Wednesday night, I walked in to the departure terminal at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. There stood a sea of men and women wearing fatigues, most with expressionless faces.
Turning to one of them while going through security, I asked out of simple curiosity: "Where are you headed?"
"Iraq," was the quick reply.
No further questions, your honour.
I started thinking about the long faces many of the Blue Jays must be sporting right now. They hit the road, play nine baseball games and lose them all. The man before me leaves home knowing he might come back in a body-bag.
This kind of perspective may be of no interest to many Jays supporters, but I can assure you, it hit me square in the gut. Jesse Carlson gets to wake up in the morning with a job (either in Toronto or Las Vegas) and an outstanding chance at making it through the day.
If you love this team as I do, games like the one witnessed Wednesday hurt. If you'd told me the Jays would score 10 runs in a Roy Halladay assignment, I'd have laid a mortgage on this ugly streak coming to an end. But baseball has a funny way of breaking your heart, and the many questions that surrounded this team on Opening Day will rise again.
The most pressing question is this: Who are these guys? Are they the surprising bunch of clutch hitters with an unexpectedly solid rotation that had us believing the playoffs were a possibility as recently as 10 days ago? Or are they, as Paul Beeston pointed out at a winter-time assembly of ticket holders, a club hoping to nurture some youngsters and take a real stab at the big prize in 2010?
This horrendous slide has got to end soon, and Wednesday's game had all the makings. Instead, the drought is at nine, the division's best team is coming to town, and the knuckle-baller who did a wonderful job of messing with the Jays' collective swing at the start of this disaster is the first man they'll see Friday.
Thankfully, this is just a game.
It took a group of brave people catching the next flight to Baghdad to remind me of this.
