Foresight is blind.
David Ortiz is an established veteran. He’s also, suddenly, an unproven rookie. After a tumultuous 2009, the Boston Red Sox DH can’t afford to take anything for granted in 2010—which would be worse news if taking things for granted hadn’t always been the essence of earthly folly.
Clairvoyance means pretending that you can really see the future in a crystal ball.
Candor, on the other hand, means admitting that you can only glimpse the present through a dusty glass.
I’m not suggesting that Ortiz doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. His power numbers rebounded in the second half of ’09, and there’s ample reason to believe he still has a few big swings left in his bat. But let’s not confuse faith with fact. In a league where no game is over until it’s over, it’s silly to say too much about a season that hasn’t even begun.
Unhatched hens don’t cluck.
Unhit homers don’t count.
If there’s a moral to the Ortiz saga, it’s simply that you shouldn’t write a story until you know the conclusion.
The sports blogosphere is full of wannabe fortune-tellers. Previews and predictions, projections and prognostications—they’re probes into darkness, products of nothing more enlightened than dimly-educated guesswork. The problem, of course, is that speculation invariably betrays ignorance. Determinists will argue that Ortiz’s destiny can be calculated using the right series of data points. I’d counter that even the most determined human calculator is destined to choose the wrong set of digits.
Uncertainty is bad.
Overconfidence is worse.
Ortiz may regain his old form this spring, but for now his rebirth is just a theory waiting to be tested.
Fate defies all forecasts. Today is an inevitable moment; tomorrow is an unfathomable mystery. David Ortiz will reach the end of the road whenever he finishes his journey, at a pace that can’t yet be measured and a place that can’t yet be mapped. Our mortal intellect perceives reality as a progression of sequential instants. What that means for our mortal intuition is a puzzle soothsayers and Sox supporters will have to solve on their own.
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You won't find many baseball tips in the Sermon on the Mount, but there's no shortage of pointers on how to break a slump:
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Which is sage advice for a slugger seeking redemption.
Because life happens one at-bat at a time, and any man who speaks with conviction in the on-deck circle is either trying to sell you Fantasy Draft tips or only just saying, is all...
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