Sermon: Opening Day

           

 

First Presbyterian Church

April 5, 2026, Easter Sunday A

Matthew 28:1-10, 16-20

 

Opening Day

 

 

First, an acknowledgment: I really did get the inspiration for this sermon title and theme from the church sign from a couple of weeks ago.

Did you notice that, somewhere amidst all the basketball foolishness of the past few weeks, baseball season started?

I'm old enough to remember that Major League Baseball's opening day always happened in Cincinnati, on a weekday afternoon There was a great big tradition and all behind it, with an Opening Day parade and everything. I remember it mostly because growing up in Georgia, I often saw that game on TV because Atlanta was frequently the opponent for that first game of the season. In fact I was watching to see Hank Aaron tie Babe Ruth's all-time home run record on Opening Day in Cincinnati in 1974. (And you better believe I plan to be at the River Bandits' home opener Tuesday night, if I can ever get the online ordering system to work.)

Funny thing about Opening Day; no matter how big the celebration, no matter how the big the win or heartbreaking the loss, no matter what (except maybe for rain), there was another game the next day.

There's a lesson in that. We'll get back to it later.

Every gospel’s retelling of the resurrection has its own quirks (for example, Mark barely tells you anything at all, and you never even see or hear the resurrected Jesus?), and Matthew’s definitely has its own distinct features, but there is one thing all four of them have in common: in none of the accounts does anyone actually see the resurrection happen. As Barbara Brown Taylor points out in Learning to Wait in the Dark, there is technically no such thing as a “witness to the resurrection.”

Aside from Mark’s aforementioned gospel, all of the others show us the already-resurrected Jesus, some quite extensively such as Luke’s several encounters seemingly all on the same day, and John’s extensive retelling of Thomas’s particular encounter in Chapter 20 and that breakfast scene on the lakeshore in chapter 21. Matthew’s account is a bit more terse, and appearances of the risen Christ only add up to two – the encounter with the two Marys and then the Galilee appearance to the disciples that culminates in possibly the most famous verses in this gospel, the ones at the very end that constitute what we have come to call the Great Commission – “Go ye therefore and teach all nations…” for those of you who have it memorized still in the King James Version.

The odd thing about Matthew’s account is that even though the two Marys witness quite a spectacle when they arrive at the tomb – an earthquake, a lightning-like angel descending from heaven and rolling back the stone, the guards becoming “like dead men” – all of this spectacle is prelude to the announcement that “he is not here.” Somehow, Jesus is already gone from a tomb that had (presumably) been sealed before the angel rolled it back, if 27:66 is to be believed.

Meanwhile, what the two Marys get is not to bear witness to a miracle. Instead, they get a job to do. (This is where that part about Opening Day comes back.)

First the angel gives them the word to go find those other disciples and get them headed towards Galilee, where Jesus will meet them. While they were headed off to do just that, with the curious mixture of “fear and great joy” Matthew describes, Jesus himself makes his appearance – just as in John’s gospel, Jesus appears to the women first – and basically gives them the same message: go tell the disciples to meet me, not in the great city of Jerusalem, but back in rural Galilee, where Jesus spent so much of his ministry.

This is no great spectacle in front of great numbers, but only to two women, isolated from the rest of the world that was going on as if nothing had happened. No great crowds, no great gathering: just the two Marys. Later the disciples (eleven, after what Judas did) get their turn. As far as Matthew’s gospel goes, that is maybe thirteen witnesses to the resurrected Christ?  It’s almost as if it’s a secret, at least until Jesus commands them to "go therefore and make disciples of all nations..." At least we have Christ's promise that "I am with you always, to the end of the age." This is where Opening Day means there's another game tomorrow, and the next day, and so on. Easter's not over; the season is just getting started.

Maybe the point of Easter is about our job to bear witness, to testify. We receive that commission no matter where we are, no matter how big or how small, how important or unimportant. Whether anybody saw it or not, Christ is still risen and still calls us to bear witness, whether we're in the big leagues or the minors.

Easter is not the end of anything. It's Opening Day. The season is just getting started.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #232, Jesus Christ is Risen Today; #233, The Day of Resurrection; #511, Come, Behold! The Feast of Heaven; #239, Good Christians All, Rejoice and Sing!

 

 

 Opening Day, April 4, 1974. To be fair, Aaron did get the next game off. 

 

Sermon: We Didn't Come This Far Just to Come This Far

First Presbyterian Church

July 27, 2025, Pentecost 7C

Colossians 2:6-19; Luke 11:1-13

 

We Didn't Come This Far Just to Come This Far

 

 

The quote itself can be found attributed to a number of different individuals, including a sci-fi/fantasy author and a reality TV star. It came to my attention, though, when it was quoted several times by one of the top athletes on the Kansas City professional sports scene. No, I'm not talking about Patrick Mahomes or Taylor Swift's boyfriend or anybody on the Chiefs. I'm talking about Bobby Witt, Jr., the young All-Star shortstop for the Kansas City Royals (Side note: if I were going to talk about *the* top athlete, it would have to be someone from one of KC's soccer clubs. You can't play that sport at all without being an insanely good athlete.)

As the Royals were making their unlikely push for the playoffs, Witt Jr. was increasingly the member of the Royals sought out by the media to get a feel for where the team was. First as the team assured themselves of a winning record for the first time in nine years, Witt Jr. refused to be satisfied with that achievement; then when the team clinched a playoff spot, that wasn't enough either; finally, winning that first playoff series prompted that same refusal to be satisfied one more time, in these words: "We didn't come this far just to come this far." The quote and the spirit behind it became popular enough to be turned into a t-shirt. [show t-shirt]

Wherever Bobby Witt Jr. came up with that line, it's a good one, even for churches. 

We've been through two years together of study and reflection on this church and its place in this community, sometimes intense, sometimes more casual. We've looked at questions about how things have changed since the last time this church called a non-temporary pastor, whether it might be time to think about the building or about a part-time pastor or even if closing the church might be an option (not at this time, came the conclusion). Then a Pastor Nominating Committee was formed and did the work of putting together a profile of the church for potential pastors to consider. They conducted several interviews, narrowed the field of candidates, and finally chose Pastor Amie Vanderford, who will be in this pulpit next Sunday and the Sundays going forward. Eventually I’ll be off to another church to do this process again.

For any church looking to go forward, there are always precautions to be observed and things to remember. Our scriptures for today offer a couple of examples. Neither of these should be earth-shaking, but they're still worth remembering.

The rather dense passage from Colossians, one of those books with Paul's name on it but probably not actually written by Paul, contains some language that isn't typical of Paul's letters but nonetheless does make a point that Paul would want to make: do not be put off from the fullness of Christ by things that are, so to speak, only human. Here our author speaks of "hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of the world" as a thing to be avoided; indeed he urges the church to "let no one take you captive" to such things. 

It might be a shock to see "human tradition" cast in such a negative light, particularly given the church's propensity to honor and revere tradition in its theology and practice. I find (and I freely admit this is my own conclusion) that this statement might be better understood in modern minds by reference to a variant of that word: traditionalism. 

Tradition is a foundation, something that can be and is even meant to be built upon. Traditionalism, on the other hand, uses that foundation to build a prison, limiting and constricting rather than growing and encouraging. In the words of theologian Jaroslav Pelikan, "Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name."[1]

There will be temptations in this community around us, seeking to impose "human tradition" on us. To put it bluntly, there will be churches in this town that condemn this church for calling a woman as pastor. Clearly, they've never read Romans 16, in which Paul commends the deacon Phoebe, the evangelist Prisca, and the apostle Junia for their work in the church. Those strictures are "human traditions" best left aside.

