Expectation Management: Postseason and Personal Edition

Update on the Oct/Nov Group Break scheduled for this afternoon. All systems go!
Truth be told watching the Rays the past few nights has been tough but, as the title implies, this is as much a problem with my expectations as with the Rays' performance. I think the Rays should go out and ROLL the O's and KC, especially guys like Millwood and Chen, but they got shut out. Why knows why? My grief has a lot  more to do with what I expect at this point in the season versus what I expected in March. If you had told me then the Rays would have been assured a playoff spot and be battling for the Division Title on the last weekend of the season I'd have said, "Bring it on!" Of course now that those things have come to pass I'm greedy. I want them to win it all and do so now, $$@$ it!

As linguistic monkeys we're a lot like that as a species. We won't admit it but we expect things despite the fact outcomes may/may not be uncertain. We might say we plan for the worst and hope for the best but, more often than not, we entertain thoughts of the worst to inoculate us against it actually happening, as if fantasizing about a worst case scenario somehow assured us that it would never happen.

Which leads me finally to this: I want to apologize to all the folks with whom I've been in and out of touch over the past couple of months, group break participants in particular. I'm sure this is too much info, especially for a blog on baseball cards, but the compa had a miscarriage a couple of months ago. It was one of those events where, even though we both knew there are no guarantees a given pregnancy will come to term, the expectation was, of course, that it would. We were pretty unprepared for a negative outcome and it's taken me these months to get my head back straight.

Good news, of course, is that I'm back! Things are good, I'm catching up on business, looking forward to the postseason and getting back to things.

Go Rays!