This is what I love about baseball.
I was sitting in a meeting on Tuesday. We have a meeting every Tuesday from 1:30 - 3:00. But this day was different This Tuesday was Game 4 of the NLCS. A day game. A 1:05 start. And I was in a meeting.
For most of the games since the playoffs started, I've sat in front of the TV at game time, sat on the edge of my seat with a knot in my stomach; almost 50 years of baseball passion stuck firmly in my throat. My heart pounds. My palms sweat. I suffer through every last pitch.
And I swear a lot.
But I was in a meeting and it was game time and I had to improvise. I set my iPhone to silent and I watched the text messages and updates come across my screen. And I tried not to swear.
I work in a homeless shelter. A place filled with people to whom life hasn't been so kind. People whose days are often hard. Where struggles are a part of daily life.
These are the have-nots of our society. Isolated and alone, they have been left behind by family and friends. They are invisible.
At the end of the hallway in Classroom 2, a group of residents gathered around the television. Strangers bound together by their lot in life. Men, women, old and young, they are a rag tag bunch of castoffs. They spend their days trying to right what has gone wrong, riding the bus to keep appointments, making phone calls to find housing and trying to find their way in world that hasn't always been kind.
But it was Tuesday afternoon, and it was Game 4 of the NLCS, and at this exact moment they were hooting and hollaring and carrying on like nobody's business.
For just a moment on a Tuesday afternoon there were no have-nots, no feelings of self doubt, of being alone or different, no fears about the future. In that exact moment on a Tuesday afternoon, they were just regular folks, a handful of baseball fans sitting together, cheering on their team.
In that exact moment, there was just a whole lot of happy.
