How best to deal with loss?

Dodgers 3 Tigers 0 (Series)

Perhaps we allow our hopes and dreams to last too long, and with their dissolution we are left lacking. As though we were only an embossment bearing a decal that never arrived or was left out.

This was the figment that shadowed the Arizona Diamondbacks for three days. Each game seemed to have moments of déjà vu, extra innings, last minute heroics, pitching successes and grave errors. I found myself at two of the three games, but after the fourteenth inning marathon finally ended my cabinet of advisors were very satisfied, and who wouldn’t be? Three wins and half a game out of first…at least until the San Diego game is over.

Perhaps a pessimist might look at the coming schedule and say that extra innings and near failures and errors like the one Arizona second baseman Kelly Johnson made to allow two runs to score in the eighth inning are all signs that the Dodgers are in fact finding themselves winded and faltering at the end of a great sprint that has left them looking hungry and mean, and some of them are! But not all of them. In years past Garret Anderson would have just crushed that looping line drive to center field that won game three of the series, Manny Ramirez would be playing the last game of a home stand against a basement team just because he felt like swinging a bat, and Joe Torre would have the presence of mind to know that even if Arizona manager Jim Leyland isn’t going to try the squeeze play he’s better off with Belisario pitching to an eight armed monster that bats left and right at the same time. But these are all conjectures made on imperfect incomplete and horribly inarticulate logic.

The truth could be that in fact Garret Anderson, or any hitter at all might have been lucky to get wood on that fourteenth inning pitch, and Manny is actually nursing a bruised hand after colliding with the wall on that fabulous catch in game two of the series, and Torre may know that Belisario stubbed his toe on his patio in Silverlake the other day and every thrust off the pitchers plate is pure agony, but we’ll never really truly know.

What we do know is that Armando Galarraga has learned something about loss. On the verge of being a big part of baseball history, on the verge of being the third pitcher in a month to pitch a perfect game, something that has never been done in one season much less a single month of baseball, and yet we are left wanting. Jim Joyce feels bad, no doubts there, but do we know what we’ve missed? It’s not as riveting as watching big armed boys beat baseballs out of the park, but it’s something. Perhaps it’s not so vile a thing that the Dodgers had to have two extra-inning games that ended in 1-0 scores two games in a row given the apparent level of pitching expertise. On the other hand all this hub-bub about steroids may actually be paying off and high fly balls may actually be just that, fly balls. Either way, I’m glad to watch it all go down because I’ve certainly learned something about loss.

Would we play the game if it didn't but annex for us at least one microscopic second in the infinitum of that which we will lose more of than any other thing, time?