I've talked about Joe Posnanski before. There are multiple reasons I started reading his blog. The Banny Logs, Joe's awareness of sabermetrics. But the more I read, the more I'm impressed. I love how he ties in different topics together (e.g., pop culture, politics, family), I love his coining of new terms (e.g., Jeterate, Pixifood). But I think one of his greatest talents is drawing from common life experiences -- things we all understand -- and applying them to situations we *don't* understand and helping us to understand them.

We often think of professional athletes (or other celebrities) as sometimes (often?) being assholes. Stuck up, can't take time to put up with the adulating fans, the people who made them famous. In recent news is how Willie Mays allegedly snubbed Josh Hamilton.

In a post today, Posnanski draws a comparison to what it's like on your wedding day when you're the complete center of attention and you have so many people coming up to you asking you to do this and that and to give them your attention that eventually you start to tune it out. Now, I have never been in that situation, but I can kind of understand what he's talking about. And it may be a comparison that doesn't resonate with some people, because to some people their wedding day was the happiest day of their lives and they *loved* being the center of attention. Maybe so. The young athletes (and other celebrities) probably did at first too. But that's why he talks about the perpetual wedding day. What *is* it like to deal with that day in and day out? I'm not saying we should pity them. I'm not saying that it's impossible to handle it with grace and respect (some certainly do). But if you think about it, it may not even necessarily be an issue of being an asshole or not...it's surviving an unnatural situation. One that most of us, to be certain, deal with only a few occasions in our life, if that. Certainly not every day. Not a perpetual wedding day.

(And all that was stated *much* better by Posnanski. So skip this blog post and just click the link.)