Blogito ergo sum.

I remember watching on TV perhaps the greatest baseball game ever played – certainly the best one I ever saw.

 That game was played on October 21, 1975, in Fenway Park.  It was Game Six of the World Series between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox.

 Every baseball fan has heard of Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine: Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez, Ken Griffey (Sr.), George Foster, Dave Concepcion, Cesar Geronimo.  This was the sports equivalent of America’s founding fathers: a rare collection of talent and personality of which legends are made.  (They were seared in my memory partly because my hapless Chicago Cubs played them a dozen times a year.)

 What I had forgotten until I read Mark Frost’s fine book was that the Boston Red Sox of 1975 had a dream team of their own: Carl Yastrzemski, Rico Petrocelli, Fred Lynn, Dwight Evans, Cecil Cooper, Rick Burleson, and the indefatigable Luis Tiant.  (This doesn’t even include Jim Rice, whose broken wrist took him out of the Series, thus creating one of the great “What if?” debates of baseball lore.)

 Although we couldn’t have known it then, this Series also marked a change of eras.  The next summer, the era of free agency would transform baseball fundamentally and forever.  Until 1975, kids grew up knowing by heart the entire lineup of their favorite team.  After 1975, major league baseball would move from an affectionate sport that belonged to their fans and their cities to a cutthroat business that belonged to agents and corporations.  Strikes, lockouts, steroids, and gaudy salaries would dominate the landscape from that day till this.  For instance, ARod’s salary today would have bought the entire Yankee franchise in 1975!  But I digress…

 But that was a simpler time in the realm of baseball.  At 11:35 p.m. that night, after 12 tremendous innings, I knew I had just watched something special.  I knew that this thoroughly entertaining Series would go to Game Seven.  What I couldn’t know (until reading Game Six) was…

• That Tony Kubek had quietly disappeared from the broadcast booth in the middle of the 8^th inning – not to reappear – because he had been sent to the Cincinnati locker room for the postgame interviews of the probable Series winners.  In the ebb and flow of those last few innings, Kubek went back and forth between the visitor and home locker rooms more than once, until he ended up in the Cincinnati dugout (out of camera view), where he watched Fisk’s walkoff home run right over Sparky Anderson’s shoulder.
• That Joe Garagiola resented that NBC gave the call of this critical game to newcomer Dick Stockton, and actually lobbied the network executives to dub his own voice over the video of Fisk’s famous walkoff home run for posterity.
• That Stockton’s own career would take off (you’ve heard his smooth, confident, professional baritone call the NFL, the NBA, and many other sports broadcasts) – and that Stockton would have his first date with cub reporter Lesley Visser, a pioneer in her own right, and that they would be happily married from then right up to the present day.
• That Bernie Carbo, feeling overmatched by Rawly Eastwick in the 8^th inning, made a swing so bad that he stepped out of the batter’s box and thought to himself, “I just took the worst swing in history of baseball.”  On the next pitch, hit a game-tying, 3-run homer.
• That when Eastwick got two strikes on Carbo during that famous, fateful 8^th-inningat-bat, Reds manager Sparky Anderson had a strong intuition take out Eastwick and bring in his ace lefty Will McEnaney to finish off Carbo.  Anderson changed pitchers so often that he had the nickname, “Captain Hook.”  Sparky had never disobeyed that inner managerial voice before – until now.  “One more pitch,” he thought, “I’ll give him one more pitch.”  The rest, as they say, is history.
• That in the bottom of the 9^th, with the bases loaded and nobody out, Denny Doyle – a slow runner – ran into the rally-killing double play at home plate because Fenway Park was so loud that when his third base coach, Don Zimmer, was yelling, “No!  No!  No!”, he thought Zimmer was screaming, “Go!  Go!  Go!”
• That the only reason we have Carlton Fisk’s joyful, childlike home-run hop – one of the most iconic sports moments ever caught on tape – the only reason that the left-field scoreboard camera was left on Fisk instead of following the flight of the ball (which is why it was installed there!) is that the cameraman had been paralyzed in place because the biggest rat he had ever seen had just crawled over his foot. 
• That Pete Rose caught up with his manager in the parking lot after the game.  Rose was grinning, without a care in the world.  “That was the best game I ever played in!”  Sparky’s retort: “I just lost us the World Series and all you can say is it’s the best game you ever played?”  Rose, calm and confident as a certified lunatic, said, “You and I were part of history tonight; that was the greatest World Series game ever.  First time I’ve ever been happy about a game I lost.  …We’re gonna win this thing tomorrow, Skip.”  Then, as Frost tells it, “Rose moved on, happy as a pup, looking for someone else to convert.”