The foundation of our faith in Christ is in Christ. Seems like a redundant thing to say, but clearly the church has a habit of forgetting that on a regular basis. But in all earnestness, the foundation of our faith in Christ is in Christ, and nothing else. Not human-enforced doctrine, or human-based tradition, nor even in human comfort and familiarity.

Speaking of familiarity...

Hopefully you've noticed that the passage we heard from Luke sounds familiar and sounds different at the same time. (I truly and deeply pray that no one said that it sounded "wrong"...) As is often the case, the same event - the disciples asking Jesus to pray - is covered by both Matthew and Luke, but those two gospel writers cover it just a little bit differently. 

You might notice that Luke, in comparison to Matthew, doesn't quite finish the prayer. And of course, where we are accustomed to asking God to "forgive us our debts," here the text simply says "Forgive us our sins." Admittedly "debts" can be a big deal, but "sins" really does get to the point more directly and clearly. And yet churches can split over which version or translation of the Lord's Prayer is used in a service. 

I know that this is a horrifying thought. There's a reason we Presbyterians are the butt of a particular version of the old light bulb joke. It goes like this:

Q.: How many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb?

A.: Change???!!!

 

If that's you, I have news for you: some things will change.

Pastor Amie, who will be in this pulpit next Sunday, is going to be a different pastor and preacher than I am or than Pastor John was before me. Change will happen. 

Here's the thing, though; things would have changed anyway, no matter what pastor you called. For that matter, some things would have changed even if Pastor John had stayed all this time. It is an inevitability of human existence and of the church in a world that changes. Things change. It simply happens.

If the church remains rooted in Christ, as Colossians instructs us to do, all the change in the world cannot change that. If the church remains rooted in Christ, all the "human tradition" and the "basic principles of the world" cannot change that. If the church remains rooted in Christ, in fact, we will discover that some things about the way we do church may need to change, but the church's rootedness in Christ does not change. Whether we say "debts" or "trespasses" or "sins" in the Lord's Prayer does not change the need for the church to remain rooted in Christ. 

While the Royals don't look like there's another playoff charge in them this season, Bobby Witt Jr. still got one thing right: we really don't come this far just to come this far. Next Sunday will mark a new beginning for this church, not the end of anything. 

We didn't come this far just to come this far. The church still has more work to do.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #41, O Worship the King All Glorious Above; #275, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God; #693, Though I May Speak (The Gift of Love)

 

 

---

[1] Jaroslav Pelikan, "The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities.

See, it really did get made into a t-shirt...

Note: this was the final sermon I preached at First Presbyterian Church of Independence.

Dear Pastor: More on performance culture and congregational singing

Last week's entry considered the impact of what John L. Bell called "performance culture" and its impact on the folks in your pews and their willingness to sing, particularly considering the impact of that performance culture and its infiltration into the church itself. That was not, however, the impact Bell was necessarily thinking of in The Singing Thing, and the impact of performance culture itself on the willingness of the folk to sing does need to be considered as well.

Bell states that "we are almost unconsciously entering an era very different from any Western civilization has previously known" (113) concerning emphasis on select performers over mass singing. Perhaps things were/are different in Bell's Britain. In the US performance culture has never been far from the center of any cultural life, and such communal singing as did exist did not always do so in a way that was as widespread as it might seem. Take, for example, the singing schools of colonial and early Federal New England.

These robust gatherings, social events as well as musical lessons, addressed a particular concern that we might share: the poor state of singing in the church. Itinerant singing masters established these singing schools as far as they could travel, offering instruction in enough of the rudiments of music to help congregation members have a fighting shot at singing the hymns in the service without evoking nightmares. Inevitably the singing schools themselves became the attraction, but the effect of people learning how to sing (at least a little) was a boon to the church.

The church in New England, that is, and maybe a little bit of the mid-Atlantic. This wasn't a nationwide phenomenon, and thus its impact was necessarily limited. (It did leave behind some fantastic music, however. Go listen to some William Billings, like here or here - or here, though the latter was not so much a church song. These were part-time musicians, by the way -- Billings was a tanner and other things, and Justin Morgan, heard here, was a horse breeder. Yes, the Morgan horse was his doing.)

Serious question: what would it take to make singing schools a thing again? That would be fascinating.

Likewise the shape-note or fasola singing phenomenon was thoroughly grassroots, but not geographically unanimous. Borrowing some elements from those New England singing schools (including some of the music - here's how one of those Billings tunes translates into shape-note style) but fleeing the increasingly urban East for the rural frontier, and using an ingenious system of assigning shapes to notes in order to make basic intervals easily singable, the shape-note tradition took root in the then-frontier Midwest and South. It was a rural phenomenon, not at all respected in urban climes. (The tradition survives today, and has in some cases taken on a more urban audience than its early practitioners would have ever thought.

Even as these popular traditions found their homes and adherents, performance culture also found its footing, particularly in the mid-nineteenth century in a two-pronged approach. As virtuoso performers (frequently European) figured out there was money to be made performing in the US, they started making their way to the States accompanied by Barnum-esque hype (literally so in the case of the soprano Jenny Lind, whose first US appearances were engineered by no less than the circus huckster P.T. Barnum himself - that much of The Greatest Showman was true.) At the same time advancing technology in the form of sheet music brought a form of "performance" culture to the good ol' American home, where your daughters could be primed to be prize catches by learning to play the piano and sing appealingly. In different ways both of these pulled against the practice of singing together, one by emphasizing the performer and the other by emphasizing the individual. 

One could push against other factors in American cultural life - the elite emphasis on good music of the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century, the middling and uncertain emphasis on teaching music in schools, and yes, the advancement of broadcast culture (from radio to television to streaming tech) and its hyper-glorification of the "star" as other factors that have pulled against much of a sense of communal singing as a valued quality, perhaps amplified by the sheer size of the US and the greater challenge of anything becoming culturally dominant in such a large country.

So where does public communal singing happen? You could point to community choruses, to the degree that a town can support such a thing. Oddly enough, one of the few places where true communal singing sometimes happens is at sporting events. Baseball still offers up "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" when the seventh-inning stretch comes along, except when national television broadcasts ruin that by inserting a useless soloist (and having survived, at least in some quarters, the militaristic usurpations of "God Bless America" that infested the sport after 9/11). Perhaps the most song-friendly sport is, of all things, soccer. Supporters groups have their songs and chants at the ready, which is wonderful ... unless you're for the other team. (Here's an example from the club down the turnpike in Orlando. It ain't Bach, but hey, they're singing.)

And then there's the church, where the singing is a little about being community, but so much more. More than community, its about being "body" - the body of Christ, to be precise. To a great degree the world is not going to be a lot of help facilitating and encouraging our singing, dear pastor. So how do we do it?

Joy in the moment: The Right Way To Play The Game is usually wrong about this

Note to the baseball-phobic: this post is mostly about baseball, though there might be conclusions drawn from it that are not baseball-specific.  Proceed with caution.

One of the sideshows that have played out over the course of this baseball season and, with some amplification, the postseason as well is the purported over-celebration of some players, or the curmudgeonly prudishness of others, depending on your point of view.

During the playoffs so far, the exuberance faction has mostly been represented by the Los Angeles Dodgers, with particular offense being committed by Yasiel Puig, an emigre Cuban outfielder and recipient of a large contract, who is prone to celebration upon hitting home runs, or thinking he has hit home runs.  At least once his celebratory bat flip ended up preceding not a homer, but a double or triple.

Puig is guilty of some mental lapses in his game and mistakes that have a direct effect on the course of play.  Possessed of a strong throwing arm, Puig sometimes lets his arm strength fool him into making crazed overthrows.  He also makes ludicrous attempts at spectacular catches only to have the ball bounce by him, sometimes with no more than a loping jog of pursuit after.  These obviously give the opposing team extra hits and bases and opportunities for runs, which isn't good.  These hurt the Dodgers, and the Dodgers need to get that kind of mental error fixed.

