When there was crying in baseball...

...or, how a MLB team taught the world (and the church?) a lesson in grieving...

Tom Hanks has never been more wrong.

More precisely, Jimmy Dugan -- the character Hanks played in A League of Their Own -- has never been more wrong than the past two days, particularly in Miami.

Since the bitterly shocking news of the death of José Fernández in a boating accident near South Beach early Sunday morning, his team, the Miami Marlins, has become an unwitting portrait in collective grief. And surprisingly, for a team that hasn't always had a good reputation for its ownership or management, the franchise has (so far) been up to the task.

Fernández was not the only athlete to die on Sunday; in fact he was far from the most famous, with Arnold Palmer's passing later on Sunday. For all the surprise at his death (Jack Nicklaus reported Palmer sounding "great" in a phone conversation just a few days before Palmer's death), the world knows how to cope with the passing of a legend, more or less. (And earlier deaths in the sports world this year -- Muhammad Ali and Pat Summit in particular -- came with a back story of long-standing disease that almost made their deaths equal part sadness and relief.) The encomiums for Palmer's spectacular achievements and particular stature in his sport and the larger culture came about as easily as anything in a time of grief.

Or, to put it another way, the New York Times probably had a draft of Palmer's obituary ready for finishing at the time of his death. It's pretty unlikely that was the case for the 24-year-old Fernández.

It's not as if baseball hasn't had its share of dying-too-young (and the death of any active player falls into that category). Only two years ago the St. Louis Cardinals were jolted by the death of outfielder Oscar Taveras, a player even younger than Fernández, shortly after their elimination from the playoffs. Seven years ago Nick Adenhart, a pitcher for the Angels who had made all of four major-league appearances, was killed in a car accident in early April. I could go on quite a while but it's probably easier to refer you to this list, of baseball players who died while still playing ball (and as is the way of Wikipedia, Fernández is already on the list).

Each such case is unique, and Fernández's is not an exception. Many media outlets have made reference to the deaths of Roberto Clemente and Thurman Munson, which speaks highly of Fernández's stature in the game, but Clemente and Munson were established veterans or even in the later stages of their career. Fernández was only 24, completing his fourth season in MLB (two of which were shortened by injury). A Rookie of the Year season in 2013 and an award-worthy season this year, along with an effusive and typically joyful personality, elevated Fernández and the impact of his passing beyond those of many of the players noted earlier.

Ken Hubbs, a young second baseman for the Chicago Cubs who had been named Rookie of the Year in 1962, died in a plane crash before the 1964 season. His story offers both similarities and differences; he had known success early in his career, but not on the level of Fernández. Further, Hubbs was a completely different personality, quiet and restrained. Fernández was a one-man celebration of baseball, with a dramatic backstory of escape from Cuba to boot.

In short, the Marlins were confronted with a particular and unique case; a dynamic young player, a huge part of not only their present but especially their future, and a charismatic personality in the clubhouse and even a kind of hero in a city that really had never seen such a player on their MLB team, dead in a horrible accident, at the climax of their season, while the team was technically if not practically still in the hunt for a playoff berth, with achievement that already suggested a potential Hall of Fame career ahead.

Sunday's game, not surprisingly, was cancelled. If the Marlins were only on the fringe of playoff contention, that day's opponent, the Atlanta Braves, was thoroughly eliminated. However, the New York Mets came to town on Monday, and they were (and are) still in the heat of the wild-card race. A game had to be played by then.

On Sunday, the team gathered for a press conference at what would have been game time. The team's president, director of baseball operations, and manager were joined by third baseman Martín Prado in speaking for the team. In the realm of sports being tough is paramount, but not a one of these representatives veered anywhere near that posture. Their grief was real and unabashed. Tears flowed. President of Baseball Operations Michael Hill broke down and was unable to continue.

Jimmy Dugan would have lost his mind, I'm sure. And if Sunday hadn't driven him crazy, Monday would certainly have done so.

