The Day Baseball Didn’t Help

For those of you who don’t know me in real life, I’m a certified school teacher and am in my first year with my current school district. I love my job and I love being able to write, so my professional life feels pretty good right now. With hot stove season in full force, I look forward to my school day and then coming home and turning on MLB Network to catch up on news. Yesterday was different.

I’m in a position that allows me to teach at several different schools during the school year, so I have met many students and fellow teachers this year. One of my classes is a pre-K class, ages 4-5, and I dare say they are my favorite group. Recently, we had been preparing them for their first fire drill and lock down drill that was to occur before their Christmas break next Friday. They had a bunch of questions about why we needed to have lock down drills and this was before Friday’s events.  Now I’m stuck thinking about what we will have to tell them over the coming week. I’m stuck hoping my students will want to come back to school and will trust that they are safe. Baseball just doesn’t feel important to me right now.

Baseball has been a therapy of sorts for me. If I have a weird or bad day, talking or watching baseball usually helps, but it took a lot for me to snap out of my thoughts and discuss baseball with a couple of friends last night. It just didn’t cross my mind, which is rare during this time of the off-season. Yesterday was just one of those days to pause and just think about what happened and deal with the emotions that come with such a tragedy. Even if you have much older children than elementary age or just have nieces/nephews who you see every so often, I’m sure it still made you think about them yesterday.

I hope the Rangers can make a couple of moves and bolster the lineup and/or rotation if possible, but for the moment, I want to encourage everyone to reflect and hug any children that are directly in your life at this time. Maybe next week will be a better time for talking baseball and maybe we’ll have good news to share with the fans.

** If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading and allowing me to get my thoughts out there. I hope everyone enjoys the holidays and Go Rangers!