I'm just not quite certain what (aside from being wrong about having hit a home run) is such a horrible offense in a bat flip, short of one that hits another player.  For one thing it isn't always done even in celebration.  Tampa Bay Rays rookie Wil Myers got into trouble earlier in the season for bat flips that were no more than awkward attempts to get rid of the bat and start running to first at the same time.  The charge is that Puig is intentionally flipping the bat to "show up" the opposition, whatever that means.

Another incident in the series between the Dodgers and the St. Louis Cardinals involved some supposed shenanigans on the part of first baseman Adrian Gonzalez, normally one of the more stoic players in the game.  When one of the Cardinals accused Gonzalez of "Mickey Mouse" antics, Gonzalez responded in the next game by, after scoring a run, putting his hands to his head in mouse-ears shape.  The Cardinals, the latest self-appointed Keepers Of The Unwritten Rules, presumably found this an offense as well.

The Cardinals seemed to pick up that role from the Atlanta Braves, who inserted themselves into more than one incident during the season over the presumed Right Way To Play The Game.  Any kind of display after a home run seemed to bring out their particular ire, even though the Braves themselves fielded at least two of the biggest home-run preeners around.  The Braves only lasted one round in the playoffs, presumably not long enough to get hugely offended at the Dodgers' offenses.

I find this disturbing, mostly because one of my favorite parts of this season involved an unlikely starting pitcher for one of the worst teams in the league.  Jose Fernandez, age twenty at the start of the season with no experience above Class A baseball, ended up in the Miami Marlins' rotation to start the season due to injuries to other starters and (possibly) to an incompetent owner looking to curry favor with betrayed fans howling over the selloff of most of the team's actual major-league players during the previous season and offseason.  Fernandez had not only talent but also a compelling story; a Cuban defector, one who came across as a teenager in 2008 (on a third attempt, having spent time in prison after the failure of the first two) in an attempt that involved having to dive into the waters to save his drowning mother's life.

In one of those freakish scenarios that happen just often enough to tease sports fans into insanity, Fernandez not only succeeded, but thrived, wildly beyond anyone's expectations.  He represented the team in the All-Star Game and ended up being named National League Rookie of the Year by one organization.  He came close to a no-hitter in one start.  He racked up tremendous strikeout totals for a rookie, and crazy good stats for a pitcher of any experience level.

And the best part was, to me, that he enjoyed doing it.

He was happy when he won.  He was happy when his team won (which was seldom).  He was particularly happy when he got a base hit (for some reason pitchers get extremely giddy about hitting, considering they're usually so poor at it).  And he got really happy when he hit a home run in a September game against the aforementioned Atlanta Braves, this season's principal Defenders Of The Right Way To Play The Game.

Fernandez, after hitting the ball, apparently took too long to start running.  This was apparently the judgment of Braves catcher Brian McCann, self-appointed Chief Enforcer Of Baseball Decorum.   Keep in mind this is a twenty-year-old rookie pitcher.  If you are tempted to chastise him with the expression "act like you've been there before," you are ignoring the fact that Fernandez most likely hadn't been there before.  Furthermore, apparently the Braves had no problem with their own catcher/outfielder, Evan Gattis, preening like Madonna in her prime (if Madonna looked like a lumberjack) after hitting a homer earlier in the game.  (According to later accounts, Fernandez actually said "wow" as Gattis's homer left the park.  And maybe some other stuff too.)  OK for me but not for thee, Braves?  To hell with the Unwritten Rules Of Baseball, you just violated all the rules of The Right Way To Play The Game Of Life, and your early playoff exit was richly deserved for that alone.

The Cardinals, at least, have kept their prudery limited to postgame comments to the sports media, even more craven than D.C. media in their mindless pursuit of talking points and clickbait.  They got to the World Series, where they get to play the Boston Red Sox, whose idea of lightheartedness is apparently to disguise themselves as Confederate Civil War generals.  Unless you're a big fan of big ugly beards, it's going to be a rather characterless Series, unless one of the Cardinals attempts to forcibly shave Dustin Pedroia or Mike Napoli mid-game.

Why must games be such joyless affairs?  Even before the emerging science on head trauma put me off football for good, the hyper-militarized regimentation mixed with real showing-up and taunting that characterizes most football games was already starting to put me off my feed.  Does baseball have to be so rigid as well?  The game needs a lot more Jose Fernandezes and a lot fewer Brian McCanns in my not-all-that-humble opinion.  The kid pitcher is embarrassing you?  Shut up and get a hit.  If you can't do that, act like a damn grownup, not a spoiled rotten child.

Life itself is far too often a joyless affair.  The trudge from day to day, most days ending with more weariness than sense of accomplishment.  The increasing sense for so many that there really is no hope for things to get better.  The paranoid hoarding of profit and treasure.  The inability to savor any achievement, because one can't stop pressing on towards the next.  The wearying mantra that "too much is never enough."  The craven envy driving people to strive after The Latest, The Newest, The Hippest, The Coolest, The Hottest.  The Way To Play The Game.  And just when the clouds seem to lift a little, the next bit of bad news, unidentified stuff on a CT scan or the downsizing at work or the whispered degrading gossip at school or online, the brutality, the hatred, the jealousy, the anger, the fear.

And yet for entertainment, for diversion from that grinding existence, we so often turn to stuff that is if anything even more relentlessly grim.  I have to admit I don't get the appeal of these oh-so-popular shows in the ilk of Breaking Bad or such.  Life is hard enough.  Why in the world would I make my down time even harder?

Where is the joy in life?

Not merely happiness, though that's good itself.  Where are we allowed to be joyful?

The church?

Sadly, that merits a "ha!"  Too often, too many times, it is overrun with Brian McCanns, jawing at the Jose Fernandezes for Stepping Out Of Line, for Excessive Celebrating, for Inappropriate Display Of Joy (or Inappropriate Display Of Sadness), for innumerable violations of The Unwritten Rules Of Religion.  The joy that comes not in some mere display of extroversion, but in the awestruck silence, the lone trickling tear even, simply doesn't fit into Proper Church Decorum, so it has to be chastised.  The sorrow that hangs like an anchor on the heart, dragging the soul into the cold murky depths, is Not Proper Church Behavior, and must be rebuked, or at best ignored.  We Have Our Rules And They Must Be Followed.

Before I go any more into Hunter S. Thompson mode, a stanza of "Blest Be the Tie":

We share our mutual woes,
Our mutual burdens bear,
And often for each other flows the sympathizing tear.

If you are in a place where you can find that, cling to it.

If you are in a place where you can "share our mutual joys" or let loose with a great resounding belly laugh with each other just because that moment that just happened could not be received in any other way, count yourself fortunate.  Those moments don't happen often enough to waste on somebody else's idea of The Right Way To Play The Game.

