My Year with the Houston Astros: Part 2

Elimination number: 128

Boiled down to the bones of it, it’s just you and the game. You try to exert your will, but you ultimately bend to its own. You are at the mercy of the game.  The Gods and the numbers have conspired against you. Your fate has been written.

Not many things are on your side. Your opponents aren’t on your side. The writers  are not particularly on your side. Recently, history has not been on your side. There are still some fans and some interested parties with a rooting interest in your achievements, but — now more than ever — you are alone in your journey.

Save for chance. Chance will always be your companion. Chance will not always be welcome, mind you. He will be fickle. Ground balls will grow eyes. Wind patterns will change. Umpires will miss calls. Chance will seem like your enemy.

But it is not always a parasite — a leach. Sometimes it will buy rounds all night. Chance knows that if it only took, and never gave, it would cease being itself. It would be something else. Damnation, perhaps.

Others seem to be in better graces with it. For some, it lays nothing but golden eggs. For you, it is as inefficient as a 100-year-old house.

But it still gives. It has too. It gave last night, for what it could. Chance doesn’t always come to aid at your greatest time of need, but it still comes.

Chance knows there is no Goliath without a David.