And, hey, I'm happy to be here. After being a top prospect and number-six overall pick, the ceiling fell in on my career, and I had to journey through illness, obscurity and the Joliet Slammers to find my way to the big leagues. Those small city teams that name themselves after a local employer can seem fun from the outside looking in, but it just serves to remind itinerant ballplayers, often drifting like myself to a team back where near they grew up, how close they are to their post-baseball lives, trying to fit into some grind of a local economic niche for the rest of their lives. What I'm saying is, yeah, if I was dealt one more bad card, yeah, I might have been a jailkeeper.
But that's not where I'm at now. Yeah, I'm so fringey that I'm pretty sure that all four shots below come from the same game, and there's a non-zero chance that they all come from the same pitch. But I'm a lefthanded Syracuse Met who is sometimes a lefthanded New York Met and that's proof that we have some control over our fates. But you, good reader, have a better view than most of where the fates will take me next. I wind, and I pitch, but where the ball is going to end up is what I'm asking you.