The limits of sports, revisited

Some time back I dashed off a little piece about how sports, for as much as I enjoy them (and yes, baseball in particular), aren't really that great a vehicle for some of the things we ask them to do in modern society.  Recent events have provided motivation to revisit the idea.
At the time of that post, the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State was unfolding in all its grisly horror.  Since then, Penn State has actually played a football season without Joe Paterno coaching, and it wasn't quite as awful as predicted.  I make no claim to know what that means.  In the meantime, the infighting and recriminations about the scandal, the NCAA's handling of that scandal, and university's comportment through it all continues, though much farther from the glare of public attention.
The Miami Marlins, formerly the Florida Marlins, committed the faux pas of engaging in a "fire sale" of all their viable major league talent (except for one guy) within too short a time of fleecing the citizens of Miami-Dade for gobs of money to build a new stadium.  There will be legal recriminations yet, I suspect, but MLB will do nothing, because the Marlins owner is one of their chosen own, and MLB is pretty poor at policing their own.
College athletics gives us its usual assortment of mixed signals.  College football is basically an industry at this point, with the "college" part less and less relevant as (in my humble opinion; this is pure speculation, I admit freely) the top programs get better and better at covering their tracks in terms of keeping their best athletes eligible by hook or by crook.  College basketball offered up the gruesome spectacle of a horrific injury suffered by a Louisville Cardinals player during the tournament, and subsequent questions about who exactly was responsible for the medical treatment that followed (Kevin Ware, I can relate to that part).  And good God, no, I'm not linking to any video of that.  I have not seen it and I don't expect you to do so for my sake.
Of course, it was a week ago that the questions of the limits of sports began to forward themselves again.  The Boston Marathon, as much civic festival as prestigious race, was disrupted by a criminal and terrorist act, with three deaths and numerous injuries.  The immediate aftermath became the vehicle by which we saw an awful lot of human good; first responders and volunteers rushing toward the explosions, marathoners finishing the race only to keep running to a hospital to give blood (as if they weren't already physically depleted themselves).  The race itself was called off, and to my knowledge I never saw any mention of who finished first.
One was hard-pressed not to recall the aftermath of recent tragedies (only a couple of weeks before baseball had opened its seasons with commemorations of the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School) and the ways in which sports teams tried to fit into the community's response to them.  The Boston Red Sox, as is traditional on Patriots' Day/marathon day, had already played that morning and were headed on a road trip when the explosions happened.  Their return home Friday night was postponed (the first time the words "local manhunt" had ever appeared in a sports score summary, I'm guessing).  The next day, honorably but predictably, turned into an honoring of first responders and others involved in the response to the bombings and the manhunt that finally got its man boy in the overnight hours recently past.  A young outfielder hit a dramatic home run and the home team won, and everybody went home happy for a Sox win and for being able to move about most of Boston freely.
Then the next day the Sox got swept in a doubleheader by the Kansas City Royals.  Did that hurt the healing process?  I mean, the freaking Royals, people.
I do not want to belittle such things in the wake of tragic/horrific events; I do wish to ask us as a society not to overstate them.  "Respite" is a perfectly appropriate word and an honorable thing to offer; "healing" is not appropriate and not within the capacity of a sporting event to do.  Red Sox outfielder Jonny Gomes's use of a bat honoring those killed in the bombing or manhunt was a spectacularly decent thing to do; it did not, however, bring healing or "closure" or any circumvention of the grieving process that the families of those victims will still face.  A moment's respite?  Sure, and this is a good and decent thing to do.  It is not, however, a solution or an end to anything, and to act as though it is only does harm to the victims such a deed is meant to honor.
Sports is hardly alone; no one event, no one venue or pursuit or proclamation will ever be sufficient for "healing" or "closure."  No one will be "healed" or "achieve" closure by the fact that Tamerlan Tsarnev was killed in the manhunt, or by his kid brother's trial or sentencing.  That's not how the human psyche works, and those who claim to get "closure" from that kind of thing are probably left at several arm's distances and not touched with Dr. Seuss's thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole.  Grieving takes time.  Those who will not give it that time are frankly damaging themselves and those around them.  To expect that anybody will get closure in the face of terror and loss is damnable.  Don't do it.  Just don't.
End of rant.

The obstacle course

I'm not the kind of hyper-popular blogger who is missed by thousands when I go missing for more than a week.  I know that and I'm o.k. with that.  Still, for the faithful few who do keep up with this blog, I do try not to let too much time lag between entries.

So it's been a couple of weeks since last I blogged.  I got to enjoy our vacation with my wife's folks, including a couple of spring training games.  I even got to operate the radar gun used to measure pitch speeds by one scout.  Need proof?  Look here.

I only hope I didn't ruin some pitcher's prospects by screwing up the gun's reading.  Baseball careers are fragile things, especially for pitchers.

I had and have to remind myself that I needed that break.  It's hard especially to remember that right now, as the end-of-semester crunch becomes more and more present, with papers to write, projects to prepare, trips for non-vacation purposes (including my first trip back to Kansas since moving) including the ordination process and its next step for me, and of course the continuing fact of being treated for that pesky cancer.  Whichever poet penned that line about April being the cruelest month is starting to sound prophetic.

Chemo is still a draining thing, but a day or two of fatigue and some tingling fingers are hardly the kind of side effects I feel highly compelled to complain about, compared to what others have gone through.  It isn't how I planned to spend my middle year, mind you, but I do know I'm fortunate compared to many who have been far more wracked by their treatment than I.

I'm reminded again that I've been fortunate to be surrounded by an array of incredibly supportive and caring people.  Many of them are also pretty stunning ministers-to-be, like this one.  If your idea of the future of the church hinges on preserving existing institutions or maintaining social or cultural status, you're probably down and out about it; when I look at the people who are going to be part of helping shape and guide that future, I feel a lot better.

What role I play in that is still a part of the process unfolding.  I can't know which direction things will go; I still feel a strong pull towards the doing of worship and liturgy, but there are other things that start to make sense to me as well.  Too soon to talk about them here, but it might be a topic for future blogs.  We'll see.

In the meantime, the cruelest month awaits, the gauntlet is thrown down, the obstacle course demands that I run it.  And if it turns out to be a couple of weeks before the next entry I beg your indulgence.

A follow-up: the Red Sox, the church, and "first principles"

No, this isn't a follow-up to my rotten health report.  I don't know any more about that today than I did yesterday.

Rather, I'm already compelled to look back to this post, reflecting on the church's or a church's knowing when it's time to walk away from the usual way of doing things.  In that post I referred to my odd little pastime of running a simulated baseball team, and the unpleasant decision that the team as constructed had run its course and it was time for a rebuild from the bottom up.

Oddly enough, a real live major-league baseball team came to something like the same decision this week.  Those who follow baseball closely can hardly avoid being aware that the Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers pulled off a historic trade this weekend, made monumental in baseball terms by the sheer monetary value of contracts changing hands.  Two of the players headed from Boston to Los Angeles, Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez, have contracts extending over multiple years to come that will bring them in excess of $100,000,000 (it just looks more impressive in numbers, doesn't it?) over the life of the contract.  To put that in perspective: only one such player (Alex Rodriguez, the infamous "A-Rod" now of the New York Yankees) had ever been traded in the history of baseball before Saturday's blockbuster.  A third player in the deal, Josh Beckett, is still owed a little over $30,000,000 on his contract for 2013 and '14.  The fourth player headed to Los Angeles is a utility infielder, which means his contract for next year is only about $1,500,000 or so.  In return, Boston is receiving five players, only one of whom is a major-league regular; the others are currently in the minor leagues, and only one or two of those have any major-league experience at all.  Ironically, the only big-leaguer in the deal, James Loney, is the least-regarded player in the package, having proven to be a disappointment over the course of his time in L.A. and making Adrian Gonzalez a particularly appealing acquisition for the Dodgers to play first base, which had been Loney's position.

Gonzalez did not disappoint in his first game in Los Angeles, homering on the second pitch thrown to him in his first at-bat Saturday.  Beckett is scheduled to make his Dodgers debut Monday night.  Crawford is currently injured, and will not be back before some time in 2013.  Nonetheless, the Dodgers can look for instant returns on their rather substantial investment as they attempt to push their way into baseball's postseason.  The Red Sox, on the other hand, are extremely unlikely to see any return on their investment this season at all.  Loney will probably finish out the season there, but is a free agent after this year and there's no guarantee the Sox will choose to keep him around.  The other players might filter onto the Red Sox roster starting next season, or maybe even not until 2014.

