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silveradept[This is part of a series exploring the Baseball Tarot. If you would like to prompt for a part of the game or a card from the deck, all the rest of the month is available for your curiosity, about either baseball or Tarot. Leave a comment with a prompt if you want in. All other comments are still welcome, of course.]
The Suit of Bases represent practical concerns, standing in contrast to Bats that are all about action, Balls that prefer contemplation, and Mitts that prioritize sentiment. The actual bases are immobile, and their unchanging nature provides definition for the field of play, the strike zone, and the intermediate and final goals of the offense and defense. The bases are useful to both offense and defense, used both to put runners out and provide them safety, however temporary it may be. They are both hotly contested territory and otherwise unremarkable - four plain squares and a pentagon. Bases are essential to the scoring of runs, and to the prevention of runs being scored. If there is any entity that the bases can be said to belong to, it is the umpires, whose calls at the bases determine which side will be helped by their use. Like the umpires, the bases are not concerned with the players, but with the game. As such, they are the unit of measure that many statistical categories use in determining the value of particular players.
One does not simply wave a bat, throw a ball, or place fielders and their mitts haphazardly and expect to be able to collect or defend bases. Every now and then, coincidences happen where random placement and decisions do produce positive results for one team or the other, but most teams, managers, and players have a big plan that they understand their role in and their own individual plan for how this at-bat or even this pitch will go. Even if what actually happens is very different than what the plan was anticipating, there is a plan in place. The practicalities of taking bases demands it.
This extends well beyond the baseball field. Many of the players entering this level of a professional sport league are going to have a lot more money available to them than they would have previously. Or those that land a breakout acting role, have their startup bought out for ridiculous amounts of money, perform the statistical improbability of winning the lottery game or other gambling ventures, or some other windfall, obtained through skill or luck, that increases the available money significantly. It's very tempting to use that money to fulfill wishes and whims and to try things that would never otherwise be available. Some of that will make us happier, at least in the short term. Sometimes the details of those things ends up in the news, in stories usually grouped as being about "hookers and blow" - the ability to circumvent normal social conventions and prohibitions with money. And when all of that is done, they find themselves having spent the money without having any of it for later so that they can sustain the wealth. A lack of planning (or hiring someone who can make a plan) prevented the long-term benefits of financial security. By not paying attention to the practical matters, the benefits are lost.
These kinds of things apply to far more mundane matters as well. The dreams, hopes, and wishes of people can sometimes be the only thing that keeps them going through difficult times, or is what they use as the basic guides of how they want to work their lives. It's the advice delivered to young people when they reach critical decision points - "follow your dreams". Which is good enough advice for Mitts, and they will hope that things turn out well, but Bats wants to act now on it and Balls needs to know about every facet of everything that could happen along the way for the next ten years before it will be okay with starting. These competing forces can't resolve themselves without the intervention of something practical - the plan. The idea of achieving or striving toward your goal, taking into account the amount of privilege you have and the amount that you can borrow against the future ability to pay it back. The mundane things - finish school, take the requirements, get good grades - are the least glamorous components of the journey of self-discovery and the decisions that will decide on a career path after school is completed. The rest of life looks a lot shinier than time spent engaged in training and study. It turns out, though, that training, while boring, often repetitive, and sometimes seemingly endless in the ways that it can fail to meet the demands of the coaches leading the training, is still the best way to achieve expertise. Which is the real factor that gets taken into account when there is hiring, no matter what position is being applied for, on the field or off it.
Of course, no plan is perfect. Hitting a round ball traveling at high velocity with a round bat also traveling at high velocity means there are a lot of possible outcomes that can happen. Plans can, at best, cover some of the possibilities that could happen. Well-constructed plans will provide frameworks with suggestions or actions to take based on entire categories of possible actions, sometimes with the details scripted in, sometimes with them left to the person executing the plan. Even then, it's possible for the plan to fail entirely. Someone can go through college, get a good degree, and graduate on time, only for the economy to recess hard and flood the job market with people that have years of experience and expertise fighting to collect the remaining jobs, regardless of their wage. The perfect execution of the plan doesn't guarantee the intended result, unfortunately - there's always something else that potentially could get in the way, out of the control of the plan. Sometimes the plan has to be modified to meet reality, sometimes it has to be scrapped entirely. And sometimes the plan, practical that it is, is insufficient to achieve happiness and dreams. The safe bet is not always the most rewarding one, even if it is the most secure one. The bigger plan of scoring runs means that baserunners have to take leads, try to take extra bases when success isn't guaranteed, and sometimes even attempt steals. Batters have to be patient, and sometimes accept walks rather than swing at bad pitches. The actual means by which someone achieves the bigger plans is often a lot different than the way they thought they were going to, because the actual circumstances of their life are very different than what they could foresee and plan for. Many of the things that we are proudest of are the things we achieved by being methodical and planned in getting to the goal, while having taken advantage of serendipity and random things in our favor and prevented or overcame those things that worked against us.
Bases always calls us back to the fundamentals of our game - mechanics, observation, planning. Sufficient training and preparation is enough, at least, to set out on the journey in the direction you want to go and to feel confident at being able to handle situations along the way that might not have been covered in that training. Bases isn't opposed to asking for help, whether from terrestrial or celestial entities, but it does think that only asking for help and expecting someone else to put things in order for you isn't going to go very far. Bases believes that the more work you put in toward achieving your goals, the more likely it is that those factors that are out of your control are going to end up working in your favor in one way or another.
