That’s when dad came out with his two indelible words, said with the same authority of an old schoolmaster: “No Sooking.”
When draft day arrives it’s vital to know which players to target, and perhaps even more importantly, which ones to avoid. Who will give you consistent performance from day to day, and from year to year, and which ones will not? Who are baseball’s sooks, gimps and gamers?
When I was a wee lad my friend and me played soccer against our two dads in the backyard. While our only goal was to win, unbeknownst to us, our dads’ primary goal from match to match was to educate us on sportsmanship. They would “permit” us to win a game, but would then suddenly come storming back to take the next one.
At first, this left us in teary fetal balls on the worn out grass in front of our two measured out rocks. So, After we got over ourselves, we improvised – we would measure out our two rocks differently whenever we expected an onslaught, much to the unspoken head-shaking scorn and disappointment of our dear old dads. They said nothing. They simply let their “magic” do the talking, and still somehow managed to beat us, despite the new dimensions of our goal. What was happening to our once formidable team? Well, we were back on the ground moping, teary-eyed and fetal, once again.
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