So what are the Red Sox thinking?

(A quick historical primer follows for the two or three readers of this blog who don't follow baseball at all.  If you are a baseball fan, you'll probably know all this stuff, so you might choose to skip ahead a bit if you wish.)

The Red Sox have had a checkered past, capturing attention as much for their failures (an eighty-six-year stretch of failure to win a World Series in particular) as for any successes.  Beginning in the 2000s a new management regime made the decision to turn away from trying to compete dollar-for-dollar with high-spending franchises such as the New York Yankees, instead focusing on developing young talent through their minor-league system and supplementing that talent with judicious spending on free agents and trade acquisitions.  In particular, the Red Sox also emphasized the development and acquisition of pitching talent, on the principle of scarcity; it was then harder to find good pitching than good hitting.

After some notable heart-breaking setbacks (the 2003 playoffs in particular), this new regime was rewarded in 2004.  The Red Sox avenged their loss to the Yankees in the 2003 playoffs with an unprecedented comeback in the American League Championship Series, winning four straight potential elimination games to get to the World Series, where they swept the St. Louis Cardinals to break that long championship drought.  Three years later, they pushed through to win a second World Series title against the Colorado Rockies.

Even by 2007, though, things were starting to change, just a little bit.  The emphasis on pitching and developing from within remained in place, but here and there an exception to their core principles happened.  A long-term and relatively expensive contract for outfielder J.D. Drew, which could at best be said to have given mediocre returns, provided a measure of vexation for Sox followers.  After 2007, though, for whatever reason (pressure to keep winning, pressure to keep up with the free-spending Yankees, pressure to keep the manic Boston sports media at bay, pressure, pressure, pressure), developing young talent and fostering pitching (and foregoing those crazy long expensive contracts) fell by the wayside.  Beckett, a trade acquisition, was handed a multi-million dollar extension after playing a big role in that 2007 championship.  Pitcher John Lackey was signed to a big contract mostly on the strength of his role in the Angels' championship in 2002.  Japanese pitcher Daisuke Matzusaka was acquired in one of those complex international transactions in which the Sox first had to pay over $50,000,000 just for the right to negotiate with Matzusaka, who they then signed to a multi-year, multi-millions deal.  Crawford, formerly of my Tampa Bay Rays, was signed to a crazy contract upon his free agent departure from St. Petersburg, and Gonzalez got a big contract extension after being acquired in a trade with the San Diego Padres, one in which the Sox gave up three major young prospects.

Individually, aside from possibly the Lackey and Matzusaka deals, it's hard to say any of them were completely wrong-headed.  Beckett, hero of the Florida Marlins 2003 World Series win, had been the major force in Boston's 2007 championship.  Crawford was easily regarded as the most talented player in his free-agent class, and nobody doubted Gonzalez's ability when he was acquired.  The trouble is, when you sink that much money into a player and for some reason that player doesn't live up to the contract, your options for remedying the situation are severely limited.  Lackey pitched rather poorly with the Sox, and his attitude went south, and finally he was injured to the point of missing this whole season.  Matzusaka, despite some successes, never completely adjusted to the differences between pro ball here and Japan, and was eventually injured himself.   Beckett has been inconsistent since his new deal, alternating good and bad years.  Crawford, sadly, got off to a poor start in 2011, lost his nerve (it's a very different thing playing in unhealthily obsessed Boston vs. Tampa-St. Pete, where barely anyone knows they have a team) and pressured himself into a deeper hole, and finally ended up injured as well.

Meanwhile, instead of fostering young talent, the Sox gave it away, and some of it is flourishing elsewhere.  Anthony Rizzo is establishing himself with the Chicago Cubs (who picked him up in a prospect trade with San Diego), and Josh Reddick, traded to the Oakland Athletics for a relief pitcher, is having a breakout year, for just two examples.  Suddenly the Red Sox, far from being the pitching-youth-payroll flexibility franchise their core principles had espoused (and that had developed and prudently spent their way to two World Series wins), were increasingly old, broken-down, and dysfunctional.  A collapse for the ages last September has been followed with a broken season in 2012, leading to this weekend's epic tradeoff of talent.

Put bluntly, if you can't find some parallels here for American Protestantism, I'm not sure you're paying attention.  Churches nowadays find themselves shrinking both in numbers and influence.  Now I've railed against numbers as a measuring stick for the church in too many blog entries to link, and I've argued that the church's cultural influence in this country came at a cost we haven't fully reckoned.  What I find increasingly evident is that the church is in many cases guilty of reacting rather like the post-2007 Sox; throw money at the problem (fancy new buildings, sophisticated media facilities, professionalized musical outfits -- be they slick praise bands or virtually professional choirs, superstar preachers?), try desperately to keep up with the Yankees (the culture against which we often see ourselves as being in competition) on their terms (accumulating wealth or "star power," gathering and wielding political influence -- rather like a club, all too often -- or making worship virtually indistinguishable from entertainment?), and losing sight of our core principles.

I found it interesting that one of the first analyses of the Red Sox trade referred to the franchise's "first principles" in arguing that the deal marks a return to those core tenets of youth-pitching-flexibility.  That phrase "first principles" is an interesting one itself, finding currency from mathematics to philosophy to economics to politics to a whole lot of other fields of endeavor, apparently even running a baseball team.

When, at last, we find ourselves aging, dysfunctional (I need only look at my own denomination for this, whether past or present), and sliding into cultural irrelevance despite our best efforts, maybe we finally start looking around for our core, our "first principles" as a means of pulling ourselves together.  Only, we are forced to wonder, what are our first principles?  What is our core?  What is the point of the church's existence?  Your church might have a mission statement, but does that church's statement really reflect what it believes is the core of its existence?  Or does its organization, its activity, or its basic behavior betray that its true core lies elsewhere?

On one level, it had better be easy to identify what -- or perhaps Who -- represents the church's first principles.  If at some point the church cannot break down its basic identity, its rationale, its very reason for existence to Jesus Christ, we've severely lost our way.  Trouble is, though, Christ is awfully easy to reinvent for our modern purposes.  Jesus as CEO? Done.  Jesus as guru provokes too many possibilities to link.  Jesus as warrior?  Go poke around Revelation (and maybe Paul or pseudo-Paul) and ignore those pesky gospels and you're home free. Jesus Christ Superstar? Sorry, couldn't resist. Jesus as Republican (or Democrat)? Easy pickings.  It's a sad game with a long history in the church: emphasize this scripture passage here, ignore that one over there, read this one a particular way, and voila! Jesus as, basically, you writ large.  Here's a helpful hint: if your concept of Jesus doesn't include at least one thing that offends you or ticks you off, you're probably missing something.

So this is what a church faces, when there's finally nothing left to do but go back to the basics.  What is our core, our reason for existing, our sine qua non?  What, or Who?  And how do we as a church live that out?  And how much are we willing to give up to recover that?  If the answer to that last question is not "everything," then ... what are we doing?

The limits of sports

I've added another stadium to my "collection" of venues in which I've indulged my weakness for baseball.  Nationals Park is a pleasant enough place to watch a game, though the food is ludicrously expensive even in relation to other big league parks, and even though last night's game was played in a soupy miasma of heat and humidity.  The home team, fresh off a sweep of a very good San Francisco Giants team in which they thoroughly torched some of the better pitchers in baseball, got beat by the woeful Colorado Rockies and a rookie pitcher (admittedly one of the top pitching prospects around, but still a rookie), even with über-phenom Stephen Strasburg on the mound for Washington.