The game was played, with less of the usual boisterous atmosphere of a major-league sporting event. It was part ballgame, part catharsis, part memorial service, part wake. Markers throughout the park reminded of Fernández, including his number (16) painted onto the back of the pitcher's mound and every player in the Marlins' lineup wearing Fernández's name and number. Dee Gordon, the team's slap-hitting second baseman, came to the plate with his own tribute; a natural lefty, he took his first pitch from the right-hand batter's box, wearing a helmet with Fernández's name on it. After that pitch, Gordon took his usual place in the left-hand batter's box ... and drove a long home run to right field. You have never seen so many tears after a home run.

Both team president David Samson and manager Don Mattingly even acknowledged something that had gone unspoken until then, and allowed that it was on their minds. Fernández had originally been scheduled to pitch on Sunday, but the team decided to bring back injured starter Adam Conley for his first start after rehab on Sunday against the weaker Braves and reserve Fernández for Monday night against the stronger Mets. If Fernández had been scheduled to start Sunday, would he have taken that boat trip late Saturday night? Both Samson and Mattingly were frank about their own wonderings about that very fact.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the two days has been a slight insight into the counseling being received by players and staff. One key statement, paraphrased here: if you're in shock, be in shock. If you're in denial, be in denial. If you need to cry, cry. Don't hide. Don't mask. Don't pretend to be something you're not.

That, from a pastor's point of view, is spectacular.

And yet it's very often the opposite message that is sent in time of grief.

And sometimes the church is the worst messenger in the time of grief.

Have you ever heard any of the following?

This happened for a reason.

You have to be strong.

All things work together for good ... (a poor translation of the Apostle Paul).

They needed another angel in heaven/singer in the heavenly choir (just horrible theology).

Buck up, sissy.

You have to be an example for your family/friends/church/teammates (in this case).

I'm guessing you have. And if you're like me you cringed. Or worse.

The Marlins' season ends Sunday. That might begin the hardest part of this grieving process. They no longer will have each other to lean on.

But so far, credit the team with both being up front with their grief and still doing their jobs. After all, they beat the Mets on Monday night, 7-3.

After the game, the Marlins gathered again at the mound, and left their caps there -- one last final tribute for the evening.

Weekly Reader: Well, what do you expect?

So on Sunday afternoon, before heading off for a couple of meetings, I was busy watching football (or futbol, to be more precise) when my Twitter feed apparently felt compelled to alert me that a football (American style) player had gotten hurt.

In this case New Orleans Saints defensive back P.J. Williams had to be carted off the field after sustaining not one, but two hits to the head on one play. Due to the uncertainty about Williams's injuries and their extent he was immobilized on a backboard and his head/helmet was strapped down to prevent any further injury. In the end, though, the diagnosis was a concussion, and while Williams stayed overnight at a hospital for precautionary reasons, he was expected to be discharged on Monday and enter the NFL's concussion protocol.

Quite a Sunday for your second-ever game in the NFL. He was even a hashtag for a little while.

Now time for this blog to get callous.

There are injuries by which you are allowed to be shocked. When Kevin Ware's leg snapped like a cheap pencil in the NCAA Final Four, shock was appropriate. It was horrifying, grotesque, and completely not typical for a basketball game.

Then there are injuries you really have no business being shocked by.

You really have no business being shocked when your favorite baseball team's best pitcher goes down with a torn rotator cuff. It's pretty much an epidemic, and while it generally isn't life-threatening, it still happens way more than it should.

It's a bit silly to be shocked when a hockey player loses a tooth. It's a stereotype, for pete's sake.

On the more farcical end of things, there's no point in being shocked when a soccer player acts as if he's in the throes of mortal agony after a non-contact play (I say "he" here because this really doesn't seem to happen so often in the women's game).

And football? I'm not sure there's any kind of injury on a football field that should really be shocking anymore. We've seen too many. And frankly, at this point it might be that those who suffer obvious injuries that require them to be removed from the game are fortunate, in that they don't stick around for two or three or a dozen more hits to their stunned cranial matter.

