BYB REFLECTS ON THE FOURTH OF JULY

"Life moves pretty fast. You don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” 
--Ferris Bueller


  

I have lived for 40 years and baseball has been apart of it for about 35 of those years.  When you put it like that, I’m either the biggest baseball nerd ever or just a passionate fan of the game.  It's days like this that I like to sit and reflect about life and what it means.  Many of my memories are baseball related, after all, there are life lessons you pick up on a baseball field. But the greatest moments have nothing to do with any of that.  Not the Yankees, not the game, just life.

The Fourth of July has everything to do with America and if we didn’t have our independence and freedom, you wouldn’t be reading this.  We sure as hell wouldn’t be free and would never have seen Dave Righetti’s no hitter back in 1983, but more than that, we wouldn’t be doing much of anything that we wanted to do.

 America is the greatest country in the world.  When I think about what our troops do to protect us every day, you can’t help to just look at your children and want to hold them tight and never let go.  My 9 year old, who's going on 17,tends to be tricky…hearing him say “stop!” and break away from a hug to go play with his friends on the baseball diamond is something I’ve come to accept and he and my boys know how crazy my wife and I are of them. In the end, my kids know we love them but we want them to have alittle space as well. It's our perfect balance of parenting. 

So you ask, Why do I know they know we love them? Because whenever my oldest is playing in one of his games and he gets that key hit or a key strikeout while he's pitching, he’ll turn and smile at me through his Bryce Harper eye black. That's all I need sometimes... That's family…that’s freedom.

I may have not been the most traveled guy in the world, maybe not the most educated or smartest ever, but I may have the best family in the world, and I'm pleased with that accomplishment. As parents, we try to raise our kids not to make foolish choices that we may have made growing up, yet, they’ll most likely make them anyway and guess what… that’s the learning curve.  Luckily, we’ve been there before so we work through it.  Without freedom, you can’t make mistakes and learn from them. Without freedom, our family doesn't have choices...think about it that way.

So what’s this all about? Love, life, family…freedom.
  

It’s the Fourth of July today.  Enjoy the day, have fun, be safe and think about life for a moment.  Reflect.  It’s the greatest thing you have and we have our independence to thank for that.

And to all of the brave US troops around the world...God Bless you...  and thanks.

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