It isn't as if there doesn't appear every day some kind of story pointing out the horrors associated with modern professional athletics. And clearly, there aren't thousands of people out there trumpeting those stories and considering their faith implications in the way this blog means to do.
The NFL has admitted, in a legally binding way, that they estimate about 33% of the players in the game will end up with some form of long-term traumatic brain injury. One would think this would draw more attention than it has, the idea that as you look at the field on any given play, seven of the twenty-two players involved will end up with Alzheimer's or CTE or ALS as a result of the very activity you are watching, particularly on top of the outcry over the domestic violence revelations about Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson and multiple others. The collective response to this bit of data was "meh, whatever, pass the salsa." Pro tip, gang: if you say you're angry, but you keep watching/going to games, your anger is irrelevant.
Meanwhile, college football offered its own little horror show when Michigan played Minnesota. When a Minnesota defender treated Michigan QB Shane Morris as a human piñata (a hit, leading with helmet, that should have gotten the defender ejected, but did not) and the quarterback staggered about like Foster Brooks on a really bad day, not only did the player remain in the game for another play, but returned to play before any kind of medical clearance was given. The levels of failure in that incident are multiple -- Michigan coach Brady Hoke was guilty, but he was not the only one -- and after a few days protest, that story has obediently gone away.
We of course could point to the way a big-time college football program can corrupt the entire justice system of not only a large university, but an entire city. We could point to the insuperable disconnect between the idea of a university -- learning, ideas, mental growth and all that -- being fronted by a game that destroys the very capacity to engage in those things at all, in a nonzero portion of its players. We could also talk about the increasing public sentiment that college players ought to be free to profit from themselves or their image or such, selling autographs and the like. We could talk about how the NFL, with all of its other public sins yet unatoned, will pursue to the death a player who dares wear the wrong headphones on the sideline or in a postgame press conference.
All of those should be addressed.
But I am not an automaton. And I'm certainly not a professional blogger or columnist. Sometimes I need to have fun with sports, even amidst all the other garbage.
Fortunately, other sports have come through for me.
I've made no secret of my baseball fandom. And that sport, vexing though it is with its insistence on forced, non-inclusive patriotism in the middle of the seventh inning, has come through for me.
First, in person: on the last weekend of the season, taking advantage of cheap nosebleed seats and my lack of scheduled activities, I made it to Washington for a game for the first time this season, just as Nationals pitcher Doug Fister threw a three-hit gem of a game against the Miami Marlins. (Mind you, this would get upstaged a couple of days later when Jordan Zimmermann threw a no-hitter on the last day of the regular season, but I wasn't there for that.) It was a joy to see, even if I have no particular reason to care for the Nationals other than that they're the closest team to where I currently live.* Excellent pitching (albeit against a badly weakened team -- the main reason I had ordered that ticket was the hope to see Giancarlo Stanton of the Marlins crush something, but he was out for the season by then), a few fine defensive plays, enough hits -- all in all a great game at which to be a spectator, on a bright, not-too-hot late-September afternoon.
You get an interesting view from the nosebleed seats on the third-base side at Nationals Park.
*Note: by my normal measure of such things the Nationals would be "my" team under the "Take me out to the ballgame" clause, which urges the fan to "root, root, root for the home team." However, in my current state of suspended animation, I have not, during my time in seminary, thought of the Richmond area as "home," simply because I never thought of it as permanent in any way. If I do end up remaining in the area, then it's likely that my allegiances will shift their way more or less by default -- I inevitably end up rooting for the "home" team. (This is why I can never move to New York or Boston.) But for now, about the only formal marker of "home"-ness I have is the fact that as far as the Presbyterian Church (USA) is concerned, I'm under the care of the Presbytery of Northern Kansas and First Presbyterian Church in Lawrence is where my membership lies, which gives me the excuse to follow the Royals this postseason. More on that below.
With the end of the regular season and the beginning of the playoffs, I got my first reminder of why I put up with all the other stuff; sometimes, in a way that doesn't involve violence or destructive injury, a sporting event will give you something that pretty much nothing else on earth can do; the surprise of imperfect teams playing almost perfectly.
