I Hate Baseball...No, I Love It...No, Really Hate It

“You’re killing me Smalls!”—Ham Porter, The Sandlot

Would you rather a girl lead you on, enflame your deepest passions, then rip out your heart, lacerate every last flow of passion, and drop it, broken, into the dustbin of your soul? Or would you rather she give a firm “no” to the first date request, saving you that later pain and anguish? This is what it feels like today to be a Mets fan (or a Red Sox fan. Their perennially broken hearts are facing another George Steinbrenner induced laceration). The Mets have stood in first place virtually the whole season. Their virtually (sportswriters overuse adjectives, and right now I’m too lazy to think of another one) indestructible lead of 7 ½ games over the Phillies just a couple weekends ago shrunk to 1 ½ before climbing to a barely breathable 2 ½ yesterday. If the Mets are gonna blow this thing anyway, I kind of wish they had just started sucking in April, so I wouldn’t have spent six months getting my hopes up. The last time they won the World Series, I was still wetting my pants; I don’t enjoy wetting my pants watching nervously as this year’s team seduces me.

October 19, 2006 will forever stand as the day I popped my baseball fan cherry. Considering I started watching the Mets in 1991, this is a long time. But 2006 marked the first time since 1988 the Mets had a real chance of winning a World Series. True, they went to the playoffs in 1999, valiantly battling back from a 3-0 deficit (with Robin Ventura’s Grand Slam single) to extend the NLCS to 6 games before falling to the hated Braves. And, in 2000, they advanced to the World Series before losing to the Yankees. But those teams had Mike Piazza and smoke and mirrors. The outfield consisted of Benny Agbayani, Jay Payton, and Timo Perez. That’s right: who? They did better than they should have because of a great manager, Bobby Valentine.

The 2006 Mets were loaded. Star centerfielder Carlos Beltran, star up-and-comers Jose Reyes and David Wright. Great veteran pitchers like Pedro, Glavine, and El Duque. They finished with far and away the best record in the National League (and by far and away, I mean Far and Away, like Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman leaving 19th century Ireland, sailing to America, and heading to the Western frontier). But Pedro and El Duque got hurt just in time for the playoffs, leaving a staff of Glavine and a bunch of unprovens. They still easily beat the Dodgers in the first round and took the NLCS against the Cardinals to a Game 7, winner-take-all for the right to play in the World Series.

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Western civilization is largely the history of Christian culture, and the overarching theme in Christianity is that of the Fall followed by redemption, death redeemed through the Resurrection. All great literature is imbued with this theme. Every English student studies the basic plot elements in a story. The dramatic action opens with the exposition, and then gets things going with a crisis, which crescendos into the climax. The story goes through the falling action, before ending with the conclusion or resolution. It is much more than coincidence that Western literature follows the template of our Salvation story: God creates the world and mankind (exposition), man messes up the perfect creation and brings death into the world through sin (crisis), God becomes Man to redeem a fallen world (climax/turning point), He is crucified and dies (falling action), but through the Ressurrection conquers death and redeems mankind (conclusion/resolution). Some would say Christianity is a man-made myth that follows common dramatic themes. Rather, the reverse is true. Christianity is the truest story possible; all other literature, fiction and non-fiction, cannot help but follow this template. This truest of stories fills our search for meaning in real life events, personal, political, and—yes—sporting.

As a Mets fan, I sat distraught, witnessing the perfect creation (the 2006 regular season) fall victim to injuries before the playoffs began. The first five tension packed innings of Game 7 produced a 1-1 tie. But, in the sixth, the Cardinals’ Scott Rolen laid into the Mets’ Oliver Perez’s fastball, sending it towards the left field bleachers, bringing an almost certain death to the Mets season. But out of death comes life, and Mets leftfielder Endy Chavez redeemed the season and saved the Mets chances of advancing to the World Series with the Greatest Catch Of All Time (see it here on MLB.com: http://newyork.mets.mlb.com/mlb/ps/y2006/archive.jsp?mode=lcs&series=lcs_b&type=video then click on “Endy’s amazing catch” under Oct. 19, 2006). I had absolutely no doubt the Mets were gonna win that game. That catch revitalized the Mets and demoralized the Cardinals. But, alas, it wasn’t meant to be. The Cardinals won the game on a homer in the 9th. My sunny optimism disappeared. This was like a kid finding out the truth about Santa. My baseball innocence died. As a fan, I popped my baseball cherry.

