I’ve always regarded baseball with a cautious eye. I played one season of tee ball in the wee years of my youth, and 18 wins and a missing thumbnail later I came away with the only athletic championship I’d win for the rest of my life.

But despite having the highest winning percentage of any baseball player ever (and the youthful ignorance of the implications of a career as a left-handed third baseman), the first memory America’s pastime drags up is standing at home plate on a frigid day, bat in hand, watching Coach throw what at the time seemed like a Smoltzian fastball right into my unsuspecting thumb.

(For clarification, though it was called tee ball, the coach of the team at bat pitched, and the tee would only be brought out after a certain number of misses.)

So it was with some degree of apprehension that I finally committed to keeping up with Major League Baseball. I started a fantasy league, invited a bunch of friends from my fantasy football league and had a draft. In typical draft fashion, four people actually showed up to pick. The rest were sealed to the fate of chance and algorithms.

As I mentioned before, that season of tee ball concluded with a championship. How that came to pass is a story I should probably tell more often.

From what I can remember, we won all our games comfortably over the course of the regular season. We didn’t have anyone who could hit a home run (a major feat for the tender age of five), but most of us were suitably athletic, and the ones who weren’t just got stuck in the outfield. There was also a guy on the team, the coach’s son, who would later get drafted by the Texas Rangers, but that’s neither here nor there.

Wearing our Seattle Mariners uniforms proudly as we marched off to battle the mighty Florida Marlins for the championship, we came upon a ball field already under siege by the opponent’s parents. Balloons the color of whatever the Marlins called that blue they wore in 90s lined the fence. A boom box blared something period specific. Each parent furiously rang a cowbell. It was ostentatious, to put it mildly.

Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say we were a ragtag band of misfits just happy to be there, but if any of us were half as pumped up as the opposing team’s parents, no one was showing it.

By the last half-inning, we held a 4-3 lead. The Marlins were up to bat, and with two outs and a man on base, up to bat came one of the few kids in the entire league with the power to smack one out of the park. It was tense, but what happened next taught me one of the most important lessons of my life, though I was too young to know it at the time.

The kid hauls off and whacks one to center field.

Waiting in that patch of earth stood Kevin. Kevin spent the majority of his time during games building sandcastles in the outfield. If time had stopped, and God himself asked us whom we didn’t want in the outfield at that specific moment, it would have been this guy.

Yet there he stood, about to deliver a divine message all his own.

The ball soared.

Kevin stood.

To be honest, I’m not even sure he was paying attention. Glove out, and without having moved even an inch, ball hit leather. Game over. The only championship the Mariners would ever win.

The point? That divine message? Well, sometimes you catch the ball. Sometimes the ball finds you. Some days you’ve got your glove out, and some days you’re hitting it to center. You can’t control it, and don’t bother trying.

At the end of the fantasy draft, I looked at the projected end-of-year standings based on the players picked. I was eighth out of 10 teams. In first? My friend and roommate, who left it up to the computer.

What are you going to do, right?

John Davis is the chief copy editor of The Crimson White. His column runs Mondays.