By Jack Limpert
Reading the last grafs of this Tom Boswell column in the Washington Post was a reminder of the fun the New Yorker has had over the years with newsbreaks called “Block That Metaphor.” I sent it to a fellow baseball fan who said of Boswell, “The downside of a Harvard education spent at Fenway Park.” Good line but Boswell graduated from Amherst.
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When driving a car, if you start to lose control, you’re taught to turn the wheel in the direction of the skid. Everybody learns it. In a hairy moment, not everybody can do it. In baseball, when a team starts to go into a skid—and everybody can feel that slide just as clearly as tires spinning on ice—the natural instinct is to snap the wheel back to straight ahead, fight the approaching slump,
In other words, do everything wrong. Perhaps the definition of a “veteran” is someone who has gotten to the point where he can instinctively turn into the skid for an instant—against his first impulse.
“Big picture, things are good for us,” Storen said of the Nationals. “But you can’t hide in this game. There are going to be bad periods. The train is moving, and you’ve got to ride it.
“Things are only as tough as you make them in your mind. We’re a veteran team. It’s going be okay. The tide turns quick.”
That’s all fine. Just as long as the last 10 games aren’t a rip tide.
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