A Reflection on the Game of Baseball

As a fan of baseball and specifically the Kansas City Royals, the past few days have been generally disappointing. Scott Elarton was a member of Royals up until today. Elarton pitched much of last season for the Royals, but severely injured his shoulder and spent most of his offseason rehabbing. Because of the rules of baseball and the veteran status of Elarton (he's old for baseball), there was not much time for him to get game experience at the minor league level. So sure enough, just a few months ago, there is Elarton pitching in a major league game when everyone watching knew that he was not capable of competing at the major league level. Few things are guaranteed in sport, but it honestly felt like the team wanted to lose.

After a few poor attempts, a high ERA and a handful of losses, Elarton was placed on the disabled list. Many commentators suspected that it was a phantom injury that could buy him some more time, because an injured player is permitted a certain number of rehab appearances in the minors without actually being optioned to the minor league team. Basically it is a way to let him to practice without injuring his pride. The injury/rehab came and went, and for the past week we have been anticipating Elarton's return against the Yankees on Tuesday. Talk about a foregone conclusion. Elarton barely made it 1 & 2/3rd innings. He was taken out after giving up 7 runs.

Elarton was released from the team today, something that fans have been demanding for weeks, myself included (in spirit). There was no justifiable reason to keep running him out there. And yet the Royal's organization persisted. Again, it was almost like they wanted to lose.

Well, after hearing the news of Elarton's release today, I got to thinking. Perhaps this thing that frustrates me so as a fan, is actually a redeeming quality of baseball. I can't imagine another profession where Elarton's performance would have inspired his employer to give him so many opportunities. He would have been gone months ago. He wasn't producing results. He was old. He was in the way of the team's youth movement.

But he is also a human being. He had worked hard to rehabilitate his shoulder. He wanted to get back to help the team. He was assisting the younger players on the side with his experience. The team's manager, Buddy Bell, said, "It's really hard to release a guy that has that much character and cares that much about the organization, but at the same time, guys like that make it easier for you. . . ." The team gave this man of character every possible opportunity to turn things around. And to me there might just be something noble about that. Even though in the end it turned out just as we thought it would and, as Bell said, "[Releasing Elarton] is something that had to be done."

Baseball is clearly a business, but there are moments when you can see past the dollar sign. Letting Elarton go was a business decision, because ultimately what baseball values most is winning. But maybe this was a case where baseball valued virtue too. Perhaps I'm trying to not get too worked up over a sport, or perhaps I'm trying to force a justification, but it is at least possible that the Royals did something just by valuing Elarton by more than his ERA and wins & losses.

I guess a part of me (the weak part of course) wishes that I could have spent the past year in a similar environment. Even if I would have ultimately failed, I would have been treated justly, and in the end I would only have myself to blame. So, as always, I wish that the rest of life looked more like baseball (except for the whole looking the other way during a really bad call thing), and I wish that I wouldn't have wished so hard for the team to let Elarton go weeks ago.

Brave kid

This kid is pretty brave, just reaching over and grabbing the Holy Father's cross like that.

Here's a link to the whole video if you are interested. Just the Holy Father hanging out in the countryside. The kid is right at the end.

Men in Tights

Here's another great article by Anthony Esolen discussing the need for masculinity in the liturgy as a proper means of inspiring vocations to the priesthood. I think it is particularly applicable to those of us who have been man enough to bear a son.

Insofar, then, as the liturgy is seen as a feminine enterprise, so will it fail to interest boys. I don’t mean that they will reject it consciously. We are not talking about something bad that happens, so much as about something good and necessary that does not happen. They will not say, “I don’t like holding hands, I don’t like the soprano at the piano bar, I don’t like the cutesy slogans on the banners.” It’s simply that their minds and hearts will wander. They will not be inspired to devotion.

Although, I think in my case it has rapidly become a conscious rejection. But since I am not a child, nor a candidate for the priesthood, I digress.

For boys are those strange creatures who fail at the simplistic and the frivolous, and succeed at the seemingly impossible. Set the bar low, and many of them will fail to come up to it; set it high, and many of them, often the very same, will clear it. They who cannot pass a tedious geometry test can take apart and reassemble a motorcycle.

He suggests that one way of raising the bar is to embrace the danger:

There is no sensed danger at a picnic; therefore Mass should never be a picnic, even when it is celebrated at the park. The holy is dangerous because it is holy, set aside: “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet,” said God to Moses, “for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground” (Ex 3:5). The holy, the wondrous can shatter all that we think we know. It can drown us in itself, kill us, and give us a new name and a new life. Most welcoming were the men of the Middle Ages who chose to carve, over the entrance to their churches, the Last Judgment, with saints in trepidation and sinners weighed in the balance and found wanting! They knew exactly what they were doing. Over that door, always facing the setting sun that is the end of the day and our reminder of death, we see the dread moment each of us, saint and sinner, will have to face. Some churches nowadays trawl for members by advertising that they welcome all. Let the door and the Mass rather be welcoming because they are forbidding; because they open out onto that strange place that we need and seek; because if we step beyond that threshold we may never be the same again.

Fun vanishes with the occasion, but solemnity has the power to bring us a deep and abiding joy, whose wellsprings remain with us even in times of grief. We are solemn when we understand the surpassing import of what we are doing and when, knowing how unworthy we are to be there, we place ourselves full-heartedly under the direction of our betters, our forefathers, our teachers, our God.

