Hello there! Perhaps you recognize me? You’ll often see Joe Girardi, manager of the New York Yankees, bent over me in the team’s dugout, flipping through my pages and perusing my invaluable information.
You know, they say experience is the teacher of all things. That’s what Joe has me for. I hold all the past experience he requires to make the appropriate decisions regarding various game situations, such as who should bat against who and who he should bring in from the bullpen in certain situations.
Who cares if information ascertained in the midst of summer heat is not necessarily applicable in the midst of the October chill of the pressure-packed playoffs?
My repeated counsels to Girardi to put David Robertson in the game has become a topic of much derision.
What! must I hold a candle to my shames?
Truth is truth to the end of reckoning. Putting Robertson in was not a sin! Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful. Fortune, which has a great deal of power in other matters but especially in baseball, can bring about great changes in a situation through very slight forces.
It matters not that Robertson pitched to a 20.25 ERA in his four appearances, bad fortune does not make a decision incorrect. In hindsight, those of less knowledge can strike forth at me for if to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.
Now all blame for this appalling defeat falls on my shoulders, a binder who spent his formative years on the shelves at Oxford!
Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit and lost without deserving. So now I have borne this reputation of evil without deserving.
Still have I borne it with an ancient shrug, for sufferance is the badge of all our tribe. You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog and spit upon my binding. And all for use of that which is mine own.
How am I then a villain. To counsel Girardi to this parallel course, directly to his good?
Of course my pages contained no common sense. It said nothing of the fact that Dustin Moseley had pitched two no-hit innings against the Rangers in Game 1, striking out four in the process.
A fatal flaw indeed!
To be a slave to reason and unfettered by the better parts of passion is a curse of binders, as we are a most academic lot.
I, who am not shaped for sportive tricks, nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; I, that am rudely stamped, and want love’s majesty to strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, cheated of feature by dissembling nature, deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, and that so lamely and unfashionable that dogs bark at me as I’m placed before them.
Who am I kidding? This heinous defeat is all my fault!
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale and every tale condemns me for a villain.
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me; and if I die, no soul will pity me: nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself find in myself no pity to myself?
I pray you, in your letters, when you shall these unlucky deeds relate, speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice: then, must you speak of one that advised not wisely but too well.
The die is cast.
Demand me nothing: what you know, you know: from this time forth I never will speak word.
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