I wonder if guys like Craig Kimbrel are excited today. About to get traded to a contender, potentially going to be a hero, potentially going to get to know a new city and new fanbase and new teammates, have done it before so perhaps some of the anxiety is gone…but maybe not. Maybe it just sucks. Maybe Craig Kimbrel’s feeling sad.
The potentially-getting-traded aspect of a career as a baseball player has to be hard, and it has to be especially hard for guys like Anthony Rizzo, who really seemed destined to spend the rest of his career in Chicago once 2016 turned out the way it did. I’d imagine the Cubs are keeping him updated, but I wonder what it feels like, and little things like this seeming note from his dad would lead one to believe Anthony Rizzo is pretty darn sad and/or anxious right now, and I know this is the second time talking about Rizzo’s headspace in the last couple weeks, but the saga just feels so personal, especially for a guy who really did wear his heart on his sleeve during a lot of moments during his tenure here. Is he actually going to get traded? I don’t know. His dad seems to think so, but I played Little League with a lot of guys who thought their kids were going to be on the Red Sox and none of those kids ended up on the Red Sox, so what do dads know?
And Kris Bryant—sudden Zen master Kris Bryant—he’s always seemed a little more capable of being guarded, but you also wonder if he’s just such a naturally even-keel guy that we’re seeing the real him at all times, and if the growing anxiety he’s communicated, the weariness, the sadness, if that’s going to come out today or tomorrow if/when it happens, like when Yu Darvish got gutted for the world to see upon his trade from Texas to Los Angeles.
I guess there’s something comforting in the idea that Bryant and Rizzo are together in this, two guys who really seem to love each other (with Bryant especially expressing that love for Rizzo in recent weeks), that they’re probably sitting in the same room right now, each with one of his closest friends, each with someone who’s been at their side through some of the best and worst moments of lives that, while not entirely baseball-centric (I’m not going to pretend Anthony Rizzo’s worst moments have come in the baseball sphere given, you know, cancer and, well, Parkland), revolve heavily around baseball. That they’re together, that they’re going through it together, that they—from what we can guess from our limited perspective that may or may not be accurate—have each other.
This’ll all feel so much better in fifteen or twenty years. Right? There’ll be a big reunion one day of that 2016 team, and Rizzo’ll carry the trophy out again, and they’ll play the clip of Bryant fielding that grounder and throwing it to his friend, and we’ll sit upon the joy of that moment and the joy of that 2015 rise and the thrill of that 2017 rally and NLDS and we won’t think about the Tony Wolters game in ’18 or the Cardinals series with Rizzo’s bum ankle in ’19 or laying down against the Marlins in ’20 or that awful set in Milwaukee this summer and everything will feel good again…right? But even that feels uncertain, because this is so personal, and you wonder what bridges are burnt or burning, and you think about the hardest moments in your own life and for reasons unknown to you there’s a married couple two tables over from you at the coffeeshop right now and they just signed a bunch of papers and now one’s crying and the other’s holding them, and you wonder what two baseball players a thousand miles away are going through, two guys that have been such a big presence in your world through this odd thing that is professional sports.
And you feel kind of silly saying it, but you hope they’re ok. You hope they’re both ok. You hope they’re all ok. And you know you don’t know them, but you love the thems you know, and you hope they know how loved they are, in case it makes any difference.
We’ll see. Harder for them than us.
