Baseball Is Life: Split Ends

It’s not a good sign when you plop down in the barber’s chair and she says “Oh, honey.”

I should be used to this; my hair has charted its own course since we first appeared in the world, when it was so light that I seemed bald; there’s always been a great deal of it, but the individual strands are so thin that they are forever reaching for the Lord. It is heavy in the summer and anxious in the winter. A cowlick in the dead center of my forehead saw to it that I passed the better portion of the late 80s to the mid 90’s battling bangs. I could have been a Nobel Laureate at the age of 19; we will never know, for my young adulthood was dedicated to scowling at a curling iron rather than sitting in deep consideration of the workings of the universe.

What was happening now was the fallout of badly damaged split ends, followed by the attempts of two franchised barbers to forestall the carnage; I was now attempting to undo the botched undoing of the botched undoing, as the lower half of my hair remained fuzzy and angry. Finally I capitulated; what I needed here was a person who didn’t take appointments via branded app and didn’t rely on an ESPN broadcast as 85% of the haircutting experience.

I knew it was bad when Josh The Pilot noticed. “It’s okay, he said carefully, “if you’d like to go to a real salon.”

Counting pennies is what got me into this, and dropping several was the only way to get me out. Everybody knows the German people aren’t celebrated for our good hair sense.

So the hairdresser pityingly made her way around my head, informing me that she was “blending” the devastation, which sounded to me like touching up the gutter trim in the wake of a house-flattening hurricane. And indeed, when she dried my hair, I was rewarded with a fair imitation of David Bowie in the mirror.

“It just needs to grow,” she said.

Well, so does my ability to have a Twix in the same room without appropriating it, but what was going on here was a hair rebuilding. It was the closest solidarity I’ve had with the Reds in at least four years.

Everyone describes this team as in the process of “rebuilding.” Well, yes, but– how? We see management ditching payroll and trolling the tragically friendzoned. What’s the plan? Are they… blending? Because if so, all I’m seeing is a bunch of L’s under the moonlight, the serious moonlight.

The remedy for my head is lots of little Phoebe clips and a willingness to wear my chapel veil to Skyline and the post office. I work with it. I wait it out. It is a season, not a lifelong sentence. It is fug, but this interval is necessary to overcome some cost-saving mistakes.

But it feels that way with this team. How long must we wait? Weathering a rebuilding is bad enough, but when that rebuilding has no discernable plan, it’s just floundering. What we have now is fug. But is it necessary?

This team cannot “just grow.”

We need a real salon.