I think that people just like being pessimistic and depressed. There's something to be said for being realistic, but you can be realistically optimistic. What on earth am I talking about? Baseball projections.
All the projections are predicting a terrible season for the Tigers this year. But not just this year, no, Tigers fans are being told to buckle their seatbelts for several years of heartbreak. I am so frustrated by this for several reasons.
The standard line for the past few years has been that the Tigers are too old; we're an aging team. Guess what? We're young now, and suddenly it's an issue. Which is it? Are young teams good or bad? This is what I'm saying; these people will never be satisfied. We had a team of veterans and youngsters, but we were "too old" and that was a problem, if you listen to the writers. Now, we have a team where the veterans include James McCann and Nick Castellanos (who only have four or so years each under their belts). It's a little weird, to be sure, but hey! We're young now. This is good, right?
Apparently not. I mean, it's good to get young, but that also means that we have to wait for the guys to grow and mature (become veterans) before we'll be any good. But hold on? At that point, who wants to guess what the narrative will become? Right! That we're getting "too old". And the cycle repeats.
Let's tackle this idea that a young team has several years of tough knocks to endure. I take you back in time to 2014, when the Royals went to the World Series. Everyone was talking about how many young guys were on that team. Sixteen of players on their roster were 25 or younger. Their average age was 31.5 years old. Looking at that team, they were a great mix of youth, prime, and seasoned veterans. The next year, when they won the WS, fourteen of their players were 25 or younger, but their average age was 30.3.
How about the Cubs from 2016? All anyone was talking about was their youth! Twenty of their players were 25 and younger and their average age was 29.4 years old. Tell me again that young teams can't do well.
I'm not saying that I think we'll win the World Series this year. I'm not even saying that we'll make the playoffs. This is where realistic optimism comes in. No one wants to set themselves up for disappointment. A lot of our players this year are relatively unproven. So we really can't say one way or another how they'll do, because we just don't know. That drives a lot of people nuts, so they just say we'll be awful to keep expectations low. I get that. I'm not expecting a postseason run. But I do expect us to play well. I'm hopeful for a winning season.
If you build hopes up too high, you'll be destroyed when things crash. But if you don't hope at all, how is that any way to go through a season, much less life? People swing from one extreme to another. I try to live in the middle, with realistic optimism.
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