterday was done to songs from my Grunge de Seattle playlist. Then, songs to and from my date with Wifey Poo was done to my Chick Singers playlist. I bet you can find where the break is. You are smart like that.

Jesus Christ Pose, Soundgarden
Dissident, Pearl Jam
Breed, Nirvana
Jeremy, Pearl Jam
Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town, Pearl Jam
Heaven Beside You, Alice in Chains
Grind, Alice in Chains
Angry Chair, Alice in Chains
In Bloom, Nirvana
Polly, Nirvana
Not For You, Pearl Jam
Nothingman, Pearl Jam
Creep, Stone Temple Pilots
Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana
All Apologies, Nirvana
Front Porch, Joy Williams
All I Wanna Do, Sheryl Crow
At Last, Etta James
Ordinary World, Joy Williams
I Will Always Love You, Whitney Houston
One Of Us, Joan Osborne
Time After Time, Cindy Lauper

Something I’m looking forward to today: I’ve gone beyond hoping my baseball team will actually win a game today. We are royally struggling at the plate. So I’ll say I’m looking forward to actually scoring a run on a base hit. Yeah, that’s not a high bar, but we haven’t been great at clearing it so far this fall either.

Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: Boy The Younger and the choir he’s in are singing Take Me Out to the Ballgame at the Cardinals game next week.

Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: Realizing how much progress I’ve made in fixing myself and my ability to remain calm in stressful situations.

What I’m writing: Yesterday’s Two Crappy Pages involved no writing. Two baseball games, a date, a Mizzou football game and sleep. That was my day.

What I’ve written: Crossing the Streams: How behavioral science enhances automated underwriting

The baseball team I coach isn’t exactly the Bad News Bears, but if there was a long continuum of teams starting on the left with those lovable losers and proceeding way, way, way to the right until you reach the 1927 Yankees, well, we don’t have to travel down that line all that far at the moment.

In yesterday’s pool play games, we lost 8-1 and 10-3. In those two games, we managed just seven hits. That’s one more than our total errors on the day. Not good.

This team has had a familiar pattern since last season. We play OK … until the Big Inning. Then, we give up anywhere between five and 14 runs and we’re cooked. This happened again yesterday. In the final game of our previous tournament two weeks ago, it was a 14-run inning. In Game 1 yesterday, it was a seven-run inning. In Game 2, it was a six-run inning. I guess you can say that’s progress, but it sure as hell doesn’t feel that way.

It is extremely hard to be the head coach of an underperforming baseball team. I’m not suggesting we are world beaters, but we are not that bad. I have done everything I can think of to try to inspire and improve this team. Yet we keep getting our asses handed to us and I’m left giving post-game speeches to try to rally the troops. All the while I’m wondering if my to-this-point awesome and supportive parents are questioning what they hell they are paying so much money for.

We can only take so many batting practice pitches. We can only hit so many ground balls and fly balls to our fielders. We can only coach them on the finer points of the game so much. When you have nearly as many errors as you do hits over two games and that latter number is in the single digits, it’s not exactly a recipe for winning.

So we’ll try again today in bracket play. It’s one-and-done, and I’m throwing our best pitcher in the first game. It’s a rematch against the team that beat us 10-3. If we win, which I don’t see as possible if we don’t start hitting the ball somewhere that fielders aren’t, we’ll have a rematch with the team that beat us 8-1. If a miracle happens and we win that game, we’ll play for the tournament championship.

The Bad News Bears somehow did it. But I don’t think Kelly is riding his motorcycle through our field anytime soon.

Play ball?

Would you please help a brutha out? I’ve created a weekly eNewsletter called News-B-Nuts in which I’ll be sending out news nuggets and witty commentary to subscribers. If you can, would you support this endeavor for just $5 a month via Patreon?

The Big Inning — September 8, 2024

THE DAILY UPDATE

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