That kind of unpredictability is what's fun about sports, and baseball most particularly due to its relentless 162-game long march of a schedule.  Given enough opportunities, even the woeful teams will beat the wonderful teams on occasion -- not often, but just often enough to provoke the repeated use of the phrase "you never know" in describing the game.  Given a 5-0 deficit going into the bottom of the ninth inning, one would think there was no reason to hang around.  Still, when third baseman Ryan Zimmerman cranked one out to lead off the inning, a threatened mass exodus arrested itself, with fans congregating around the left-field plaza area straining for a look at the field, or at the large monitor installed near that plaza, just in case ... .  After all, the Nationals did put on a big late comeback just the night before, against a better team.  But on this night it was not to be, and in fact the Rockies held on for the 5-1 win.

Suspense without a script is part of the entertainment value of a good sporting contest.  Even if nothing happens, the sheer continual possibility of something happening has enough value and compelling interest to leave one feeling a little exhausted by its end.  One of the more compelling experiences I can recall was a high-school football game (I was in the marching band, natch) against a nearby rival, in which my team scored a very quick touchdown and missed the extra point, and nobody scored again -- a 6-0 final.  Yet, what might seem like a completely boring affair was anything but; long plays thwarted at the last, dramatic goal-line stands, dramatic interceptions when it seemed the other guys were about to score -- the sequence of desperate lows skyrocketing to giddy highs was an exquisite and exhilarating thrill ride.  I was worn out, and all I did was tromp around on the field and play a mellophone for ten minutes at halftime.

A good sporting contest can entertain, it can provide the kind of thrills that such a tense contest can provide (and if you aren't capable of getting this, you probably shouldn't snark about why people don't get the glory that is Shakespeare or Beethoven), and maybe on occasion it can be the occasion for life lessons on things like hope.  Still, there are things sports can't do, and there are things sports can do that the world would probably be better without.

Too easily sports becomes the venue for the uglier side of humanity to parade itself.  The recent Euro 2012 championships in soccer were the venue for some virulent hate speech by "fans" in Poland and Ukraine against certain players on the visiting teams, specifically those who [note: sarcasm ahead] committed the unforgivable crime of not being white.  The only thing more mind-bogglingly stupid than fans who riot destructively after their team loses a major championship such as the World Series or March Madness is fans who riot destructively after their team wins such a championship (yes, I'm looking at you, Lexington, Kentucky), and yet both happen way too often.  The horror of the still-unfolding scandal at Penn State defies capturing in one sentence, but an inescapable part of the formula is the cultish admiration for a long-successful coach, and the resultant power that ends up in hands not divine enough to cope with it (hint: no human hands are divine enough to cope with that kind of power).  Beyond fan ugliness, player misbehavior is too easy to find in headlines, from players getting paid to injure other players in the NFL to a string of drunken accidents or drug arrests or sexual assault charges to which the popular capacity for outrage is somewhere between numb and outright resentful ... of those who would hold athletes accountable for their behavior.

Given such an ongoing record, why would we think that of all the bizarre things sports have the capacity to "heal" societal wounds or grief?  And yet, think back to those days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon; how much talk did one hear about the capacity of baseball or football games to "heal" American society?  Um, no.  The late David Halberstam (a New Yorker, mind you) swatted that notion away like a cheap jump shot with these words, written a year after the attacks: "If, in the long run, you need sports to help you through a time of tragedy and to take your mind off a grimmer reality, then you are emotionally in so much trouble in not understanding what is real and what is fantasy that the prospects for your long-term emotional health are probably not very good." (From "Sports Can Distract, But They Don't Heal," published on ESPN.com on September 10, 2002, and reprinted in Everything They Had, a collection of Halberstam's writing on sports published in 2008.)


Halberstam did not dismiss the temporary boost such games can provide in that kind of situation, citing the Yankees' run to the World Series that year.  Even in that, though, the boost was thoroughly temporary (the Yankees didn't win the Series), and didn't take away any of the grief or tragedy the city or country was bound to experience.  And frankly, we'd be a deeply troubled and emotionally and intellectually impoverished country if it had.

One could even argue that baseball and football became complicit in the enforcement of a particular conformity of response to the events though their quick acquiescence to the exigencies of hand-wringing flag-waving; no time for grief anymore, gotta sing "God Bless America" in the seventh-inning stretch instead of "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" so those terrorists know they didn't win -- and don't dare ask questions.  [Eleven years later, this persists to varying degrees in Major League Baseball, with most every park doing so on Sundays (civil religion, anybody?) and special occasions, and at least the Yankees doing so at every game, so that you're getting a double-dose of musical patriotism (since the national anthem is still sung at the beginning of every game as well).  Is there not some place where overkill begins?]

I enjoyed my ballgame last night (though I'm quite sure any further need for live baseball this season will be fulfilled quite nicely by the local minor-league squad), and I'll even admit that one of my great small fears going forward into this new unknown is the possibility to end up called to a church far away from any major- or minor-league ball.  Still, I know enough to know that when I got up this morning, there were still bookshelves awaiting moving and/or building; my denomination was still behaving badly at its biennial business meeting this week; Hebrew still starts Monday; and this area is still under an Excessive Heat Warning for today and tomorrow.  Nothing was healed, no problems were solved.  It was an evening's pleasant diversion, and one more step in a season of diverting intrigue and suspense.  Any "uniting" with a diverse crowd of others lasted only until that unsuccessful rally breathed its last.  Should the Nationals make a charge for a World Series title, it won't do anything for the city's crime rate (except, alas, for a possible riot-charged spike the night of the last game), or for the fact that its citizens have no voting representation in Congress.  The Saints, no matter how much rhetoric to the contrary, did not "heal" New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; that only happens when people put their energy and soul into rebuilding and restoring the city, and if some of those people happen to be members of the Saints like Drew Brees, good.  Sports can do many things.  Sports cannot do many things, and there are many things sports should not do.  One is always wise to keep those things in mind and to keep from confusing them in theory or in practice.

When prospects become tragedies

For a baseball fan this is the dark season as it is.  Baseball season is over, and nothing awaits but a giant sucking void between now and the first rumors of spring training in February.  Awards are given out in November, which is nice, but arguing over what in heaven, hell, or earth that guy was thinking voting for Michael Young for AL MVP isn't quite the same as Miracle Day back at the end of the season, or watching the kids break in, or hoping that Matt Kemp might get the Triple Crown after all, or whatever part of the season provided that extra boost for you.

For a real, passionate baseball fan, other sports don't quite cut it.  Football, the brutalizing overblown spectacle that it has become in the NFL at least, is the antithesis of baseball (George Carlin nailed that pretty well).  While I can occasionally engage a little with college football (what was FSU doing Saturday night?) it's not there either, and the B[C]S is a pathetic excuse for a joke, which discredits the whole enterprise beyond repair.  Even if basketball were appealing to you, the NBA is in the process of self-immolation, and the college game isn't quite rolling yet.  Hockey (more antithesis) is rather shadowy these days, the NHL having in fact ceded its #4 position in pro sports attendance to Major League Soccer, believe it or not.  So for a baseball fan, these are bleak, sad days, with little solace on the horizon.

Things are bad enough, in other words, without real life intruding on the escape-world that is fanship.  And yet real life has intruded, violently and roughly, into the baseball fan's offseason in ways to make the mind reel.

First was the kidnapping in Venezuela of Wilson Ramos, a talented young catcher for the Washington Nationals.  A little awareness of international news will remind one that this sort of thing is sadly common in Venezuela these days, and other professional athletes have had family kidnapped there for hefty ransoms, but this is the first case I know of where the athlete himself has been the kidnapping victim.  This story at least had about as happy an ending as possible, as Ramos was rescued a couple of days after being kidnapped.

