My son put this together in a burst of inspiration this morning. I present it here unedited and without comment. Enjoy. I think.

The Christmas Story

For Baseball Addicts

Here is a Halladay story for you. Some shepherds were sitting on the field one night. They were there to protect the sheep from Cubs, Diamondbacks, and wild Tigers. Stuff like that. You probably didn’t know this, but the shepherds were actually Twins. They were sitting there, minding their own business. One was leaning against some Rockies while the other tugged on his White Sox.

All of a sudden there was an Angel standing in front of them, with Rays shining all over the place. The shepherds were terrified. The Angel spoke. “Don’t be afraid, be Braves! I have great news. This isn’t just of Nationals importance, but it is for the World! I want you to o-Pena ears and Lee-sin well. Howard you like to know that you are no Longoria waiting for a savior, but he is here? He has come to pay the Price for the world’s sin and will be a Shields for you from the wrath of God. So stop laying around! God’s Victorino is sure! Get Upton go into town. You will find a baby in a dugout stable. That’s him!” Then an entire team of Angels were there, singing an anthem and re-Joyce-ing.

When they had gone the shepherds jumped up and said “F-Orioles?? Awesome!!” and ran off, feeling as big as Giants. They broke the Cardinal rule of shepherding, leaving their sheep to their own defense. The shepherds were a couple of Athletics, because they ran all the way to the stable without stopping, and there they found the baby, with his mother and his Padre, just as the Angel and told them they would.

Meanwhile, a long way to the East, a group of Royals were meeting. “I was sure I knew All Stars, but there is a new one! Let there be no more divisions between us, and let’s go see what’s happening. What are those Brewers up to?” So, like a group of Rangers, they packed their camels and headed out. They were really committed, because it was a two year contract that they signed up for! When they finally found him, they said it was well worth it, and he was the best person they had ever Mets.

This little baby grew up to be a man who changed the world. He gathered to him a group of Dodgers, Pirates, and Mariners, and taught them the truth. Eventually he made a surprise sacrifice play, and by it won the game.

Merry Christmas, everyone, and Phillies Navidad!

When the Tampa Bay Rays lost game five of the American League Division Series against the Texas Rangers, I ceased being a baseball fan. I questioned all the time spent watching and reading and hoping and dreaming. I concluded that all that emotion and time would be better placed elsewhere.

I was through with baseball.

That was Tuesday night.

Thursday night, I couldn’t sleep. So, I opened up an essay I had been meaning to read. It was a New Yorker article written by a young John Updike regarding the very last game that Ted Williams ever played at Fenway Park.

At 11:00 PM I began texting quotes to my son, much to his amazement, as I’m always asleep by that time.

By the time I had finished reading, and had repented of my earlier foolishness, I was once again a fan.

There is an intoxicating and maddening magic in this game that I cannot explain. It is a magic that infected me as a young boy under the spell of Frank Robinson and later the Big Red Machine in Cincinnati. It was heightened through my years in St. Louis by the “Wizard of Oz”, “Whiteyball”, and one player who would reach our hearts, Willie Dean McGee.

The magic faded through our years in Southwest Florida, a player’s strike dowsing the wonder and exposing the dark business side of the game.

But it would never go away. Bradenton was the winter home of the Pittsburgh Pirates. I lived in the shadow of a field where Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell would regularly play. I stood on home plate once and wondered at the fact that I was standing where they each had stood.

And then, in 2008, a lowly underfunded team from Tampa Bay slew the big boys in the American League East, and the magic was fully revived. Until last Tuesday.

John Updike is one in a long tradition of gifted writers, captured by the magic of the game, trying to capture that magic in prose. I texted to my son passages like the following.

First in defense of the charge that Williams’ hitting never advanced the cause of Red Sox wins, Updike says,

“Indeed, for Williams to have distributed all his hits so they did nobody else any good would constitute a feat of placement unparalleled in the annals of selfishness.”

With a novelist’s eye, he describes some of those attending Williams’ last game:

Two girls, one of them with pert buckteeth and eyes as black as vest buttons, the other with white skin and flesh-colored hair, like an underdeveloped photograph of a redhead, came and sat on my right. On my other side was one of those frowning, chestless young-old men who can frequently be seen, often wearing sailor hats, attending ball games alone.

Describing Williams’ last trip to the plate, he brings us into Fenway to join in the wonder of it:

Instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us—stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause—no calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-one summers toward this moment.

Updike gets closer to the wonder as the tension mounts with that last at bat:

There will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

Hope is, indeed, unrealistic, and this really gets at the heart of the magic. Updike sees it clearly.

All baseball fans believe in miracles; the question is, how many do you believe in?

In spite of myself, I love this game.

Go, Rangers.

As I get ready to travel to St. Petersburg to attend the first game of the American League Division Series between the Texas Rangers and the Tampa Bay Rays (look for me in right field with my three sons), I was struck by this excellent post by my good friend and former colleague and all-around wise guy (in the BEST sense of that) Geoff Henderson. If you like sports, this is a must read. A snippet here:

If I love Cade more than football, I’ll not neglect playing with Cade, and at times have to press pause and watch the game later or not at all. If I love football more than Cade, I’ll let him see the lingering frustration of a tough loss, even if it is more subtle than flipping a bird, because my lifeline has been cut. If I love Cade more than football, I’ll teach him how it can be a fun hobby which helps connect me with both Christians and non-Christians. If I love football more than Cade, football will be all I talk about or think about during the week.