And then he discusses a distinction between men and women and how we receive truth:

Many a woman will believe the truth because she loves the man who speaks it. That is why it is relatively easy to convert a woman to the truth by manly kindness; consider the strong touch of Jesus’ hand as He defended the woman who had anointed His feet with oil, saying to her at last, “Thy sins are forgiven” (Lk 7:48). Indeed, a woman who is responding in love to a man who speaks the truth will often catch his meaning instantaneously, instructed by a praiseworthy desire to follow the truth, and him who speaks it, to the end. In this regard they are almost always much quicker than their brothers. For when the angel at the tomb gave the holy women the good news of the resurrection, repeating for them the words of Jesus, they remembered those words, and hurried to tell the apostles, surely reminding them too of what Jesus had said. But the apostles had to see to believe, for “their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not” (Lk 24:11).

The apostles had to run to the tomb to see for themselves. Thomas would not trust even his brethren, but had to probe the wounds with his own hands before he finally confessed, “My Lord and my God!” (Jn 20:28). Do we not recognize the men here, suffering from their peculiar weakness? Men are more difficult by far to convert. They are stubborn. They do not often embrace the truth because they love the speaker. More often they learn to love the speaker because they have come to see the truth of what he says.

Karma Tycoon

Hey Qahal, maybe your wife would let you play this video game.

Slow Motion Emotional Manipulation

So I'm trying to enjoy a peaceful dinner in the firm cafeteria tonight as I take a short break from my labors. I'm forced to watch CNN on the TV because it is the only channel that comes in.* And after a whole two minutes of news coverage they cut to a five minute commercial break that included this:



Now at this point I fully expect Doobie to be weeping like a little school girl. But they are just animals. Now, don't get me wrong, I love animals, but I refuse to care more just because you slow the film down. And I refuse to equate them with starving children in Africa.

Now, before I get accused of propagating a "genocide" against pets (which of course would imply another human correlation), I will recommend a more tempered piece on animals that can be found here.

And if you want to see one of the funniest things ever, in slow motion, go here. The video quality is poor (and loud), but enjoy nonetheless.

* Of course I believe that this is an attempt on the part of the firm to brainwash us all with the liberal media. Well, at least it is an attempt to prevent me from ever enjoying a meal in peace.

Modern Christian Artists

Thomas Howard has written about the difficulty for Christian novelists in our modern world: "You can't write about the devil and expect your New Yorker readers, or your graduate departments of English, to take you seriously. It is a problem." Howard wrote this regarding Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, which smuggled ideas of grace and sin into a story that the New Yorker crowd would appreciate. No argument with him here. Perhaps a well written piece of literature with Catholic themes can appeal to the literati if done so subtlely as not to offend, but it can not be done very easily.

I recently attended a reading by two authors: one was William Kloefkorn, the state Poet Laureate of Nebraska, the other was a creative writing professor from some university who had written a novel that the New York Times hailed as brave and powerful, blah, blah, blah, for its extremely pro-abortion story line. Kloefkorn read first and read a selection from his memiors. It was well-written and pretty funny. It received a few laughs and polite applause. Next up was the other author. She was introduced by another professor (I believe) who said she was excited for the reading because it promised "something dirty." It was a crowd of adults, but they cheered that introduction with the zeal of a bunch of 14 year-old boys who had just found a stash of dirty magazines. The author then approached the podium and began with an apology. She said that she had been suffering from a long bout of writers block and for the past few years has been able to write about nothing but teenage sex and therefore the short story she chose to share was about teenage sex. Again, this comment was received with enthusiastic applause. Her story was not only about teenage sex, but her adult fantasies of infidelity to her husband as well. Ignoring the content, the story was not at all compelling and not even that well written, but I suppose I will let that go as my opinion (although it was objectively poor). Her story garnished many applauses, most notably when she described her husband's penis, at which point she broke from her narration to inform the crowd that that was her favorite part of the story, too.

After the two readings, it was clear which was the crowd's favorite. It had nothing to do with the quality of the stories, but the shock value of the content. Who cares that this was an event about literature, the night would have been a success if they had just played clips from the Howard Stern Show. I could not help but think that they would have loved the Kloefkorn memior if he had told about some fleeting love affair from his youth instead of a more meaningful event. It seems that the modern writer has an even more daunting task than writing for New Yorker readers, but in fact has to write to please adolescent libidos.

Of course, the problem is much worse. The masses don't care about literature, anyway. All that matters these days are the talkies and the moving pictures. I wonder if one can make a 'moral' movie that appeals to the moviegoing equivalent of the New Yorker readers and graduate departments of English.* Apparently not. The New York Times offered criticism of Hollywood for its "Anti-choice" position in such movies as Knocked Up. Nevermind the fact that the movie centers on premarital sex, it is apparently not progressive enough for the Times. I have not seen the movie, but (as shameful as it is) I have seen the same writer/director's movie The 40 Year Old Virgin and have a hard time believing that there can be anything more than the most superficial moral message to Knocked Up. I wonder if the Times also criticized Wedding Crashers because it portrayed the anachronsitic institution of marriage? (This, of course, begs the question as to what self-respecting Christian cares what the Times has to say about anything, but that is another story.)

So, as bad as the Christian novelist has it, the Christian screenwriter has it much, much worse. The novelist is allowed to smuggle the True Things into a good story; the screenwriter is only allowed to tell the bad story. I suppose if I must arrive at a point in this post, it is simply this: quit watching movies, or if you are going to watch them, only see movies like Transformers (right Qahal?).
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*The typical moviegoer is a different story. The Passion and all those Pixar cartoons have done fine at the box office, but what do us common folk know, anyway?

The Nuge, part II

The Nuge is on a roll. Here he is popping up in the Opinion Journal. Keep those editorials coming, my good man.