Insights: Baseball and Matters of Life, Death, and Pumpernickel

I was raised a Catholic. My parents were not zealots, but you could find accessories like a rosary, Bible, crucifix, and prayer candle from the Good Catholic Starter Kit around the house just in case a friend was in need of a prayer or an emergency exorcism. Being Catholic meant going to church, so every Sunday I’d be forcibly removed from bed, restrained in Polly Flinders, and I’d thrash and wail as my father tried to strap patent leather Mary Janes onto my kicking feet. I hated church, and secretly my parents hated it too, but we came from a long line who every Sunday (and again every third Wednesday for confession) felt obliged to perch on rickety wooden pews that could splinter your ass at any moment if you didn’t sit very still. Even when we moved hours from our closest judging relatives we still went to church.

“Why do we have to go if Grandma won’t know we didn’t go?” I’d ask my father.

The sentiments above are certainly grounded in good intentions, and probably in a lot of truth as well. We can probably agree that taken entirely by themselves, in a vacuum, honesty is good and dishonesty is bad.

We don’t live in a vacuum, though, and it doesn’t take us long to discover that honesty isn’t always the best policy, does it? The simplest and most obvious example is that it would be a world drowning in chaos if everyone just went around being honest with everyone all the time. Tell your friend the sweater she’s wearing today is hideous, tell the stranger on the street that he looks like he’d be really good in bed or that something about his face just makes you want to punch it really hard: chaos! In fact, a solid majority of the time as we’re just bumbling around the world at large, I’d say that keeping one’s mouth shut is definitely the best policy. Maybe honesty is second-best, but it’s a pretty distant second.

You don’t need to search far to make growth analogous with sports. We grow up alongside and with athletes, moving through our lives while they move through their careers. They’re an ever-persistent force, always looking forward, and their existence -- be it through aging, or injections of youth from the minors or college or what have you -- is a constant reminder of our own progression through life. Nowhere is this more apparent than in baseball, given the organization of its leagues and levels.

*The NHL allows the drafting of high school players, but until they figure out their lockout streak, they’re about as active as your local BASEketball team.

“Death ain’t nothing but a fastball on the outside corner. And you know what I’ll do to that!...You can kiss it goodbye.” -- August Wilson, Fences.

Fences is a Pulitzer Prize winning play about an old Negro League player, Troy, who is obsessed with cheating death. But even as he plots and plans to stall the Grim Reaper, he acknowledges, “Ain’t nothing wrong with talking about death. That’s part of life. Everybody gonna die. You gonna die, I’m gonna die ... Hell, we all gonna die.”