This is what the sport does to its players. And you know that going in, if you're a rational adult.

So spare me the hashtags. You've made the bargain; live with it.


Other things to read and think about:

*If you wondered why the NFL had become such a prolific contributor to select members of Congress, now you know why.

*From the "Waiting on Science Our Savior" department: The NFL is gonna throw gobs of cash at the pursuit of a "magic helmet," and some for concussion research too.

*Former NFL placekicker Cary Blanchard died earlier this month. He was one of the 4,500 former players who was a plaintiff in that settlement reached a couple of years ago. Yes, placekicker. Even I didn't think that was terribly possible. Shows what I know.

*From earlier this year: you might remember an experiemental study from a few years ago, when a number of former players like Tony Dorsett were judged to show signs of CTE while still alive? The first former player to be a part of that study, Fred McNeill, has died, and...he has been posthumously confirmed to have had CTE. This could be a very big deal in the effort to diagnose the disease in the living and try to find some way to combat it. The bad part, of course, is that more players will have to die to confirm this -- the great ethical conundrum of CTE research.

*A former NFL great suffering from possibly football-related dementia has become the subject of an ugly custody battle.  He's regrettably unlikely to be the last such story.

Outside concussionball:

*A group of NHL players hit Capitol Hill (figuratively) to lobby for tigher rules for younger players.

*Political activism among athletes is not limited to NFL players during national anthems.

Scary, but not shocking.

What we may never know

One of the largely unspoken dimensions of our understanding of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in football players is that while we have a certain amount of understanding generated by currently diagnosed cases, we'll never truly know the whole story.

We will know when former players or their families choose to have their brains given for examination after their deaths. Given the ever-increasing awareness of the effects of football and the thousands of hits its players sustain over the course of their participation on the youth, high school, college and pro ball (for those who get that far), that number is fairly likely to increase. Even that won't necessarily be a complete picture, since most of those who choose to donate are those who experienced symptoms of brain decline during their lifetimes.

(Side note: you could possibly do science a great favor, as a former player, by submitting your brain for study especially if you do not experience such symptoms in your lifetime. Understanding why some are afflicted by CTE and some are not would be an important advance in understanding this trauma.)

However, even that picture won't necessarily reflect the whole story.

That Mike Webster's condition became known to the public has as much to do with the fluke of what Pittsburgh medical examiner was called in to examine the body when it arrived at the morgue. There's not any guarantee that a different examiner would have chosen to perform the more extensive examination that Dr. Bennet Omalu did on that occasion. If that had not been the case, who knows if anyone would have chosen to probe further into the deaths of Justin Strzelzczyk or Terry Long.

Before that awareness in the medical community, we will never know how many former players wer afflicted by the condition in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, or '80s, or even earlier. They might have gone down as simple cases of dementia, or something other like Alzheimer's, or simply unexplained illnesses.

Or unexplained suicides.

In researching on this subject, I came across the story of Jim Duncan. Duncan played briefly in the NFL in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with its pinnacle in the 1970 Super Bowl season of the Baltimore Colts, for whom he started as a defensive back in that championship game. He also featured as a kick returner that season.

The next year he began the season with the Colts as a starter. Injuries derailed his season, though, culminating in a head injury that November. Though no concussion was diagnosed, his season ws more or less off the rails at that point.

Perhaps more interestingly, both team and family members noticed changes in Duncan after the injury; team officials spoke of changes in his personality, while his mother recalled that Duncan began to experience memory loss.

Duncan's life went downhill quickly from there. He was traded the next season to the New Orleans Saints, but was waived by them, and after a failed tryout with the Miami Dolphins (then coached by his former Colts coach Don Shula), he was out of football. A side business went south, treatment for mental illness was required, and his marriage came apart. Finally, in October 1972, according to an official police report, Duncan committed suicide by entering a courthouse, grabbing a police officer's gun, and shooting himself.

