The Major League Baseball trade deadline came and went on Wednesday without any life-altering news in my world of sports. But I still sort of sympathized with baseball teams who either lost or gained players.
(In case you're thinking that maybe I'm accidentally posting this on the wrong blog because it fits better on my sports essay venue, just hang with me for a minute and it will make sense.)
I walked into my usual watering hole on Wednesday night and found my buddy Brian Patterson sitting with a group of people that made me pretty happy. That's because my friends Ray and Julie Small, who just this week moved back to Waco from Austin, were in the group. This is where the baseball trade deadline analogy comes into play. You see, I've lost a lot of friends to the allure of Austin this year. I'm still close with these people and, in some ways, it's better that they moved down the road. But it still feels really good to get some folks back. It feels like we might be able to make a run for the pennant after all. (Also, Patterson is here for a couple more months so it's like we claimed him off the wire and his contract comes up at the end of the season.)
The Smalls came back so that Ray could go to grad school at Baylor and they were celebrating Julie landing a job on Wednesday. But they expressed to me earlier this year how they surprisingly found themselves wanting to be in Waco. These folks are from Chicago, so it seems they would have any number of cool-city options.
They chose Waco. I'm glad to have them back and I'm excited about what that choice represents.
I know I used the trade-deadline analogy before, but it's not completely accurate. It's not accurate because if Waco and Austin were baseball teams, they would not be competing against each other. A better analogy would be that Waco sometimes feels like the farm team for big-time cities like Austin, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Milwaukee, New York, Nashville, etc.
But that analogy doesn't work either because that would suggest people like the Smalls coming back to Waco would mean they were getting sent back to Triple-A after they couldn't hack it in the bigs. That's absolutely not the case because both of them are making progress in their lives and careers. They were doing just fine in Austin.
A couple months ago, I ran into them at a pub called Lustre Pearl in Austin. Of course, that night felt a little cooler because 1) it was April and 2) it was in Austin, but it was really the same thing. Last night was a gathering of fun people having interesting conversations and it happened at The Dancing Bear here in our town.
I realize I'm using a pretty defensive tone, and maybe it's unbecoming of me. It derives from having too many conversations with people who are down in the mouth about our town. Bottom line is I understand why people want to move to Austin and I understand why they want to come back.