What do you call it when a death redeemed by Resurrection is followed by a second death? A tragedy? A farce? It’s like the boy who finally gets the pretty girl after years of rejection only she breaks his heart. Why did get his hopes up for nothing? That boy will be wary every time a new girl comes along. As a Mets fan, I went into the 2007 season still stunned by that loss, but guardedly optimistic. Every key player returned. The season played out according to form, with the Mets not playing great, but playing good enough to stay in first place. Until now. There are seven games left in the regular season. The Phillies have six to play. Any combination of Mets wins and Phillies losses adding up to five will ensure another division title. But I cannot remain confident. I feel like Ham Porter yelling at Smalls. “You’re killing me, Mets!” Like pursuing a pretty girl, being a baseball fan is too much pressure. You always expect disappointment, but its just too much fun to stay away.

Bill Clinton: The Best Republican President

Dostoevsky wrote of the terrible torture of telling a man the date of his own death. Rickey Ray Rector, a retarded man facing the gallows (actually the needle) in 1992, thankfully did not have to suffer this torment, since he was too mentally handicapped to understand his own fate. On the night of his execution, he did not eat his Last Meal dessert, asking the guards to save it for later. That piece of pie was the only thing spared. Rector’s life—and the dignity of a soon to be President—did not survive; for one William Jefferson Clinton made sure to break from the campaign trail to be witness to the execution of a retarded man in Arkansas whose life he could have spared. After all, four years earlier, Michael Dukakis appeared squeamish defending his anti-death penalty stance, and Bill Clinton could not afford to look like another soft-on-crime Democrat.

Rector was no innocent man. He turned the gun on himself after committing murder. But the suicide attempt fell incomplete; he gave himself the equivalent of a lobotomy, leaving himself with the intelligence of a very young child. Yes, capital punishment is a divisive issue, but no one can argue that executing this man was in any way needed to protect society. I just hope that someone got to eat that piece of pie. And I hope this story is an aberration in the life of former President Clinton. But after reading Christopher Hitchens’s “No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton,” I fear this example is sadly axiomatic of the Clinton political machine.

One must always read Christopher Hitchens with a grain of salt (and, presumably a stogie and a glass of scotch). Hitchens makes political enemies easily and often, and avoids the “on the one hand…but on the other hand” triangulations that he paints of this book’s antagonist. Mother Theresa is the “ghoul of Calcutta.” Henry Kissinger is a “war criminal the likes of Pol Pot.” And God…well, to Hitchens, “God is not great,” and his followers are, to put it mildly, even worse. But, Hitchens can’t be painted into easy strokes. He is a fierce secularist and simultaneously a fierce Iraq War hawk. He is a harsh opponent of the Christian Right, but as we see here, just as harsh a rival of President Clinton. And, if Hitchens’s critique of Clinton is correct, Clinton is one of the best Republican presidents we have ever had.

Leftist defenders of Clinton during the Impeachment, Hitchens says, miss the point by saying “it was only a blow job.” Clinton lied under oath. He committed perjury. And, you just cannot separate the personal and the political in Bill Clinton. He is a president who, conveniently, bombed Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq in 1998 during heightened investigations of his personal behavior. Maybe the timing of these bombings were coincidence, maybe they were a case of “Wag the Dog.” This is a man who gave the Republicans a victory they could never have dreamed about with Reagan and Bush I, instituting a welfare reform that eradicated 60 years of New Deal social programs put into place by FDR. It is easy to point out the hypocrisy in Republicans extolling the virtue of stay-at-home middle class moms while screaming for single mother “welfare queens” to put the kids in daycare and go back to work. The hypocrisy is taken to another level when a President who has had more than his share of extramarital dalliances, and more than his share of women broaching accusations of sexual harassment, requires of poor women to name the fathers of their babies to remain on welfare. And Mr. Clinton is appalled when the Independent Counsel asks him to reveal his private illicit sex life?

As a high school student during the height of the Starr Report, all I got out of the case was a constant back and forth of “they are smearing Clinton for his personal life” versus “the President is leader of the free world and should be morally virtuous.” Hitchens's polemic does lead this book reviewer (me :-)) to want to read more about the Clinton presidency from other authors. But it also helps this book reviewer (me :-), again) to appreciate the truth that the personal and the political/professional cannot easily be separated, and do effect one another.

The Secret: More New Age Mumbo Jumbo

Job was a good man. He was righteous in the eyes of the Lord. Yet, his wife and children died, his wealth disappeared, and hideous boils covered his body, leaving him sitting on a dung heap, left to ponder the meaning of his existence while his three self-righteous friends accuse him of sinfulness, since—of course!—anyone suffering misfortunate must be receiving punishment from God for something he did.Job pleaded with God for an answer. ‘Why, oh Lord, must I suffer?’ God gives Job no answer. God points out the simple truth that He, God, is creator of the world. It is His place, and His alone, to know. It is Job’s job (so to speak) to shut up, get on with his life, and keep his faith in the Lord.

If, say, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were to rewrite the Book of Job, they might substitute God’s silent answer with Jack Handey’s response to a little kid’s question about rain, ‘why is God crying?’: “Because of something you did.” Falwell and Robertson, after all, were the guys who blamed 9/11 not on the crazy Muslims who actually flew the planes into the World Trade Center, but on God pulling his providential hand of protection away from America because of the gays, feminists, secularists, and friends.

