Baseball as a metaphor for life

Just got back from a friends house. Good meal, good conversation, and a good movie. Overall a very enjoyable evening after a long week. The best part however was the movie although the food was incredible in its own right! Tonight we watched Bull Durham. I've seen it plenty of times and am really surprised it isn't in our DVD collection.

The thing I like about the movie is the play on life. Tim Robbins is a gifted athlete but stupid. Kevin Costner is a good ballplayer but not gifted enough to make it in the bigs, although he has had his cup of coffee (to use the baseball term for saying he played in the major leagues but only for a very short (in his case 21 days) time). Susan Sarrandon plays the love interest but is really the glue that keeps the movie together. She sees the future in both players although you don't get the impression it is real clear in her mind. She knows that Robbins will only be there a short time and she knows that Costner is just there to help out Robbins but isn't quite sure about what happens to him after Robbin's leaves. At the same time it's telegraphed almost from the beginning that Sarrandon and Costner are going to be together in the end but the interplay between the two is witty and well written. So in the end Robbins ends up in the bigs. Costner... well he gets let go from the minor league club but it is suggested (from the beginning of the movie) that he is going to become a coach. Sarrandon meanwhile sees herself as being the odd man out and thinks Costner is going to dump her. Instead... he tells her that he plans on hearing her weird opinions for a long time to come.

So why do I say the movie is a metaphor for life? Well I look at the deeper meaning of the movie as saying that we are all good at something. In this case some are athletes and some are not. At the same time we have to give a shot at our dreams. When you think of baseball players the quantity that play at the professional level is pretty large. At the same time the percentage that make it to "the show" is pretty small. I look at my time in television (not really trying to make this a television post) and say that I made it at the professional level but things along the way changed my direction and my plans of becoming the next big reporter or photographer had to be set aside. I sit here working now at a business almost 180 degrees different then television. That isn't a bad thing... Just a change from where I saw myself when I started down my professional career.

The moral of the story? well life is about transition. What appears to be a pretty straight road to travel has unexpected forks and stop signs. We can dwell on what we might have been... or we can head down the new path and find new adventures.