Yesterday we celebrated my daughter’s 19th birthday.
The day started with homemade gluten-free malasadas, courtesy of her brother.
If you’ve never had a malasada, it’s basically a Hawaiian doughnut made from fried dough rolled in sugar crystals which, nutritionally speaking, is about as logical as putting Kool-Aid in your gas tank and expecting your car to run well throughout the day.
That evening, we loaded everyone into the minivan and headed down I-95 toward Miami to watch our favorite baseball team, the back-to-back World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers, play the Marlins.
I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the journey to get there. I put driving down I-95 to Miami on a Friday afternoon somewhere between jury duty and assembling IKEA furniture without instructions and with one missing piece.
So we loaded the car with extra snacks and treats to help the time pass a little faster. It seemed like a reasonable strategy: if you can’t make the traffic move, you can at least make the snacks disappear.
We eventually made it to the stadium, found our seats, and settled in to watch our Dodgers make their push for a three-peat.
The Dodgers had signed four-time All-Star Kyle Tucker during the offseason to a four-year, $240 million contract, with the goal of becoming the first team since the 1998–2000 New York Yankees to win three World Series in a row.
So there were some pretty high expectations.
And, well...the beginning of the season didn’t exactly go according to plan.
Tucker struggled. There were stretches where he couldn’t seem to buy a hit.
By late summer, the critics were getting louder, and there were even questions about whether the Dodgers needed to make a change to get him going, but he kept playing and lately, something had started to change.
Tucker had struggled for much of the season, but over the previous few games, there were signs that things were starting to turn around.
Then, on Friday night, we happened to be sitting in the stands.
The Dodgers were leading 2–1. The bases were loaded and Kyle Tucker walked to the plate.
You could almost feel the anticipation in the air. Then...BOOM. Grand slam!
Four runs in and the stadium exploded.
Tucker finished the night with five RBIs, including the grand slam, his first since 2023 and here’s the crazy part:
Grand slams are relatively rare. There was a very good chance we could have sat there for nine innings and never see one, but we happened to be there when Kyle Tucker delivered one and after watching his season unfold, I thought there was something pretty interesting about that.
We tend to judge results by what we can see right now.
If we’re trying to get healthier and the scale isn’t moving...
If we’re getting body work done and still have aches and pains...
If we’re eating better but our blood work hasn’t changed as quickly as we’d hoped...
It’s easy to think, “This isn’t working.” But our bodies don’t always give us immediate evidence that the things we’re doing are making a difference.
Sometimes the work is happening long before the result shows up.
Kyle Tucker didn’t become a different baseball player that night. He had been taking his swings all season. Eventually, one of those swings landed in exactly the right place and it reminded me of something:
You don’t always get to choose when the results show up, but you do get to choose whether YOU keep showing up.
We can’t guarantee the grand slam. We can’t guarantee exactly when the breakthrough will come, but we can keep making the better choices and putting the odds in our favor.
After the game, we headed to one of Miami’s famous Cuban restaurants to finish celebrating her birthday.
The restaurant staff came out singing “Happy Birthday” at full volume.
At 19, nothing says “Happy Birthday” like having 40 complete strangers suddenly know it’s your birthday.
As I sat there watching her laugh, surrounded by her family, I thought about the night.
We had driven through Friday afternoon Miami traffic, eaten enough snacks to keep a 7-Eleven in business, watched a struggling All-Star hit a grand slam, and ended the night with good Cuban food and a chocolate shake.
You never know which ordinary night is going to become a memory you keep.
That’s one of the things about life we can’t control.
We can make plans, make good choices, and do our best to put the odds in our favor, but we never really know which moments are going to become the ones we remember.
Sometimes the best memories are the ones you never could have planned.
Dr. Derek ‘Miami Traffic Survivor’ Taylor