Oddly, shortly after reading Geoff’s post, I ran across this from the religion editor of the Orlando Sentinel.

I’m beginning to think that God is trying to tell me something.

That led then to what looks like a fascinating book, of interest to some reading this blog:

God and Football: Faith and Fanaticism in the SEC

Okay. Enough of that. Off to the game.

As much as I would like to take credit for this, I rather doubt anyone at the Orlando Sentinel is paying attention to me. This was the way this morning’s sports page announced the Rays victory last night:

Much better.

It has been 101 days since we moved from Bradenton, south of Tampa Bay, to Orlando, 150 miles east.

We might as well have moved 1200 miles North.

I have ranted before about the baseball coverage in this area, or its lack. And I wrote yesterday about the general media bias here and throughout the country against the Tampa Bay Rays.

But finally, I have realized the truth. The truth is I have left Rays-ville and moved to Yankee-Town.

My wife and I noticed Tuesday that there was little mention of Monday’s Ray’s win in the paper. A dramatic win capping a supreme pitching duel, which moved the Rays into first-place in the competitive AL east was noted on the bottom of page 6.

That afternoon I picked up a short segment of a local sports talk show host who was seeking to console Yankee fans after their ‘surprising’ loss.

All doubt regarding the sentiments here were removed with this morning’s sports section. The top of the front page is pictured here.

Randy, welcome to Yankee Town.

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[Note: for the record, we are now, according to Google Maps, 93 miles closer to Yankee Stadium than we were in Bradenton. It was 1172. It is now 1079. Perhaps that explains this phenomenon.]

It does not get any better than this.

Our ten year old pretty much nailed his parents’ newspaper reading habits this morning at breakfast. “Mom reads about politics and Dad, you read about sports.”

As much as I wanted to defend myself and show that I care as much about the real world as I do about the make-believe worlds of college and professional sports, I really had nothing to say. He had me nailed.

(I could add, though, that for some, politics is sports. A very politically active friend once told me that whereas I could rattle off the name of the current MLB home run leader or the pitcher with the best record, or explain the impact of certain averages on the outcome of a game, he, blind to those details, could give me the voting record of senators I’ve never heard of. Some of the more cynical among us might suggest that what goes on in Fenway Park or Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium might have more impact upon our national quality of life than what goes on in Capitol Hill. Well, okay, maybe not Wrigley…)

All that as the background for my rant about media bias. With the Tampa Bay Rays in a statistical dead heat with the NY Yankees for the AL East lead (but 1/2 game back due to playing one less game) the Orlando Sentinel (no lover of Tampa Bay sports) says this, speaking of an upcoming series between the two teams:

“…a stretch of seven games the American League East rivals will play over an 11-day period. Every game is important for the Rays….”

Emphasis is mine. What this says is true. What it does not say, as often is the case, reveals the bias, here, and in political writing as well.

This is important for the Rays, but not for the Yankees? Come now.

The fact is, the world assumes that the Yankees are the crown jewels of baseball. They are the elephants that no mouse can topple. They will, we are to presume, coast to the AL East championship, unless the Rays win some of their ‘important’ games.

Please.

In light of my recent football themed post, and in light of the beginning of the college football season this week, this note:

The church I pastor is located near the campus of the University of Central Florida, a large university with a mediocre athletics program. Apparently to pump interest into the upcoming sports season, a Playboy Bunny, and I think alumna, graced the cover of a recent publication of the athletic department.

This led one online commentator to a local newspaper article about this to quip, “This year, let’s win one for the stripper.”

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[Those of you who are sport’s knowledge challenged will not find this funny, but for explanation, you can go here.]

One observation I’ve made over the years is that one cannot have unity in an organization if there is disunity in the leadership of that organization. I make this observation not to suggest that there is necessarily an intentional fostering of disunity in the body if there is disunity in the head. No, it simply is a reality that if the leadership of an organization is not united, that lack of unity, no matter how skillfully masked, will be reflected as a lack of unity in the organization.

An interesting illustration of this appeared in today’s Orlando Sentinel. Apparently, in the last years of Bobby Bowden’s tenure as the head football coach at Florida State University, there was serious disunity in the coaching staff.

Consider the scene after one practice early in October 2009. Former linebackers’ coach Chuck Amato gathered the media for an impromptu press conference. The reason? Amato wanted to dispute rumblings that he and Fisher had gotten into a fistfight on a plane (or in the team shower).

This is apparently just the extreme of what had been the norm. The result?

In years past Florida State’s divided staff created a divided team. The offense and defense rarely met together and rarely worked together. The locker room was separated by position segments, so that some offensive and defensive players rarely interacted.

That is surprising to me, but not so much when one sees the division at the top.

Gone, now, the article says, are locker room divisions. Why? Fisher’s explanation is that now “… everyone has a common goal and they don’t all think they invented it.”

Unity among the leadership will foster unity in the organization.

Fisher managed this partly by firing three guys and hiring some others. Organizations, such as churches, don’t often have that freedom. So, we have to work for unity.

To that end I highly recommend study and reflection upon this book by Patrick Lencioni: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

I long for churches to have “winning seasons” as much as some long for FSU to have one. May we who lead be those who have “a common goal and they don’t all think they invented it.”