The Pecan Park Eagle

(2) Buyer’s Regret is a condition that multiplies exponentially for club owners and general managers of cellar-dwelling teams. If you have somewhere along the way signed a 200-pound outfielder to a multi-year contract to hit .300, but you now find him on the way to weighing 300 pounds, while hitting .200, you’re going to be much more aware of this inversely developing set of facts as a cellar-dweller.

(3) The players on your cellar-dwelling 25-man roster suffer from one of two immediately incurable conditions: They are either too young or two old.

(4) Over time, and it doesn’t take many losing streaks to get there, your cellar-dwelling players stop thinking of ways to win – and they start asking themselves in the field, by the second inning at the latest: “I wonder how we’re going to lose this one? All I can do is try to get my hits and stay out of the way of disaster. If I’m lucky, maybe they’ll trade me to a contender late in the season.”

(5) Your stalwart pitching ace may become disheartened by the absence of support over time and start thinking these kinds of thoughts prior to each start: “OK, I’ve got a chance to win, if I can keep the other team from scoring, if my defense only has to make routine plays, and if I can either pitch a whole game, or else, turn the ball over to the pen with no less than a four-run lead to protect.”

(6) The other clubs above the cellar dwellers all start looking more and more like the ’27 Yankees and you start hearing these kinds of comments off the cuff from some of the guys: “Uh-Oh! The Pirates are coming to town tonight. Hate to see it. They are starting to play us like we’re the eggs and they are the egg-beaters!”

(7) On cellar dwelling clubs, players start talking about post-season hunting and fishing plans by the First of June. Of course, in this instance, except for the Yankees, even the front-running clubs are doing the same thing. In New York, the players are talking more about their international business plans and how playing ball sometimes gets in the way of keeping an eye on their global industries and celebrity girl friends. Cellar dwelling club players don’t have celebrity girl friends – not for long, anyway.

(8) In homage to humility, cellar dwelling managers eventually get around to using something like a table of random numbers as a strategy for making out new lineup combinations. Eventually the goal of coming up with a winning lineup simply mutates into the challenge of finding a different lineup for every game that remains on the schedule from August 1st forward.

(9) By late August, cellar dwellers have figured out that they can finish last without the presence of any high-salaried players who remain on the roster. Anybody whose performance has not totally stunk is then traded as a cost-saving strategy for addressing the big and growing red-dollar deficit on the club’s profit and loss statement.

(10) Cellar dwellers eventually settle in to a nice quiet season play-out with their few remaining loyal fans who still attend games in person. These fans always show up, but they never boo, as was the case long ago with a famous cellar dwelling team we once knew as the St. Louis Browns before they moved to Baltimore and morphed into the Orioles in 1954.

”Our fans never booed us,” said former Browns pitching ace Ned Garver. “They wouldn’t dare boo us,” he added, “we outnumbered ‘em!”

Have a nice weekend, everybody, and stay away from the cellar, unless you’re going down there for some good wine.