The response of the American people to these two preachers was a collective ‘what the f*** are they smoking?’ Yet, the wisdom of the Book of Job is lost on many, not just fundamentalist preachers. Just look at the latest New Age mumbo-jumbo, Rhonda Byrne’s New York Times best selling book and Oprah favorite “The Secret.”

The Secret consults great thinkers across the fields of psychology, physics, medicine, philosophy, and education to reveal the hidden truth about the greatest force in the Universe. Is this great force gravity? Is it any of the other laws of physics? Is this great force God, for the religiously inclined? No, it is none of these things. The most powerful force in the Universe is YOU!

That’s right, you are more powerful than gravity, the speed of light, a Nolan Ryan fastball, a teenage boy’s body odor. You are even more powerful than God. There is this mystical thing out there called the Law of Attraction. It says that whatever you are attracted to will be given to you. Let’s say I am attracted to—I don’t know—Jessica Alba. My attraction will send energy waves out into the universe and bring Jessica Alba to me since nothing is more powerful than the Law of Attraction. Are Jessica and I currently together? You’ll have to wait and see; first, there is a book review to finish.

Do you want wealth? Envision yourself being rich, and it will happen. Do you want a nice job? Imagine that cushy desk, fancy computer, and stunning secretary, and it will all be yours. Do you want to improve your golf game? Picture that ball rolling onto the green for a hole-in-one, and you will be the next Tiger Woods.

‘Ah,’ a detractor might say, ‘but what about the people who don’t get what they want? What about the poor schmucks who get what they don’t desire?’ The Law of Attraction is still in play, says Rhonda Byrne. Whatever you are envisioning or thinking about will come to you through the Law of Attraction. A person who loses his job may say he doesn’t like unemployment, but when he was thinking, ‘I don’t want to lose my job,’ his energy field sent out vibes attracting that job loss. You see, the Law of Attraction may be the most powerful force in the Universe, but it has trouble reading certain words in the dictionary. The Law of Attraction does not understand negative words like “no,” “don’t,” “can’t,” and “won’t.”

Imagine yourself walking down the street after a nice meal at the local Mexican restaurant. That pretty girl from your high school class (whom you haven’t seen in years) randomly walks by. You start a nice conversation, catch up on life, but all of a sudden, the beginnings of Montezuma’s Revenge appear. You let out that wet fart. Inside, you say to yourself, ‘please God! Don’t let this one smell.’ But the Law of Attraction does not hear “no.” The Law of attraction hears ‘let this one smell.’ The pretty girl from high school gets a whiff and quickly needs to leave.

Rhonda Byrne has an interesting theory, but has she ever considered that maybe the Law of Attraction—being the most powerful force in the Universe and all—actually CAN hear the word “no,” but people, when they are thinking these negative thoughts, think them in bad English? Maybe that kicker hoping not to miss a field goal is really a Spanish guy who speaks bad English. He thinks, “I no wanna miss no kick today.” Or it could be a factory worker thinking in ebonics, “I don’t wanna be losin’ no job today.” Then, the Law of Attraction would correctly interpret the proper intent of their language by giving them what they didn’t want but couldn’t articulate properly in their minds.

In case you are still wondering, no I am not with Jessica Alba. Maybe I emitted negative feelings, such as “please don’t let Jessica Alba and me be apart.” Or, maybe this Law of Attraction is just a bunch of bullshit, plainly seen when the book suggests that the victims of the Holocaust, somehow, someway, pulled negative energy towards themselves through some deep seated attraction to the Auschwitz ovens.

There is no “Secret” to happiness, success, and wealth. There are no energy fields out there attracting things to you through the subconscious. Sometimes, like in the story of Job, bad things happen to good people. Unlike what Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Rhonda Byrner believe, not everything that happens to us is our fault. Sometimes we need Robin Williams' psychologist character Sean McGuire to tell us, like he told Will Hunting, "It's not you fault."

In real life, you don’t get rich through happy thoughts. You get rich through (mostly) luck and (occasionally) hard work. That pretty girl isn’t going to date you if you imagine it in your head. She will date you if you are good looking, smart and funny. If you’re not, you better start looking lower in the gene pool if you want a mate. There is no magic formula for happiness. There is no guarantee of contentment. You can’t really be anything you want to. Even the holiest people sometimes suffer. Look at Mother Teresa. She felt the absence of God her final 50 years and still went on helping the poor.

People don’t need false dreams. They need a dose of reality. Yes, we should work hard, treat others well, and keep our faith in God. But, even doing that, there is no guarantee of happiness, wealth, or love. The only secret formula is to follow the example of Job; be a good God-fearing person and accept that some things are beyond our control.