Much more telling was that he and his catcher, Posada, seemed to make progress after their miserable showings here together last season.
My friend Ethan Nosowsky read the manuscript and said, quite rightly, that there needed to be a stronger narrative connection between the two parts, so I labored away at this, making no progress and getting miserable.
Another arena for failure, their relationship progresses haltingly through miserable stabs at recovery, their doomed attempts at communication setting them further apart from one another and from the rest of the world.
And immediately, instead of being miserable because I was making no progress, I was having a good time again.
In essence, human history would become a straightforward story of progress: most of us were miserable most of the time, we developed civilization, everything got better.
"[Archie Bunker was] miserable because he couldn't deal with progress," Lear explains.
"It's not possible to say that the country is progressing when 12m people are living in miserable conditions without electricity or running water," he told cheering supporters.
Last week I tuned into a PBS show already in progress - the 25th Anniversary of Les Miserables, taped in London.
Literacy is a miserable 59% and, as elsewhere in south Asia, any incremental progress is fragile and uneven.
Guessing (correctly) that all Company men beyond the river had been killed, they turned and trekked back to Bulawayo in miserable fashion, their supplies all but gone and the Matabele impeding their progress at every turn.
