While I Was Out

Saturday evening, when I started to feel ill, I wasn’t sure just what was wrong. Even well into Sunday, after I’d engaged in several bouts of uncharacteristic projectile behavior, I had my doubts. By late Sunday, though, it was clear that the flu had laid me low. I’d wondered if it may have been food poisoning, but some symptoms (and their duration) argued against that. I’d also wondered if it may have been the ball game.

Saturday afternoon we went to Coors Field. Now I’m a big baseball fan, a bigger Rockies fan and even a bigger fan yet of right fielder Larry Walker. Walker’s been an outstanding player for the better part of a decade. He’s what old-timers call a five tool player – he can hit for average, hit for power, run, catch and throw the ball very well. Many have commented on his instincts for the game – it isn’t often that Walker would make a baserunning blunder, let alone a fielding error. He simply played the game the way it should be played. On a couple of occasions he’s run into the outfield wall hard enough to break a bone, yet made the catch. For someone like me who routinely breaks his own bones by innate clumsiness, this is singularly impressive. Now he’s past his prime, particularly given the injuries he’s incurred through the years, so his bat has been largely quieted, his glove and arm are turning from gold to lead and his fleetness of foot is going the way of all things.

Now the concept of the error in baseball was convincingly discredited by Bill James et al, as recounted quite nicely in this spring’s book Moneyball. Still, the statistic is recorded and, as with anything that’s recorded, the error should be recorded accurately. Saturday afternoon Walker could have been charged with a shocking THREE fielding errors – and young Jay Payton, a good fielder in his prime, caught a ball about 350 feet from home plate, squared up to face the plate and threw the ball about 30 feet off to his right. None of the errors were recorded as such – to the shame of the scorekeeper.

Payton’s error was just one of the oddities of a day at the ballpark. (I remember hearing Vin Scully – who’s broadcast several thousand games – once saying that nearly every baseball game he’s seen has included something he’s never seen before.) It was Walker’s errors that were more disturbing. On all of them it was plain that he didn’t really see the ball well. Last offseason, without the team’s permission, Walker had eye surgery. Either Walker has experienced rather severe loss of vision, in which case the surgery has slightly mitigated his loss – enabling him to hang on to a career that would otherwise be over already -- or, more likely, the surgery has accelerated the sad decline in Walker’s skills.

So it too often is. We reach for something earthly with the thought that it will help us in one way or another and all it does is push us farther down into our fallenness – farther yet from the graceful (and grace filled) imago Dei.

BTW – be sure to get a flu shot at your first opportunity. This was a nasty bug. At times I thought my muscle cramps were going to break bones in my legs.