Friday, Apr. 15, 2005
"Pep" talk, posted at 7:37 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com This really hurts, doesn't it? It sucks. It stings. We're going to feel this one for a while...I'm furious right now. Pissed off, furious. Furious at this game, which we should have won. I'm already replaying it in my mind, and am getting more and more furious. I'm going to own this anger tonight. I'm going to go home, rethink my decisions tonight, rethink how the game was played, and rethink our approach tonight. That's what we're all going to do. None of us is happy right now. We're all pissed off, we're all upset. This losing sucks. It's rotten, especially such a close game. A few plays here and there, we would have won. One key hit when we loaded the bases. One less walk. But it didn't happen. We made mistakes, we fought hard, and we came back... and we still lost. That sucks.
So I'm going to go home tonight and feel rotten. I'm going to evaluate every decision that I made, and every play that I called. Maybe if I didn't send Josh home that inning, or maybe if I didn't pull the infield in in the last inning, things would be different. You all should do the same. Where did we lose it? Baseball is a game of moments, and we won a lot of our moments today, but we lost too many of them. I'm going to own my anger, and that's it.
Then, tomorrow, I'm going to clear my head. I'm going to remember that it's just a fucking game, and there's not a fucking thing we can do about anything that happened yesterday. I'm going to remember that we all learned something and can take something from the loss. I'm going to remember the moments that do shine through: the clutch hits folks like Marcus and Josh and Jarrod had, the solid pitching performances, the best defense we've seen this year.
Sunday, I'm going to be looking ahead. I'm going to remember that we've got some games to win next week and we need to figure out what is going to happen in practice today to make sure we play to the best of our ability. And on Monday, I'm going to back here at 3:30, ready to start fresh, and ready to get our victory against another tough team, ____________, on Tuesday. And we're going to learn from this game today and move on. It will hurt tonight - it should - but tomorrow is a new day and next week is a new week. There's nothing more to say. This fucking sucks, but it will get better. We head into the __________ with a .600 winning percentage. That's not too bad. The week was a bad one, but we've got to come back from it. And we will.
***
That was my speech tonight after a heart-breaking loss tonight. We were ahead 6-4 heading into the last inning, and we lost 8-6. It really sucks. I'm thinking about staying in and eating cereal tonight.
At least I have this to cheer me up (speaking of baseball).