The questionable circumstances of his death carry unpleasant resonances with modern headlines about young black men and shootings at the hands of police officers. The other circumstances of his last two years, though, sound awfully familiar to those who have followed the story of CTE:

Football? Check.

Head injury (whether diagnosed as concussion or not)? Check.

Memory loss? Check.

Personality changes? Check.

Business troubles? Check.

Insinuations of drug use/abuse? Check.

Suicide (possibly)? Check.

There will never be any way, at this point, to conclude or demonstrate that Jim Duncan suffered from CTE. His relatively young age, only 26, would not be a disqualifying factor, as the likes of Michael Keck and Tyler Sash demonstrate. But Duncan died forty-four years ago. Analysis or study isn't going to be possible. And there are enough questions about the circumstances of Duncan's death that should not be dismissed that CTE cannot be assumed. But it doesn't seem as though it can be ruled out either.

But we will never know.

And it's very hard to believe he's the only such case.

(Side note: normally I'd have put in a whole bumch of links on Jim Duncan, but most of them are in Google News and Google Books which don't always link well. Google "Jim Duncan suicide" to see reports in The Afro American, Jet, and other sources that discuss aspects of Duncan's life and death.)

Jim Duncan returning a kick in the AFC Championship game of the 1970 season (played Jan. 3, 1971), at the height of his brief career.

Rant: What is a problem, and what is not

One of the greater but understated challenges in tackling attitudes about the ongoing trouble with football and its brain-trauma tendencies is in tackling attitudes about sports more broadly, attitudes that are even less consciously vocalized but nonetheless powerful and almost impossible to overcome. One of those is the attitude that, somehow, sports is a necessity.

If you pressed a sports fan on the subject they would likely either: (1) deny that such a statement is true, but continue to live their lives as if sports is in fact a necessity, or: (2) say that, yes, sports is a necessity, but be unable to answer "why" with anything beyond vacuous platitudes or myths.

Case in point: this article, a seemingly innocuous piece by one Julianna W. Miner on why kids tend to drop out of youth sports by around age 13.

Now it would be possible to report such a study, commissioned by the National Alliance for Youth Sports, in a pretty blase manner, putting the statistics out there and not much else. But that's not what his afoot here; it's not a straight-up news report, but closer to an opinion piece, written by a mother of youth, one of whom is about to hit that age, fretting about All The Things The Child Will Miss By Not Playing Sports.

Now if you've read this blog much you know something is up when I go all Hunter S. Thompson on you with the capitalization. Let's pull out the sticky lines and expose them to the light:

“It’s not fun anymore” isn’t the problem; it’s a consequence of a number of cultural, economic and systemic issues that result in our kids turning away from organized sports at a time when they could benefit from them the most. Playing sports offers everything from physical activity, experiencing success and bouncing back from failure to taking calculated risks and dealing with the consequences to working as a team and getting away from the ubiquitous presence of screens. Our middle-schoolers need sports now more than ever.

The "it's not fun anymore" quote, first of all, shouldn't be dismissed quite so easily; she doesn't seem to think her children are particularly intelligent, because the natural thing to do would be to ask "well, why isn't it fun anymore?" and get some more specifics out of it. But apparently the author is just bursting with the systemic problems she's just gushing to get out and can't be bothered with details.

The real slippery logic comes thereafter, with the recited list of positive attributes of playing sports. There are two particular kinds of slippery logic at play here; one I'll call the "lone savior" fallacy, and the other the "illusion of flawlessness."

Note the sleight of hand at play above: first, the claim is that kids are turning away from organized sports "at a time when they could benefit from them the most." Then the next sentence begins "Playing sports..." and goes on to recite the usual list of mandatory benefits of sports, as if somehow one absolutely cannot learn how to bounce back from failure if one never plays football or something (oh, and there is the ubiquitous complaint about excessive time in front of computers or phones for good measure).

But where did the word "organized" go?

Have we actually made it impossible for kids to engage in physical activity outside of organized sports? The only way to do so is to sign up for a league?