Today's story cannot have a happy ending.  Greg Halman, a young outfielder for the Seattle Mariners, was stabbed to death while at home in the Netherlands, not long after being part of a tour of major leaguers visiting and giving baseball camps across Europe.  Halman wasn't quite the talent that Ramos is, being too prone to strikeouts, but he had made the majors and still had the chance to make it for good.  The sadness of having to use the past tense to describe that chance stings, all the more for those who follow that team more closely and perhaps saw him play or maybe even encountered Halman, maybe got an autograph.

Let us be clear: following any sport with any kind of intensity is thoroughly escapist.  (Admittedly for some people it seems to be a substitute for real life, particularly among followers of certain teams or college football conferences -- coughSECcough -- but we rightly worry about such people and know something's not right with them, yes?)  What is supposed to be the fun thing about sports (besides its unpredictability) is that real-world fears are banished as long as there's a game going on and your team is still in it.  Murders and kidnappings and wars and bills and all manner of other stresses are left aside for a time, to root in common with people you wouldn't give the time of day to in real life but to whom you are bound by this one common passion.  The only thing you're supposed to be wondering about Greg Halman this offseason is if he can cut down on his strikeouts and be a contributor next year, not oh God, how can this happen? or any of the other questions we always ask when tragedy intervenes rudely in our lives.  That in this case murder seems the clear cause (and according to early reports, his brother is a suspect) only deepens the hurt and confusion and disorientation.  (This column by Rob Neyer of Baseball Nation suggests that Halman is only the third active major leaguer to be murdered in the history of Major League Baseball.)

No, it's not unique to baseball; a young tight end for the University of Arkansas football team died unexpectedly this weekend as well.  So far as anyone can discern foul play is not involved there.  There is something particularly disturbing about foul play being involved.  Part of the issue is, I guess, that celebrities (which certainly includes professional athletes), despite the increasing tabloidization of celebrity these days, still have a certain untouchability about them in our naive little minds.  Yeah, they can screw up their lives with the best of us (and it becomes more entertainment fodder these days), but being murdered still shocks in most cases (the bloodier aspects of hip-hop rivalry a couple of decades ago notwithstanding).

Baseball players are supposed to play until they can't play anymore, then go get old and show up for old-timers games and tell stories and all that romantic stuff.  They aren't supposed to get kidnapped or stabbed to death.  It's not supposed to be real life.  It's supposed to be baseball.

Oh, my, did that just happen?

For those who follow baseball with much passion, Wednesday's waterfall of decisive games, epic comebacks, and grotesque collapses was a once-in-a-fandom event.  That kind of thing Just. Doesn't. Happen.  Teams don't lose nine-game leads for playoff position in September.  It's impossible to be that bad after having been so good, right?  Nothing is impossible, my friends; after that display even skiing through a revolving door begins to look conceivable.

For most the headline-grabbing event is the long, horrific fall of the Boston Red Sox.  Atlanta Braves fans are in the unenviable position of either suffering in silence or interjecting, "Hey, what about us?  We fell apart just as badly . . . oh, wait . . . ."  And in truth there are reasons that the Red Sox collapse is in fact a bigger deal, which we shall address anon.  But to the Braves first.

Earlier in September the Braves had an 8 1/2-game advantage in the chase for the wild card position, the final playoff spot in the National League.  The St. Louis Cardinals, the team trying to close that deficit, looked a bit disoriented and lost, and the Braves were riding their old-style formula of devastating pitching (now with a real bullpen, something the Braves teams of the '90s never quite mastered) and occasionally scoring a run or two to win the game.  After Wednesday's games, the Braves resided one game behind the Cardinals, looking at an offseason beginning sooner than anyone had anticipated.

At least as of the time their game ended, no one had frittered away such a large last-month-of-the-season lead and missed out on the playoffs, ever.  But if one were going to look for a team susceptible to such a collapse, the Braves weren't the worst candidate to pick.  So much of their success was bound up in their pitching, particularly a bullpen featuring a couple of young flamethrowers in Jonny Venters and Craig Kimbrel, that if for some reason that pitching hit a rough patch there was no Plan B.  The kind way to say it is to call the Braves "offensively challenged."  Chipper Jones should cruise into the Baseball Hall of Fame someday, but he's on the downside of his career and so frequently injured or banged up as to be a shell of his former self.  Last year's rookie phenomenon, Jason Heyward, practically re-wrote the definition of "sophomore slump," to the point of losing the confidence of manager Fredi Gonzalez and being replaced for long stretches of time by a career minor-leaguer who had never really hit in the minor leagues.  (Here's a little-appreciated truth about baseball, particularly hitting: you can't get out of a slump by not playing.)  Dan Uggla, the slugging second baseman acquired in the offseason, played as if the last letter of his name had been replaced with a "y."  Aside from rookie first baseman and possible Rookie of the Year Freddie Freeman (no relation), there wasn't a lot of dependable offense there.  If the pitching faltered, even a little bit, the Braves were in trouble.  And that's exactly what happened.  It was hardly a total collapse, but Kimbrel and Venters became a little bit more hittable, the starters couldn't spare the rest of the bullpen by pitching eight or nine innings, and the Cardinals got hot at the right time to take advantage.  Now Cardinal fans can extend their good-byes to Albert Pujols a little bit longer.

Only an hour or two later, the Red Sox got the Braves off the hook, just a little bit, with their "yes we can!" answer to the Braves' "can you top this?" moment.  Boston completed a nine-game collapse with a loss to the Baltimore Orioles, while the Tampa Bay Devil Rays defeated the New York Yankees.  That rather mere description does not do justice to Wednesday night's turn (and turn again, and turn again...) of events.

Up to the ninth inning of their game, the Red Sox led, 3-2.  In the meantime, the Rays trailed the Yankees as much as 7-0 before beginning their comeback, which was not completed until the ninth inning with a barely-fair home run by one Dan Johnson, whose sole purpose in baseball seems to be to destroy the Red Sox.  In 2008 he hit a crucial home run in the Rays' pennant push, and did it again late last season.  In between, Johnson spent the 2009 season in Japan and most of the 2010 season in Durham, NC, home of the Rays' AAA farm team.  This spring something odd happened; the minor-league lifer actually got to leave spring training with the major-league team instead of shuffling off to Durham.  Faced with this unexpected karmic windfall, Johnson responded by mustering a batting average barely over .100 (in a sport in which a .200 average is a good sign you should seek alternate employment).  Quickly he was shuffled back to Durham, there to bide his time until the odd baseball quirk known as September roster expansion allowed him to return to the majors, in time to destroy the Red Sox yet again.

With the game thus tied, matters continued into extra innings, in which the 12th inning finally brought triumph in the form of a barely-fair home run from a much more conventional source, Evan Longoria, the Rays' most highly-renowned player.  This home run occurred just in time for Red Sox players to see it on their clubhouse TVs upon trudging dejectedly in after their ninth-inning loss, due to a sharp single by Robert Andino, who is now in the process of receiving a vulgar middle name in perpetuity from Red Sox fans, in the manner of Bucky Effing Dent (1978) and Aaron Bleeping Boone (2003).  Andino's single, appropriately enough, ticked off the glove of Sox left-fielder Carl Crawford, finishing up his own horribly disappointing first season in Boston as the recipient of a very pricey free-agent contract, allowing him to escape the horrors of playing for Tampa Bay.

Let the irony wash over you for few moments.  Enjoy that?  Good.

