If you don't give your dreams a chance, what's the point of them?

If there's one thing that can be truly heartbreaking, it's when people don't even pursue their dreams.

It's one thing to go after something and not get it. It's far different to decide you probably wouldn't get it if you tried and then not try at all.

I'm not really talking about myself. I got so far off track during adolescence that for some years I don't think I had any real dreams. When I finally decided on something at age 27 -- going back to school and becoming a sportswriter -- a combination of circumstances allowed me to succeed but only at a mediocre level.

My brief moment

But I had a friend who dreamed bigger. He loved baseball almost as much as I do, and he dreamed of playing professionally. We played ball together in the summer, and I never saw the sort of talent that would have made it, but to be fair, he was several years younger than I was.

He didn't play high school ball, but he played Babe Ruth and Senior Babe Ruth ball, and he told me years later that in the summer after high school, he was offered a contract to play Rookie League ball for, I think it was, the Orioles. Now my friend may have played well and even understood the game well, but what he didn't know about the business of baseball would fill a bookshelf.

He told them his plan was to go to college, and he wouldn't give that up for rookie ball. Now if they would send him to Double A ball ...

Of course what he didn't know, and I didn't know either until years later when I covered minor league baseball, is that once you reach Double A, you are considered a prospect to make it to The Show.

Some people may think anyone who is playing in the minors is a prospect, but I learned that the truth is very different. In 1983 I was covering an Expos farm team that won the South Atlantic League championship. The SAL is considered Low A, one step above rookie ball and two steps below Double A. Junior Minor, the Expos' manager, explained to me that below Double A, there are rarely more than two or three players per team considered prospects.

The others are there primarily to fill out lineups so the prospects can play.

But who cares? I would have given my left testicle to have had the talent and the opportunity even to play in the minor leagues for a month. I could have lived off that month for the rest of my life.

What I got was one night, the last night of the 1982 season, and not as a player, but as manager of the second-worst team in organized baseball that summer. The Gastonia Cardinals were 35-36 in the first half of the season, but were so bad in the second half they were 53-89 overall. They won just nine of their last 50 games, and never won a game all year in which they fell behind by as many as three runs.

We lost my game too, but I got a picture that has been a part of my memories for more than 30 years now.

If I could have told my friend -- with the benefit of hindsight -- that he might always wish he had taken his chance, it might not have made any difference. He might have lived his life exactly the way he has. He's not known for listening to my advice.

But I do think it's important -- if you have dreams -- to at least take a chance on living them.

Otherwise, what's the point in sleeping.