 Game Six has many strengths.  Frost does a commendable job of relating the checkered stories of the two baseball franchises (including how they got their names), setting the ’75 Series into its larger cultural context (even comparing it to the Ali-Frazier “Thrilla in Manilla”).  He takes us pitch by pitch through the game, injecting the memories of the players and coaches as commentary, and even telling of the life and career of each player as he makes his first appearance in the game.  This back-and-forth style creates great sympathy in the reader for the players as flesh-and-blood human beings.  We care about them.  We root for them.  It also creates an air of suspense and anticipation for the next pitch, the next play, the next plot twist.  Even though I already knew the ultimate outcome, and even many of the key turning points in the game, to a degree greater than I anticipated, I rode the emotional roller coaster of a fan throughout his compelling account of this compelling game.

 Game Six has some weaknesses as well.  When the players used profane language, Frost quotes them verbatim.  Thus the book will offend the sensibilities of some adult readers and make the book off-limits to younger baseball fans.  The coda (relating players’ subsequent careers and lives thereafter) was too long and thus anticlimactic.  Frost also draws out far too long his lament about how free agency has ruined baseball.  However, even with its flaws, Mark Frost’s book is one that every true baseball fan can read and enjoy – and should.  I conclude with perhaps the best description of athletics I have ever read anywhere, which I quote at length:

 They’re in late middle age now, all the players who strode the stage of Game Six.  The youthful, big-league dreams they all shared had come to pass, lifted them up, making possible a large American life during and after their careers that for most would have otherwise remained hopelessly out of reach.  To a man they all still love the game that gave them their measure of glory, and if baseball has more than its share of the intractable dilemmas informing so much of modern life, it also still has the game itself, in all its sweet formal simplicity and complex interior reality; that remains its richest, most valuable asset.  The idea of finding meaning in a game, no matter how elevated the level of play or its artificially inflated significance in a culture that all too often celebrates size over substance, it easy to write off against the weight of the world’s concerns or the pressing limits of finite life spans.  But such condescending assessments miss the essential nature of the nourishment these contests provide; because it is the human qualities embodied and displayed by the players in these arenas that we drink in and from which we derive soulful benefit: grace, stalwart strength, determination and inner fire, standing up under pressure, persistence and faith in something larger than the self, taking joy in victory, yielding with dignity in defeat.  These things matter and they are, as much as any identifiable part of the human experience, eternal.

When I became the headmaster of a Classical Christian school, I faced a weird conflict between my personal love of sports and my professional disdain of them.  The former was born of a lifelong enjoyment of athletics, both as a spectator and as a participant.  The latter came from the damage I had seen athletics do to school programs, devouring disproportionate amounts of precious time, energy, and money.

 Further study into both Classical and Christian traditions (where athletics have been prominent), plus discussions with school leaders about how to give athletics their proper place in campus life, plus reflection on the merits of athletic endeavor for character formation, have convinced me that sports, clearly understood and carefully guarded, will enrich the lives of schools and their students.

 Paideia has commissioned a task force to explore the strategic role of athletics in our mission and vision.  One of the task force members loaned me a book put together by Brain Kilmeade (you may have seen him on Fox and Friends), The Games Do Count, in which famous Americans from all walks of life testify to the formative role of sports in their own lives.

 The book includes such luminaries as Oliver North, Condoleeza Rice, Ronald Reagan, Tony Danza, Robin Williams, Donald Trump, Jim Caviezel, Jon Bon Jovi, George Will, Geraldo Rivera, and Bernie Mac.

 The Games Do Count is a nice book to fill up the little nooks and crannies of one’s day (doctor office waiting rooms, public transit rides, Saturday-morning coffee on the patio) because it has short chapters, interesting personal stories, doesn’t have to be read in order, and is non-controversial if strangers see you reading it.

