The Futility Infielder

The newlyweds Mr. and Mrs. Jaffe are back from their spectacular honeymoon in Florence and Venice, Italy. We had a wonderful time; the weather -- 70-80 degrees and sunny during the day, with nary a drop of rain to dampen our spirits -- was perfect, the food -- at least in Florence -- was amazing, the wine flowed freely, the accommodations were outstanding, and even the dollar, which has been more or less getting its ass kicked since the advent of the euro, was about 10 percent stronger than on our Paris/London trip last summer.

But by the eighth day of our ten-day trip, our sightseeing -- at a more hectic pace than we'd promised ourselves -- began to take its toll. The churches, piazzas, crucifixion frescoes, and Madonnas-with-child began to blur together, the chintzy glassware, high prices (screw the 100 euro gondola rides that are "mandatory" for such romantic-themed trips; we couldn't be bothered) and tourist traps grated on our nerves, the Venetian canals and confusing maze of alleys drained our mental energy. When Mrs. Jaffe's stunning blue eyes began to well up with tears as she told me she needed a vacation from our vacation, I knew there was no shame in my secret yearning for the grid and the grit of New York City.

More than anything besides orderly street numbering, I missed baseball, subsisting at best on a thin gruel of two-day-old line scores in the International Herald Tribune. I missed my electronic conduit to the game, my Internet pals who make following the bouncing balls so much fun. Keeping a very low profile, I checked my email a couple of times, mostly to prevent my inbox from overflowing with junk mail, dropped by this site to read the kind words my visitors had left, skimmed Under the Knife, Bronx Banter, and Dodger Thoughts for quick fixes on the sly. And I yearned for the time I could kick back on the couch with a cold brew and a ballgame, whether to watch the surging Yankees or the struggling Dodgers, those two teams having reversed course since the point at which I went into turbo-wedding mode.

I've been saying for the past ten years that you know you live in the right place when you look forward to coming home from a vacation, and in my case that rings true even for a milestone event such as my honeymoon. With my return, the circus that has dominated my life for the past year is leaving town, and while I'm grateful that such a momentous occasion is now in the rearview (and perhaps a bit sad that I won't be so much a center of attention for awhile -- how else can I get a hundred and sixty people, not to mention a three-piece band, to humor my vocalized rendition of "Ring of Fire"?), I'll now have considerably more energy to devote to my writing and the rest of my work. I've got a slew of projects -- for Futility Infielder, Baseball Prospectus, and beyond -- that have been back-burnered for too long and I'm excited to dig in.

One of the advantages of traveling abroad is the opportunity to step back from the everyday mindset one falls into as a citizen of the U.S. As I explored the cradle of the Renaissance, I was reminded of how often our dearly held beliefs turn out to look ridiculous, even malevolently so, years or centuries later when new discoveries are made and the light of reason and truth outshines those Dark-Aged dogmas. There are a host of political parallels I could offer, particularly in this polarized environment, but there's plenty to which that applies even in the baseball sphere. I'm looking forward to spreading a bit of that good light around.