Pray all you like, but to accomplish your goals, move your hands, too. The work you do well be just as important.
The Suit of Bases represent practical concerns, standing in contrast to Bats that are all about action, Balls that prefer contemplation, and Mitts that prioritize sentiment. The actual bases are immobile, and their unchanging nature provides definition for the field of play, the strike zone, and the intermediate and final goals of the offense and defense. The bases are useful to both offense and defense, used both to put runners out and provide them safety, however temporary it may be. They are both hotly contested territory and otherwise unremarkable - four plain squares and a pentagon. Bases are essential to the scoring of runs, and to the prevention of runs being scored. If there is any entity that the bases can be said to belong to, it is the umpires, whose calls at the bases determine which side will be helped by their use. Like the umpires, the bases are not concerned with the players, but with the game. As such, they are the unit of measure that many statistical categories use in determining the value of particular players.
One does not simply wave a bat, throw a ball, or place fielders and their mitts haphazardly and expect to be able to collect or defend bases. Every now and then, coincidences happen where random placement and decisions do produce positive results for one team or the other, but most teams, managers, and players have a big plan that they understand their role in and their own individual plan for how this at-bat or even this pitch will go. Even if what actually happens is very different than what the plan was anticipating, there is a plan in place. The practicalities of taking bases demands it.
This extends well beyond the baseball field. Many of the players entering this level of a professional sport league are going to have a lot more money available to them than they would have previously. Or those that land a breakout acting role, have their startup bought out for ridiculous amounts of money, perform the statistical improbability of winning the lottery game or other gambling ventures, or some other windfall, obtained through skill or luck, that increases the available money significantly. It's very tempting to use that money to fulfill wishes and whims and to try things that would never otherwise be available. Some of that will make us happier, at least in the short term. Sometimes the details of those things ends up in the news, in stories usually grouped as being about "hookers and blow" - the ability to circumvent normal social conventions and prohibitions with money. And when all of that is done, they find themselves having spent the money without having any of it for later so that they can sustain the wealth. A lack of planning (or hiring someone who can make a plan) prevented the long-term benefits of financial security. By not paying attention to the practical matters, the benefits are lost.
These kinds of things apply to far more mundane matters as well. The dreams, hopes, and wishes of people can sometimes be the only thing that keeps them going through difficult times, or is what they use as the basic guides of how they want to work their lives. It's the advice delivered to young people when they reach critical decision points - "follow your dreams". Which is good enough advice for Mitts, and they will hope that things turn out well, but Bats wants to act now on it and Balls needs to know about every facet of everything that could happen along the way for the next ten years before it will be okay with starting. These competing forces can't resolve themselves without the intervention of something practical - the plan. The idea of achieving or striving toward your goal, taking into account the amount of privilege you have and the amount that you can borrow against the future ability to pay it back. The mundane things - finish school, take the requirements, get good grades - are the least glamorous components of the journey of self-discovery and the decisions that will decide on a career path after school is completed. The rest of life looks a lot shinier than time spent engaged in training and study. It turns out, though, that training, while boring, often repetitive, and sometimes seemingly endless in the ways that it can fail to meet the demands of the coaches leading the training, is still the best way to achieve expertise. Which is the real factor that gets taken into account when there is hiring, no matter what position is being applied for, on the field or off it.
Of course, no plan is perfect. Hitting a round ball traveling at high velocity with a round bat also traveling at high velocity means there are a lot of possible outcomes that can happen. Plans can, at best, cover some of the possibilities that could happen. Well-constructed plans will provide frameworks with suggestions or actions to take based on entire categories of possible actions, sometimes with the details scripted in, sometimes with them left to the person executing the plan. Even then, it's possible for the plan to fail entirely. Someone can go through college, get a good degree, and graduate on time, only for the economy to recess hard and flood the job market with people that have years of experience and expertise fighting to collect the remaining jobs, regardless of their wage. The perfect execution of the plan doesn't guarantee the intended result, unfortunately - there's always something else that potentially could get in the way, out of the control of the plan. Sometimes the plan has to be modified to meet reality, sometimes it has to be scrapped entirely. And sometimes the plan, practical that it is, is insufficient to achieve happiness and dreams. The safe bet is not always the most rewarding one, even if it is the most secure one. The bigger plan of scoring runs means that baserunners have to take leads, try to take extra bases when success isn't guaranteed, and sometimes even attempt steals. Batters have to be patient, and sometimes accept walks rather than swing at bad pitches. The actual means by which someone achieves the bigger plans is often a lot different than the way they thought they were going to, because the actual circumstances of their life are very different than what they could foresee and plan for. Many of the things that we are proudest of are the things we achieved by being methodical and planned in getting to the goal, while having taken advantage of serendipity and random things in our favor and prevented or overcame those things that worked against us.
Bases always calls us back to the fundamentals of our game - mechanics, observation, planning. Sufficient training and preparation is enough, at least, to set out on the journey in the direction you want to go and to feel confident at being able to handle situations along the way that might not have been covered in that training. Bases isn't opposed to asking for help, whether from terrestrial or celestial entities, but it does think that only asking for help and expecting someone else to put things in order for you isn't going to go very far. Bases believes that the more work you put in toward achieving your goals, the more likely it is that those factors that are out of your control are going to end up working in your favor in one way or another.
Pray all you like, but to accomplish your goals, move your hands, too. The work you do well be just as important.
