We have just completed our second regular season and lucky for us parents, we will be going post season. I was reading our baseball message board where a lot of fans, players and parents go, and came across a wonderful post by a parent of a 4 year player who just graduated. I think it is worth reading, as I can't believe how quickly the time passes. I know it is long but you would have to understand the player and his father, both intellectuals. Just to remind you just graduating parents and those who have just completed their first year how quickly it goes.
WAITING FOR OMAHA
"Time is a thief, diverting our attention to tomorrow in order to rob us of today, suggesting some future in one’s present paradise of imagination. You know, like Omaha.
College baseball is a superb foil for the thief of time, held as it is in idealistic reverence by its proponents, “the few, the proud.” More than perhaps any other sport in America, baseball is a state of mind, acquired in childhood and quickly taken as a right, just another lie of the thief. To play is a privilege, and a fleeting one. Like Wally Pipp, rarely are we aware we are not just taking time off, but have played our final game. It ends quickly for most, as roughly one percent of those who have played organized ball as children play in high school—then one percent of those play college. For the college player this may register as a present paradise, or a brutal subsistence, or both. Regardless it leads inexorably to the end of playing—or for that one percent to starting over as a serf in a congressionally-protected feudal society, where ballplayers are owned and shipped around North America, chiefly by bus, where the luckiest bet one third of their remaining athletic careers that the major league dream, and payday, may appear.
But College baseball players don’t think so much all about that. It’s about Omaha.
Yesterday Rice rode the bus into The Big Easy for a soggy, eleven-day purgatory (I’m not going to also do the CS Lewis thing, but that would be good), as we all begin to deal with competing regionals projections, ties to our supers partner, which bracket we will enjoy when we get there—to Omaha. We can survive a lost series to the GreenWave and still keep our national seed, can’t we? We need to get at least to the semis of the tournament? The finals? Or does it ultimately matter not at all, as our RPI is cemented in our mid-week successes, and once again C-USA has been a convenient conference championship (necessary) but relatively useless as a supplier of RPI, which is how we get to the top eight, so we can host twice, so we get the best shot…
Because Nothing Matters unless we get there, to Omaha, and thus Time steals today.
It all serves to recall the Samuel Beckett play, Waiting for Godot, once voted the most significant play of the 20th century, and actually Beckett’s translation of his own French play, written in 1948 at the height of French nihilism, where not even Omaha matters. Appropriately, we spend three hours of our time watching two characters waste their existence waiting for a Godot who never arrives.
ESTRAGON:
Charming spot. (He turns, advances to front, halts facing auditorium.) Inspiring prospects. (He turns to Vladimir.) Let's go.
VLADIMIR:
We can't.
ESTRAGON:
Why not?
VLADIMIR:
We're waiting for Godot.
ESTRAGON:
(despairingly). Ah! (Pause.) You're sure it was here?
VLADIMIR:
What?
ESTRAGON:
That we were to wait.
VLADIMIR:
He said by the tree. (They look at the tree.) Do you see any others?
Think of the Tree as Rosenblatt.
College Baseball is a Master Thief, a con man filling us with false hope that this can go on forever. Rice fans are the worst, along with only three or so programs in this decade, where Omaha is always on the horizon. It has become our birthright, we assume.
No, Omaha owns us.
High School doesn’t measure up. Remembering the end of our careers in 2004, me as a coach and fan, my son as the MVP of Orange County’s best team, we were ranked number 1 in the southern section of CIF and supposed to go all the way in playoffs. By then it had been a year since the fabled car ride from Vegas to Scottsdale where the two of us talked through six Led Zeppelin albums about college, academics, baseball, and life, to develop the athletic side of his mission statement: “Pitch in Omaha.”
Foothill HS lost, of course, to a team in tiny Santa Maria, 1-0, a seven inning game pitched by my son, a run scored on a daring send of a runner from second on a bounding ball fielded collectively by SS and LF—plus one wild throw. One of those high school things, you know?
It hurt, but not for long, and not much. We were going to Rice, to play for Omaha. That would be Paradise.
ESTRAGON:
What is it?
VLADIMIR:
I don't know. A willow.
ESTRAGON:
Where are the leaves?
VLADIMIR:
It must be dead.
ESTRAGON:
No more weeping.
VLADIMIR:
Or perhaps it's not the season.
ESTRAGON:
Looks to me more like a bush.
