Humility

After listening to this afternoon's game while working on a major editing project, I thought about something George Will said on last week's Baseball Prospectus Radio. He said that, when he was writing Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, the one thing that he found both surprising and impressive was that he never once heard anyone who had played the game of baseball brag in the way that, say, Terrell Owens brags. Will thinks that this is because baseball is so difficult, and failure in baseball is so much more common than success, that the game tends to enforce a certain humility on those who play it, including its most successful performers.

If that's true of ballplayers, it also ought to be true of bloggers and others who write about the game as if they have it all figured out. Just when you think you know all there is to know, something happens like this Brewers series. Before this series, I was certain that the Brewers and Pirates were polar opposites: a team with a promising future run by smart guys who made smart decisions...and us. I know that this was only four games, and bad teams sweep good teams all the time, but still...

As a Pirates fan first and blogger second, though, I'm happy to sacrifice my certainty about what ails the Pirates for victories as sweet as this one.