Opening Day

I have a bone to pick with a man named Sam Holbrook. Now, Sam and I have never met. He wouldn't know me from Adam. It's entirely unfair of me to carry around this grudge. And yet here we are, opening week of the 2013 Major League Baseball season and I am still a bit hung up on the way 2012 ended, and it has more than just a bit to do with Sam Holbrook. Last year, my team, the Atlanta Braves, lost the first one-game playoff series in baseball history. In the eighth inning they were trailing the St. Louis Cardinals 6-3 when Atlanta shortstop Andrelton Simmons lofted an easy fly ball into shallow left field with men already on first and second base. Just as the ball landed unexpectedly--and, one might argue, providentially--on the ground between two apparently confused Cardinals, Holbrook signaled to invoke the Infield Fly Rule. Now if you don't know what the Infield Fly Rule is, don't worry, you are in the company of many a professed fan of the game, and as our luck would have it, at least one of its umpires. Suffice to say that in Sam Holbrook's hands, a rule that normally protects the hitting team instead ended Atlanta's best hope for a rally and, by extension, their season; and so even with the new season here, I admit that I do carry a bit of a grudge. Of course I am sure that Sam is a lovely man with whom I would get along smashingly were our paths to cross in any other circumstance, which is why it's vitally important that we not actually meet. The part of me that nurses this grudge, the part of me that wears it proudly as a badge of fandom, the part of me that could just as easily show you the dozen other wounds that twenty-odd-years of Braves baseball have inflicted--that part of me needs an occasional villain, and until further notice, Sam Holbrook will do nicely.