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COMING UP SHORT...GROCERS FALL IN SERIES
I've been tasked with writing a retrospective on the first season of Brattleboro Grocers baseball and I'm not really sure how to take you back to what this team has done to me.
Imagine for a second you are living your life, boring and pedestrian as it may be. Then all of a sudden, somebody offers you this gift. A lifeline. Players. Friends. FAMILY.
Sam Dillard will never buy a drink for as long as he lives anywhere within a 300 mile radius of Brattleboro, Vermont. All he has to do is flash that ****-eating grin because we ALL KNOW WHAT HE DID. His home run in Game 6 of the NLCS literally made me break my remote because I was beyond happy. This team was so well constructed.
We were so confused at first when the year started. I mean, there were so many unknowns.
"They're move a baseball team here?" "Don't they know there's no one here?" "IT IS SNOWING OUTSIDE AND IT IS FEBRUARY"
Yet they actually showed up. And they didn't just show up, they came to play.
So many of these guys have become my favorite players of all time just seeing them carry themselves on the field day-in and day out and wear our colors proudly. Harry van der Kolk, Troxler, Jo-Mo, Danny Z, Amari Haynes. If they ever let J.J. Sinclair leave here as a free agent, we're going to burn down the stadium.
No, we didn't it all. But we got something better. In some ways, them losing gives us more to hope for. It gives us a reason to come back. I don't ever want us to forget what its like to be here, right now. We didn't have a team, we got a team and they kicked ass for us. I just can't even begin to think about what next year will be like, but I'm going to enjoy this one for a while.
We used to think it was weird at first that they named the team the Grocers because how much more boring could you get? But as the year went on, we started really embracing the name.
