Covering the Bases: Friday, June 28th

by Justin Van Zuiden (stlcardinals84) Last Updated 2019-06-28 18:30:00 Premium Content Part of the product Core4

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Friday, June 28th

Happy Friday, Grinders! TGIF! I’m hanging out with you in place of Cheese today, as Dave has earned himself a day off after his big week. We have a monster 14-game slate tonight, and I’ll get to that in just a moment.

A Personal Story

I don’t often share personal stories on this platform, but I’m going to share one today. If you want to get on with the baseball analysis, feel free to skip this. However, sometimes it helps to write and share your feelings, and I feel like doing that today. Hopefully, some of you can relate in some way to what I share here.

As many of you know (though some of you may not), I am a CPA by trade. I’ve been a tax accountant for almost 12 full years now. The summer months offer a bit of a respite from the hustle and bustle of tax season. From February through April 15th, you see me just a little less on the RG platform, but I really enjoy writing and doing the XM shows here. It’s a double career that can be challenging at times, but it is super rewarding.

A couple friends of mine had similar “double careers.” Both were farmers by trade and CPA’s during the winter months. It worked well with the nature of Midwestern corn and soybean farming. The planting season is generally in May, the harvest season is in October, and then they both prepared taxes during the busy season. Like father, like son. They were both great friends of mine. I worked with one of them (the father) for ten years and one (his son) for three.

The night of December 4, 2017, the father, Rory, called to tell me that he wasn’t going to come back for the upcoming tax season. His son, Ryan, was going to continue working with me and preparing tax returns. I started to get a letter ready to send out to our clients, explaining that I would be the primary point of contact for the upcoming tax year. I sent a copy of that letter to Rory so that he could review it and sign off before we contacted the clients.

At that time, little did I know that the morning of December 5, 2017 would change our small town community forever.

That first week of December, 2017 was abnormally warm for Illinois. The two farming friends of mine, Rory and Ryan, father and son, were taking advantage of the weather by getting some field work done in preparation for winter. They were using a tractor in a field which had been recently marked for a gas line. At one point, the tractor became stuck away from the marked line. Figuring they were just stuck on a rock, they attempted to force the tractor loose.

At that point, the second gas line punctured and immediately burst into a fireball.

The farm where they were working sits about ten miles from where I work. It didn’t take long to see fire in the air from the punctured gas line. Knowing that was in the general direction of their farm property, I texted Rory to make sure everything was okay.

I never heard back. The letter that I had written to notify clients became a much more painful one. Rory and Ryan were gone in the blink of an eye, just 12 hours after I had spoken with Rory. Ryan has two young girls. They were aged 3 and 1 at the time of the accident. That’s unspeakably hard to grasp emotionally.

Even though they weren’t “family” by the traditional sense of the word, that loss was a hard one for me to deal with for weeks. I couldn’t imagine what the wives and immediate family went through — and continue to go through to this day. It was absolutely heart-breaking.

Today, I am going to be playing in a local golf outing to benefit the family and the young girls in particular. I hope you all understand that I will probably be unavailable this afternoon to post updates if circumstances warrant, though I will attempt to do so if there is something major.

While it shouldn’t take events like this to put life into perspective, it serves as a cruel reminder. Life is short. Enjoy it. Hug your kids and significant others and family members a little more at night. You never know what could happen tomorrow.

In the event that any of their family or friends read this message – know that Rory and Ryan Miller are gone but not forgotten. Their mark was absolutely left on our local community, and I know they’re in a good place now.

I suppose that was my version of “Deep Thoughts With Cards.”

That story has absolutely nothing to do with baseball, but it’s probably as personal as I’ve ever gotten in a written, public post. Hopefully it was able to touch some of you, and it certainly helped me to write it.

I don’t have a good segue here, but… on to baseball we go!

Friday Night Aces

Jacob deGrom vs. Braves – It’s nice to see that the Mets are consistent. They simply don’t get wins for Jacob deGrom, and deGrom is the poster pitcher for the “wins are completely irrelevant” crowd.