 Burt Reynolds tells a fascinating story about the famous touchdown scene in his classic movie, The Longest Yard.

 George W. Bush tells how George H.W. Bush inspired him but never pushed him.

 I have to admit that I skipped the chapter by John Kerry.

 The most moving part of the book was a series of four chapters in the middle by friends and family members of some passengers of United Flight 93.  These authors told how they were not at all surprised that their fallen comrades were heroes on 9/11, because they had seen heroic traits in them on the lacrosse field, the basketball court, and the wrestling mat.  I was surprised at my own emotion welling up as I read these chapters.  I guess the wound of 9/11 has not yet healed, and perhaps never will.

 The book’s characters are true-life people, of course, and they tell of true-life lessons they learned in sports: discipline, endurance, strength in numbers (teamwork), magnanimity in victory, humility in defeat.  In short, all of the virtues and vices of the human soul are surfaced, focused, intensified, magnified, and conquered on the athletic field.  Sports is a microcosm of life, and those who participate find their lives fuller for it.  Sports can make us better human beings.

Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny contains 3 1/2 pages of alarmist claims in news reports that man-made global warming causes or has caused.  I am listing only a few: acne, aggressive weeds, amphibians breeding earlier (or not), animals head for the hills, Antarctic ice grows, Antarctic ice shrinks, Atlantic more salty, Atlantic less salty, attack of the killer jellyfish, beer shortage, birds confused, brothels struggle, bubonic plague, butterflies move north, cannibalism, cataracts, cave paintings threatened, circumcision in decline, cockroach migration, coral reefs dying, coral reefs grow, coral reefs shrink, crime increase, crocodile sex, Darfur, diseases move north, early marriages, Earth lopsided, Earth slowing down, Earth spins faster, Earth upside down, equality threatened, fish deaf, fish sex change, flesh eating disease, Garden of Eden wilts, giant oysters invade, giant pythons invade, gingerbread houses collapse, glacial retreat, glacial growth, gray whales lose weight, hibernation ends too soon, hibernation ends too late, HIV increasing, ice sheet growth, ice sheet shrinkage, inflation in China, invasion of cats, invasion of herons, invasion of jellyfish, insurance increases, itchier poison ivy, jets fall from sky, kitten boom, lake shrinking and growing, mammoth dung melt, maple syrup shortage, methane burps, minorities hit, moose dying, more raw sewage, national security implications, NFL threatened, oaks move north, opera house to be destroyed, outdoor hockey threatened, polar bears cannibalistic, rape wave, robins rampant, ruins ruined, seals mating more, sewer bills rise, sheep shrink, shop closures, short-nosed dogs endangered, smaller brains, spiders invade Scotland, swordfish in the Baltic, teenage drinking, tourism decrease, tourism increase, truffle shortage, turtles crash, walrus stampede, witchcraft executions…

I’m not a global warming guy, but I do worry about the threat to the NFL.  I’d like the Bears to win at least one more Super Bowl before I burn up.

When a golfer hits a tee shot into the water, he’s a Calvinist: it is God’s will, and who can resist it?

When he makes a hole-in-one, he’s an Arminian: he takes credit for his consummate skill.

BTW, one advantage of bowling over golf: one seldom loses a bowling ball.

Golf.

In what other sport do players call fouls on themselves, as did Stewart Cink, who accepted the ensuing disqualification from the tournament?  Zach Johnson, next to him on the driving range, said something like, “Can you believe this weird rule?”  Cink thought back to the previous day and realized that he had violated that rule.  He went to tournament officials and apprised them of his violation.  They subsequently disqualified him.

In what other sport is it “news” that a player actually cussed out loud at his playing partner (gasp!).  Bubba Watson launched a couple of cusswords at Steve Stricker because he thought Stricker was intentionally making noise during Watson’s setup.  The noise?  Swishing the grass by walking down the fairway after his own shot (unbelievable!).

In other sports, players trash talk to each other, kick dirt on umpires’ shoes, have bench-clearing brawls, go after fans in the stands, inject steroids, and every other imaginable sin.

I’ll take golf.