Monthly Baseball Update

I don’t know what it is. It seems that once a month or so, I’ve got to mention baseball.

This time it concerns the flap over the perfect game Detroit’s Armando Galarraga got robbed of by Jim Joyce, an umpire who made a bad call. You could hardly miss it. It was all over the news. I was one of those yelling, “Unfair!” and feeling so bad for Galarraga. Then, in coming days, I felt kind of bad for the ump. And then today, I got hooked by Joe Soucheray’s column with it’s headline that said, “It’s the flawed humans who make baseball so perfect.”

For those of you who don’t know Minnesota newspapers, Joe writes for the St. Paul Pioneer Press as a regular guy columnist. He’s not a sports columnist. He’s got a following and it seems to me I’ve seen T-shirts that emblazen his theme of “garage logic.” Anyway, he’s a regular guy writing about the beauty of the game, complaining about the people “pecking at each other with a 140-character limit” and calling baseball the last sport to be so “beautifully flawed.”

You can maybe imagine that I liked that description.

I’m not even sure I agree with him. I don’t see why umps can’t call the game and still use instant replay for rare and soundly questionable calls. I don’t see this as the end of baseball or umpires. Joe feels otherwise.

But I got taken by him seeing “the game’s intrinsic magnificence.” He calls baseball lovers “hopeless romantics.” With this move that he foresees happening, he says, “You will have removed the game’s ability to deliver forgiveness and redemption, integrity and responsibility.”

He called the behavior of all involved “exemplary.” I don’t know if I could have been so gracious in such a circumstance, and I have to agree that this is something you can learn through the game and being part of a team, and that you don’t see too much of, and that I wouldn’t like to lose. Joe calls this, “Wonderful stuff, just wonderful,” and says, “only baseball, which has survived every attempt man has made to ruin it, could have delivered such a passion play.”

It is exactly the kind of thing you want all young players to see. But what really got me was Joe calling it “trust in people.”

I know it’s no comparison, but every “live” human being I get on the phone lately, I tell them, “Please tell your manager that customers want to talk to people.” At the grocery store, I tell every cashier that I do not want to use the self-checkout and to tell their managers that people are indispensable. (They actually shut down the self-check out counters when a person isn’t available to supervise their use anyway! And they shut down all the express lanes because that’s what the “quick” self-check out is for.) This stuff drives me batty.

Like Joe, I’ll take a flawed person any day.

Quotes from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, B1-6