(Of all the bizarre things, I'm reminded of an episode of The Flintstones. Fred and the other parents are starting to put too much pressure on the kids in the kiddie baseball league. Barney, the only adult with sense in this case, eventually spirits the kids away to an undisclosed location where they can play for fun. I wanna be Barney Rubble.)

The conflation of "play" or "playing games" with "organized sports" is a deeply problematic mindset that is so deeply entrenched in culture as to be inseparable from any discussion about kids and physical activity. There are a boatload of problems with such a conflation, but to pick on just one for now: the moment that "organized" sports becomes the dominant or even exclusive paradigm you end up with an industry of sorts initially intended (I'll be generous here) to support kids and their physical activity, but eventually ending up demanding kids to be fed into the system in order for it to survive..and you get opinion pieces in the Washington Post trying to shame kids into continuing to play (or their parents into forcing them to play). Go look at that NAYS website linked above. It's just desperate to convince you that organized sports is the only way your child will ever be saved (from what I have no idea, but as a pastor/public theologian my BS antennae are naturally sensitive to such things).

Now let's check out the flip side of this assumption; organized sports, it is very much assumed here, is the only hope for producing children who learn such things as persistence in the face of failure, resilience, dealing with consequences, working in concert with others, and even cutting down screen time.

[WARNING: I am about to swear, loudly.]

BULLSHIT.

You want your child to learn resilience, persistence, bouncing back from failure, and all that stuff? Start them in music when young. Start them on one of those ubiquitous recorders when they hit fourth or fifth grade.

Or get them in drama club. Or dance (now there's some major physical activity for ya).

You can't stop and stew over your failure, because there's no break. You got to get your next line spoken. The music or the dance don't stop for you to have a pity party.

And even better, you can do those things literally the rest of your life. You can't play football forever, but there are church choirs out there dying for singers, and community theatre is everywhere.

So yes, I absolutely question the necessity of organized sports for learning all those virtues.

One blog post isn't enough to unpack that question, but the other bit of slippery logic must be addressed. Not surprisingly, the author isn't all that interested in getting into the possible drawbacks or harms attached to organized sports for you.

I, as it happens, have no such reluctance.

Perhaps most obvious these days in injury risks we never imagined before. Even without getting into the usual subject of the blog, and the degree to which even people who don't play football beyond youth-sports level or a little high school can end up with some degree of CTE discernible in their brains upon death, you have to be a blithering idiot not to be very circumspect about starting your child on such a sport. (Fortunately there are other options; in fact, we recently had an Olympics full of games that don't involve brain-rattling.) But there are other horror stories -- teenage pitchers getting Tommy John surgery, ghastly injuries from basketball or hockey or gymnastics (???), all can be found if you look hard enough.

But I want to pick on something else. I question the notion that all the impacts of playing organized sports are positive.

Do you learn independent thought playing youth football? Or do you learn "do what coach says or you're benched"?

Do you learn creativity?

Do you learn social discernment?

Do you ever actually learn that discretion really is the better part of valor? In other words, when quitting really is the right thing to do?

Or do you learn mindless obedience?

Or do you learn that physical prowess trumps all?

Or do you learn that your success is dependent on someone else's failure?

Let us not buy the assumption that all of the lessons of organized sports are good ones. To borrow words from Frederick Buechner,

Maybe it's not competition but cooperation and comradeship that build the only character worth building. If it's by playing games together that we learn to win battles, maybe it's by playing, say, music together that we learn to avoid them.

The original column that precipitated this rant ends with the sentence: "And, perhaps more importantly, until we dismantle the parenting culture that emphasizes achievement and success over happy, healthy kids, we don't stand a chance of solving this problem." Ms. Miner, you haven't earned the status to critique parenting cultures, because you have failed to convince us that kids leaving organized sports is an actual problem. Come back when you're not blowing smoke and throwing shade.

You know, this might just teach your kids teamwork, resilience, etc. too.