Now as to why the Boston collapse was so much more of an attention-grabber than Atlanta's:

The Red Sox, despite a history of being the plucky underdog to the Evil Empire in New York, are in fact their own Evil Empire these days.  Their payroll isn't a whole lot smaller than that of the Yankees, and their fan base has acquired the same level of smug obnoxiousness as that of the Yankees, despite trailing in World Series championships twenty-something to two.  Their chief offseason acquisitions before this year were classic examples of a large-market club plucking away the premium players small-market teams can no longer afford; Crawford from the Rays via free agency and first baseman Adrian Gonzalez from the San Diego Padres via trade.  With such offensive improvements added to what was believed to be a solid pitching staff, the Red Sox were widely picked to waltz through the American League and into the World Series.  ESPN.com surveyed a group of forty-five writers, analysts, former players, etc. and all of them--yes, all forty-five--picked the Red Sox to win their division, forget that messy wild-card stuff.  (The Braves were a frequent, but by no means consensus, pick to win the NL wild card; in other words, they ended up about where those ESPN foofs picked them to end up.)

It should be pointed out that as of September 1, those forty-five experts appeared to be right on the money.  The Red Sox were in fact in first place, something not true of the Braves in their division; this simply adds another level of incredulity to the overall collapse.

Meanwhile, the Rays, to put it mildly, spend less on their roster.  A lot less.  By all accounts the Cardinals in the NL were much likelier playoff candidates in the AL.  The Rays, despite playoff turns in 2008 and 2010, were not expected to make the playoffs at all this year.  Since nobody goes to games in St. Petersburg (the Tampa Bay area does not deserve this team) and the stadium, a goofy-looking lopsided dome, isn't a moneymaker in the mode of iconic Fenway Park, the Rays operate with a limited budget.  Besides Crawford, the Rays bid goodbye to one of their top starting pitchers and virtually all their relief pitchers over the offseason, for budgetary reasons.  Their two on-the-cheap free-agent signings were Johnny Damon, most notable for rocking the Jesus look during Boston's 2004 World Series run, and the erratic Manny Ramirez, who ended up "retiring" five games into the season due to being busted for performance-enhancing drugs.

So, on paper at least, the disparity between Boston and Tampa Bay was more impressive, by far, than the disparity between Atlanta and St. Louis.  And yet there Boston was, looking if though they had suffered some sort of collective mind-wipe that left them unable to remember how to play baseball.  The Rays had a good month of September, but not great; such was the magnitude of Boston's slide.  The Rays play at Texas Friday night, the Red Sox go home to wonder what happened.

If you've waded through this whole thing waiting for some grand theme or mini-sermon to top it off, you are about to be grandly disappointed.  There is no grand theme.  Such unfathomable swings and falls defy thematization.  (I'm certainly not going to bring divine intervention into it; I do believe God has a flair for the preposterous, but this?)  Folks, stuff happens.  Wildly improbable, statistically unthinkable things happen, and trying to extract some lesson from it is a bigger fool's errand than my own.  Enjoy it, if you're a fan of the Rays, Cardinals, or underdogs; suffer through it, if you're a fan of the Braves, Red Sox, or corporate oligarchies or whatever.  This is that thing that sport (particularly baseball) does, every so often, that makes them irresistible to those who love it.  It certainly doesn't happen every season.  Most years a team like the Red Sox prevails, and handily, while the Rays go scraping for change between the sofa cushions.  But not this year.  Sometimes the underdog wins, and there's not a whole lot to do but shake your head and wonder, and enjoy.

Prospects and hope

Those who know me know (and anyone who doesn't can learn from the profile here) that I'm a baseball fan.  Rather maniacally so, one might say.  This produces behaviors in me that are not easily explainable otherwise.

Friday night, even with loads of stuff to do or pack or grade or read or what have you, an immutable inner compulsion drove me into the car, onto K-10 and then I-435, and eventually to Kaufmann Stadium, home of the Kansas City Royals, to witness the major league debut of a twenty-one-year-old kid I'll never know, by the name of Eric Hosmer.

I should point out that I'm not exactly a Royals fan, not really.  They are the closest team at the moment, and thus the "home" team (as described in the penultimate couplet of the chorus to "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," which exhorts fans to "root, root, root for the home team"), but I've only lived around here four years, which hasn't been enough time to build ties that bind.  I spent enough time in Florida to have some affinity for both the Marlins and the Rays, the latter of which I was able to follow from its inception through some of the worst seasons in baseball history, only to have them make the World Series the season after I left the state.  I grew up in Georgia following the Braves.  But on the major-league level, I am primarily a baseball fan before a fan of any one team.

This actually explains the pilgrimage to Kaufmann Friday night.  For the non-baseball fans among you, Eric Hosmer is by virtually all accounts a good young player.  At least one expert on the subject projects Hosmer as the fifth best prospect in all of baseball, which is pretty impressive when one considers how many players toil in the minors waiting for their chance.  The experts say he can hit, hit with power, and field extremely well to boot.  And as silly as it sounds, the chance to catch his first big-league game, to be able to say that someday when he's making All-Star teams or winning batting titles or home-run titles, was too much to pass up.  "I saw him when..." is a powerful sentiment.

Considering the sad state of the Royals, the event became magnified in significance.  After drawing crowds less than 20,000 most nights since Opening Night, the team picked up a crowed over 30,000.  The team shop was making "Hosmer 35" replica jerseys by hand, and falling well behind demand (no, I didn't go that far).

For the record, the Royals lost, and Hosmer did not get a hit.  He walked twice and struck out twice (the second time on a dubious called third strike).  In the very first inning he picked a hard-hit ground ball cleanly and started a double play, first to second and back to first--not an easy play even for an experienced first baseman.  The 0-for-2 might not look like much, but having the discipline to wait out walks in his first two big-league plate appearances is actually pretty darned impressive.

So in the end, a satisfying trip.  Had I waited one more night I'd have seen the kid's first big-league hit, and the Sunday game would have rendered up a run-scoring double--first major-league run batted in.  But still, to someone who watches way too much baseball, it was a promising start.  One game is ultimately meaningless, of course (statisticians would lecture about "small sample size" here), except that it's not.  He arrived, he held his own, and now he can be about the business of having a big-league career, something that you and I and the vast majority of us will never do.

A Royals fan dares hope for what Hosmer might eventually do for the franchise.  A more generalist baseball fan like me simply gladdens to see another bright talent coming to The Show.  Maybe a non-fan can take pleasure in a talent being nurtured and developed and exercised at its highest level.  We can appreciate this, yes?

He's just one prospect, of course.  Right now the Royals are regarded as having the best minor-league talent in all the league, but even that is not a guarantee that the Royals will be printing playoff tickets anytime soon.  One might hurt his arm, one might get hit by a bus, one might simply fail to live up to expectations.  Any of those could still happen to Eric Hosmer (watch out for those buses, kid).  Still, for one night, fans of a sad-sack team had permission to dream about seasons with ninety wins instead of ninety losses, hitters who don't swing at bad pitches, teams with youth and energy and promise and that most elusive of all qualities, hope.

Hope.  It can be a terrible tease sometimes.  We allow our hopes to be raised, only to have them dashed or shattered.  It happens in our professional lives, our love lives, our political ideals, even our faith.  Often it's our own faults; we get caught striving for the wrong goal, the wrong person, misplacing our faith.  Sometimes our hopes don't turn out through no fault of our own.

The church, of course, has its own ideas about hope.  Hymnody exults in it: "my hope is built on nothing less than Jesus's blood and righteousness..." or "hope of the world, Thou Christ of great compassion," "O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come...".  It's a vital thing in that context, but it's not only among the faithful that hope is a needful thing.  It's a fierce human need.  We are highly prone to latch onto any occasion, any excuse for hope.  It may be more meaningful in most places than in regard to a baseball team, but the power of hope, and the power of the need for hope, are lessons I am well-advised to write fast upon my own heart as I go forward into this fool's errand.

And yes, for the next few years in Richmond, and then wherever the good Lord chooses to deposit me thereafter, I'll be checking out Eric Hosmer's stats now and then.