VLADIMIR:
A shrub.
ESTRAGON:
A bush.
It’s not really that pretty a place, Omaha. Downtown is more a suggestion than urban reality. Three blocks in old town are survivable, quaint but inelegant. The river is not the most stately, chiefly defining the route to the “real night life” in Council Bluffs. Right.
The stadium is long on “history” but short on comfort, revenue potential and other basic attributes that keep it in periodic danger of being replaced by NCAA or even the city fathers. The old dowager just escaped the long knives again in 2007.
But for ten days every year Omaha is the Present Paradise. We know; we’ve been there three times in the last five years. We can’t do without it. And now, once again, we wait. Nothing will suffice but the place itself. If we don’t go it will hurt, and that hurt will last.
Ask anybody around Reckling who suffered the sacrifice that was the 2004 regional, a team boasting THREE FIRST TEAM PRE-SEASON ALL-AMERICAN STARTING PITCHERS, the only time that has or ever will happen, yet they did not get to Omaha. Was it wonderful watching that year? Did people love it? Nobody ever talks about the good times of 2004. Everything is judged by Omaha.
Fast-forward to the right field bleachers of Pre-Katrina Turchin Stadium, with a bunch of precocious Rice rookies, including my own (trying to pitch with two broken ribs, because we’re a only week away from you-know-where), a team who had just knocked off a credible LSU crew at that hideous old Box, only to be rewarded with Micah Owings and the rest of the clan comprising the consensus #1 in the NCAA, Tulane. That Saturday win was so, so fine, a resounding punishment, almost as shocking to the locals as boiling water and crab boil.
But Sunday we lost, and then, Monday, we were leading with one out in the eighth before, well, you know. I tried to talk a lot about Super-Regionals stuff, sweet sixteen, Rice almost prevailing against #1, etc. But while March Madness teams in the “16” get congratulations, the question from casual fans that I remember from then was “how many go to Omaha?”
VLADIMIR:
A—. What are you insinuating? That we've come to the wrong place?
ESTRAGON:
He should be here.
VLADIMIR:
He didn't say for sure he'd come.
ESTRAGON:
And if he doesn't come?
VLADIMIR:
We'll come back tomorrow.
ESTRAGON:
And then the day after tomorrow.
VLADIMIR:
Possibly.
ESTRAGON:
And so on.
VLADIMIR:
The point is—
ESTRAGON:
Until he comes.
VLADIMIR:
You're merciless.
ESTRAGON:
We came here yesterday.
VLADIMIR:
Ah no, there you're mistaken.
ESTRAGON:
What did we do yesterday?
VLADIMIR:
What did we do yesterday?
ESTRAGON:
Yes.
VLADIMIR:
Why . . . (Angrily.) Nothing is certain when you're about.
ESTRAGON:
In my opinion we were here.
In my opinion we are once again here. This team didn’t have a reasonable expectation, until suddenly it did. I fully expected that in my son’s senior year, an unexpected gift in itself, that all this post-season hoopla wouldn’t carry as much weight. And with the draft in less than a month, his future is about to be determined by this theatre of the absurd. So what in the grand scheme of things is Omaha? It does matter as much.
But it does. Conference Tournament? Going? Well, would be fun, but tough. Mid-week, and not the Regionals. Those are important. Omaha, you know?
Do I leave work early in the event we get a game in today? Or very early tomorrow morning? You bet, because we gotta win. Omaha.
ESTRAGON:
I may be mistaken. (Pause.) Let's stop talking for a minute, do you mind?
VLADIMIR:
(feebly). All right. (Estragon sits down on the mound. Vladimir paces agitatedly to and fro, halting from time to time to gaze into distance off. Estragon falls asleep. Vladimir halts finally before Estragon.) Gogo! . . . Gogo! . . . GOGO!
Estragon wakes with a start.
ESTRAGON:
(restored to the horror of his situation). I was asleep! (Despairingly.) Why will you never let me sleep?
VLADIMIR:
I felt lonely.
ESTRAGON:
I had a dream.
VLADIMIR:
Don't tell me!
ESTRAGON:
I dreamt that—
VLADIMIR:
DON'T TELL ME!
ESTRAGON:
(gesture toward the universe). This one is enough for you? (Silence.) It's not nice of you, Didi. Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can't tell them to you?
VLADIMIR:
Let them remain private. You know I can't bear that."
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