Chasing the dream



You want to announce your effin' presence with authority?!?
Photo credit: tgsoe

It's spring, and Opening Day has already come and gone. "As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires" (by Bruce Weber) is a favorite baseball book of mine. The book starts at the Jim Evans Academy of Professional Umpiring, where a group of mostly young men explain why they are there:

"Tell us why you're here," he said, and the first young man explained his presence and his goal with a simple declaration: "I'm chasing the dream." This exact locution was a cue picked up on by almost everyone in the room under the age of thirty, which is to say about 80 percent of the class, and was repeated again and again that evening. "I'm from Des Moines, Iowa," one strapping young man would say. "I've been umpiring for five years, and I'm chasing the dream."

The dream deemed so worthy of the chase is a very specific one, of course -- it's about reaching the major leagues -- and it is more or less impossible. Most of my young classmates [CJ's note: the author joins the school as a student] paid lip service to their slim chances -- fewer than one in a hundred umpire school students get to the big leagues -- but the way the phrase became a casual mantra made it clear they didn't get (or didn't really give much thought to) what a hundred to one means. Every now and then I wanted to throttle one of them for his optimistic naivete. During the day you'd pass a guy jogging between the batting cages and the practice fields and one of you would say, "How's it going?" and the other would respond automatically and nonchalantly, "Chasin' the dream."

One of the most frustrating things about the past 15 or so years of being in chemistry is watching the outfield fences be moved further out (to use the correct sports metaphor) in terms of employment. Want to be a professor of chemistry at a R1 university? Yeah, that's chasing the dream. But working as a professional chemist in industry? That's not supposed to be an out-of-reach dream. Working at a Big Pharma as a chemist? That's not supposed to be chasin' the dream, but these days, it seems like it is.

P.S. Thanks to Ms. MSMind for the partial inspiration.