The aforementioned Kansas City Royals faced the Oakland A's in the AL wild-card game, for the right to get crushed by the Angels, the team based Anaheim with Mike Trout and Albert Pujols. The Royals, as you might have noticed, haven't been good for a while. They won the World Series in 1985 and were apparently so overwhelmed by the experience that they haven't even made the playoffs since, until this year. Many of those non-playoff teams were also non-winning, non-competitive, and even non-watchable.
I actually wrote about the Royals in one of my earliest blog posts, more than three years ago, on the occasion of the MLB debut of one Eric Hosmer. He was, as much as anything, the sign; good things were coming, even to a team so downtrodden as the Royals. Others followed after, like power-hitting third baseman Mike Moustakas, catcher Salvador Perez, pitcher Danny Duffy,
Very seldom do you see a team go "all in" as the Royals did with this trade. Shields, the major piece -- an established and successful starting pitcher -- would only be under team control for two years. After this season he becomes a free agent, and the low-budget Royals are extremely unlikely to be able to keep him. After Shields and promising youngster Yordano Ventura, the remainder of the starting rotation is o.k. at best, although the bullpen is strong. In short, the pressure on the Royals in that wild-card game was perhaps stronger than for most franchises.
They won, of course, with multiple comebacks and despite some, er, interesting managerial choices. Then they swept through the Angels as if destined to do so, with more freaky extra-inning wins. And now they've won the first two from the Baltimore Orioles. The team that couldn't hit homers this season has a slew of them so far in the playoffs. They've made crazy diving catches in the outfield (mostly Lorenzo Cain) and gotten enough hitting to shake off their unusually shaky performances from Shields and Ventura.
This is about as imperfect a team as you will find. They play defense well, they have good speed, and they have a strong bullpen. Other than that, there's really very little to suggest that this team has any business in the postseason at all, much less that they should be unbeaten in six games so far.
I am not one who likes to stretch metaphors too far, but darn it, the Royals are living out the whole idea of great things being accomplished through most imperfect human vessels. They've been very lucky, no doubt. But they've done things right when they've had to do so, and so far they're riding a wave of good feeling and hope the likes of which have not been seen in Royals country in decades (three of 'em, to be precise). If you ever needed to be reminded that the perfect doesn't always win, the Royals are your bunch. And if you want to theologize about God being able to do great things through us highly imperfect humans, they're your sermon illustration.
The Royals and baseball, though, haven't been my only source of sporting enlightenment of late. For only the second time in my life I attended a Major League Soccer match, when Sporting Kansas City traveled to Washington to play DC United. This was the Friday a week after the Nationals game, which meant I was getting to know US Highway 301 rather well.
I'd been to one league match before, the first one played at Sporting Park, a match that caused me to realize I actually liked this game and should probably follow it more closely, and which also aligned me to Sporting KC. Though they have to come and play in DC at least once a season, every occasion before this one had conflicted with some immovable object on my calendar. Finally this match came along free of schedule conflicts, and when the franchise came looking for area fans to comprise a supporters section, I grabbed a couple of tickets (although in the end my wife did not go due to cruddy weather and upcoming vocal obligations).
Side note: RFK Stadium has seen better days
This was a new experience for me. The whole idea of a supporters section is to be visibly and audibly in support of the team, in this case the visiting team. Sporting KC's staff coordinated the tickets for the group, and even sent staff members to be with the group and help keep a potentially unruly group of complete strangers together, to the point of arranging a security escort into the stadium as if we were a bunch of old-fashioned English hooligans.
The match ended in a scoreless draw, and aside from some harmless banter there was no trouble between us and the DC United fans. (The only one I spoke to directly mostly wanted to gush about how good Sporting is, with which I agreed except for the then-current losing streak.) I chanted and sang and clapped and even ended up in a picture on Twitter with a bunch of people I've never seen before and probably will never see again. And yet, for that two hours, we were a unit, pulled together from diverse places (some actually drove from KC to be at the match) and pull for the common cause of the night.
There is some kind of mystery to that. It doesn't always work out that way. Interactions between opposing fans can get violent and tragic. But when it comes to our team, it's amazing how quickly strangers can pull together, whether for the country in something like the World Cup, or for a team located too far away for any game other than this one. Would that we could tap into that mystery for the bigger things in life.
I'm sure that soon enough I'll be unable to restrain myself from flaying the latest stupidity about football or the latest semi-racist NBA owner or whatever. For now, I'm enjoying the imperfect perfection and the mystery of it all.
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