No way Jose

Disclaimer- I'm a social worker, so I believe that each and every human being has inherent value.  Also, in America I believe that everybody has the right to pursue whatever type of career they so choose and it isn't my place to tell someone what they should or shouldn't be doing.

But Jose Valverde can no longer be the closer for the Detroit Tigers.

I don't know if Valverde is a sleeper agent for the Yankees or what (and looking at his stats against the Bronx Bombers, I'd believe it), but he has certainly been awful for most of 2012.  Yet the Tigers keep trotting him out game after game after game, to a chorus of groans and soul-crushing sadness.

Why?

Look, I love Jim Leyland as much as anyone.  In this era of hyper-awareness and health consciousness, I think it's great that we have the Marlboro Man managing our $119 million baseball team.  But I also think that Jim might be too close to the situation to realize what Tiger fans realized pretty early on- Jose Valverde is not a good closer.

I'm not even sure if he's a good pitcher at this point- maybe he could be, if he could pitch in low pressure, non-save situ....(thinks back to every time Valverde pitched in a non-save situation) ah forget it.  Valverde is an awful pitcher.

Too bad that we have him signed to a long term deal and we have to being repair...wait a minute, what's that you say?  Valverde is a free agent and even though  he's making $9 million this year to sabotage our playoff chances, we are not under contractual obligation to him next year?

This is amazing!!!

Do you realize what this means???  Jose doesn't have to play.  This isn't little league, Jim.  Cut him, waive him, revoke his scholarship- whatever you have to do, just keep him off the field.  Sure, it might throw off his mojo or whatever, but he's a free agent.  Why should we care about his possibly shattered confidence?  Lord willing he'll be doing this for someone else next year.  I say sit him on the bench and pitch the guys who can, you know, get the other team out.  Shoot, I'd rather have pre-hipster-glasses Rick Vaughn or Whitt Bass at this point.

To Leyland's credit, he seemed to indicate that there is at least a chance that Valverde won't be closing the rest of the playoffs (and if divine justice is a 'thing', never ever again while donning the olde English D).  I certainly wouldn't let him.  At this point, I wouldn't even trust Valverde ordering for me at McDonalds during lunch hour. 

I'm sure Jose Valverde is an interesting human being who could be a lot of fun to be around.  As a closer though, he has less worth than the box that Hiro-San is bringing down the aisle.  It's one thing to give up a bunch of 9th inning runs in Yankee stadium in April.  It's quite another to do it in game 1 of the ALCS.

Mike Ilitch is paying 21,686,545 Hot and Ready pizzas to bring a World Series back to Detroit and right now, the biggest thing standing between that us and that title is Jose Rafael Valverde.  Jim Leyland, please, for the love of all things good, do the right thing- Bench Valverde.  Drop Valverde from the postseason roster.  Forget that Valverde exists.   Profit.

When is moving not moving?

I have a lot to cover and a short amount of time to do it, so I'm just going to get straight to the point.

Oh, who am I kidding?  Really I have nothing but time to cover my non-anything, so I could (if I so chose) simply meander around aimlessly for like three or four paragraphs before teasing some promising premise that I ultimately kill with more composition apraxia.  But since I took the liberty and just put the entire post to death immediately, I guess there's no choice but to get right down to brass tacks.

Can you tell I haven't written in awhile?

So this week has been quite eventful.  Not eventful in the 'Oil that is, black gold, Texas Tea' sort of way, but there was definitely some 'loading up the truck' and moving to...well, not Beverly Hills.  Or even Shiras Hills.  Nope, we bypassed the entire spectrum of independence, swallowed our pride, and moved in with the in-laws.

So far, the move has been largely positive.  No, seriously, it has.  Okay, please stop the giggling- it is perfectly possible for a family of four to move in with the parents of the wife and have the situation not devolve into a train wreck worthy of Jerry Springer.  Besides, even if the situation was tenuous, it is much better than the NMU townhouse we just left.  I'm seriously not sure we could have listened to any more arguments between our children and poorly supervised not-even-neighbor kids or audible assaults of inquiry from boundary-disregarding youngsters.  Indeed, I think most of the issues with the townhouses (other than the boring white walls and shrinking space) revolved around the fact that we felt like ants living in an ant farm.  You all remember ant farms, right? 

If a move to your in-laws is a step-up in the privacy arena, then maybe you should think about moving.

Besides, living here wasn't our first choice.  We certainly searched for other places that would have enabled us to maintain our independence...but realistically you have to be independent in the first place, and without delving too deeply into our financial situation, suffice to say that the emphasis is less on the in and more on the depend.  In fact, one of the factors that led us to decide on tucking tail back home is a desire to work ourselves free from dependence on others.

Before I continue, allow me to explain- I'm not under any sort of impression that there is this magical place we'll arrive at where we completely and totally are self-sufficient.  I'm much too learned for that- humans are social beings, and we don't just need other people to thrive- we need them to survive, period.  What I mean, then, is that we want to cut ties with dependence on faceless bureaucratic systems and start to depend on the people that we were meant to depend on- family.

In America, there is huge cultural value placed on independence, and part of this value that we are taught explicitly and subconsciously is that when we "grow up", we move away and carve out our own lives doing our own thing, away from the nest.  Not everybody does this- but a large number do.  If I had the time/energy/smarts, I would delve deeper into the mechanization of how young American boys and girls learn they have to move away in order to make it, and the consequences of failing to prepare them to do so.  The point is that there are many cultures where family units stay in close physical proximity as the rule (not the exception), so even though it feels weird, it's actually probably pretty normal.  Which for us is pretty weird.

The hardest part so far (other than the physical act of moving and organizing and sorting and driving a 24-foot U-Haul) has been trying to explain the move to our kids.  I think they were both excited about living with grandpa and grandma and, although Delaney seemed to be more cognizant of the whole thing than Shane did, the truth is that neither one of them really understood that we were not going to still be living in what the kids came to refer to as "Mommy and Daddy's house".  It's been a process (that I think is starting to take hold) of explaining to them the difference between a 'house' and a 'home' and that anywhere we are living as a family is our 'home'.

All in all, I'm excited about this next chapter of our lives.  In addition to the financial benefits, it will be great to get more connected with Sara's family and to be closer to her sister and husband.  It'll be nice to watch Detroit sports on the 50 inch crazy-high-def TV that sits upstairs.  I'm really looking forward to the kids each having their own room and to them having the space to run and play in the woods and fields and just let their imaginations carry them away.  I'm stoked to be able to go from my car to my couch without having to answer a hundred questions from nosy kids.

But mostly, I'm grateful for the opportunity to clean the slate and give this life thing another shot.