Goodbye (Day 42)

It’s my last day at Baseball America.

I can’t believe it has been six weeks already. A whole 42 days have passed by me and now it’s time to go. I’m not ready to stop listening to people talk about baseball every day. I’m not ready to go back to snow and hockey and real winters and toques.

It has been a pretty good run though.

For every moment that I might think passed me by, I did contribute something to BA. I am a part of books, magazines and an office of great people that has seen a variety of interns come through. I hope I’ve left a good impression and that I would be welcomed back if I were ever stopping by North Carolina. And I think I would be.

When I got to work this morning, I was equipped with wrapping paper, ribbon and gift tags. I helped to wrap the presents for the family that BA sponsored and then they took them away. It was a great way to start the work day. And while I was in the conference room wrapping, Conor came by and said that there were cake balls in the lunch room. Cake balls!

I got to try the delectable little balls of chocolatey goodness for the first time and I don’t think my description even does them justice. They are pretty awesome. Little bundles of cake and I think some icing, too, wrapped in a chocolate coating, in bite-size form. An excellent breakfast for me, for sure.

I went back to my desk after the gifts were ready to be taken away, and I had received two emails from people at BA. Editor 3 had sent me the information for a couple of job postings in the area. USA Baseball is looking for interns for next season and he thought I might be interested. He also said that he sat with people from the organization on his way home from Winter Meetings and he talked to them about it, and he would recommend me for the job if I do want to apply.

Of course I would love to put in an application, but I am also worried. I applied for the internship with mlb.com for next season and I won’t hear about it until the end of January. If I were to get a job with USA and then also get the internship with MLB I would want to take the one with MLB and then I would not only be disappointing the people at USA but I would make BA look bad if they had recommended me for something. So I don’t want to do that.

I am really getting ahead of myself though, thinking that I might get the two paid internship offers and I haven’t heard anything from them, let alone applied to one of them. So it might be a good idea for me to apply just so that I am in the pool for another employment opportunity. I will worry about that more later.

The other email was from Editor 2, announcing to everyone on our side of the office that today is my last day and that I had picked Chubby’s Tacos as my lunch place of choice. We would be heading there for the mid-day meal and he invited everyone along. He also mentioned I’ve done a bang-up job during my time at BA and have also written an inordinate number of Hall of Fame bios, so that was awesome to read.

Before and after lunch, I was working on said bios, trying to find quotes for each player, just to fit the guidelines we received in the very recent past. I have to start and end every single one with a quote, which I think is stupid and unnecessary, but also means a lot of searching on the Internet. There are some guys that people just didn’t say anything nice about and I think for them I am going to have to just use generic quotes, or find something that relates to the position they play. But I didn’t finish finding usable quotes for everyone until near the end of the day. I did find a couple of great ones though.

“All us Youngs could throw,” Cy Young said. “I used to kill squirrels with a stone when I was a kid, and my granddad once killed a turkey buzzard on the fly with a rock.”

Some of the quotations amused me.

I thought there was a chance that I could get through all the bios on my last day, but it looks like I will spend some more time on them outside of work. Hopefully I can finish before I take off on Sunday.

The lunch that interrupted quote-searching was a good one. A bunch of people came and it was a great last time out on the town from BA. Editor 2 bought my food and that was a lovely added surprise to the outing as well.

Everyone at BA has been so fantastic and awesome that it is really hard to leave. I just don’t want to go back home. I feel like I am leaving the entire sport of baseball behind, which makes it even sadder than it already is. I will go back to the land of hockey and ice and snow, and will no longer be getting daily updates on college sports and minor league prospects. I will miss heading out for lunch every day with people from the office, most prevalently Editor 1 and Editor 2. I won’t have any more reminders that I am Canadian, and I can only hope that I might still get emails when a Canadian player is signed, or a Canadian team does something in the world of baseball to make them important.

Though I’m not ready to leave, I guess I kind of have to be.

“The strongest thing that baseball has going for it today are its yesterdays,” Lawrence Ritter said.

And I will remember all of my baseball yesterdays with BA.

Goodbye Baseball America.