Blue Cord

The white flag with the blue “W” flying above the score board can only mean one thing: “The Cubs win! The Cubs win! The Cubs win!”

I woke up at 4:00 am yesterday morning and hopped in my car to drive to Chicago. I arrived a little after 10:00 and boarded the Red Line train to Addison St. Fortunately, I got on the train in Hyde Park, because by the time I got north of the Loop, the train was jam packed with Cubs fans heading to the game. (Click on the thumbnail to the right for a larger view.)

The crowd was huge. I have never seen such a pack of people arriving at a game. This is mostly due to the fact that Wrigley Field is smack dab in the middle of a neighborhood, instead of being on the outskirts of the city Despite the large crowd, it still has a very intimate feeling about it. And I wasn’t worried about being mugged like I was when I went to a White Sox game a few years ago.

The size of the crowd and the fact that I had to get my tickets at “Will Call” meant that I was late arriving at my seats (upper level, along the first base line). I only got to see the final batter in the top of the 1st. It was Carlos Lee for the Houston Astros. When I went to a White Sox game a few years ago, I got a foul ball off of Carlos Lee when he played for the White Sox. Unfortuantely, his closest foul ball this time was still twenty feet away.

I expected the game to be a pitchers’ duel, since it was Roy Oswalt going up again Jason Marquis. The two of them belong to a group of only seven pitchers who had more than 12 wins each season since 2004. It turned out to be a slug-fest, however. The Cubs came from behind to take the lead in the 7th inning when the scored five runs. The final was Houston: 7, Chicago 9. Kosuke Fukudome was 2 for 4 and drove in the go-ahead run with a double, while Derek Lee was 4 for 4 with 3 RBIs and a home run.¹

It goes without saying that Wrigley Field is a fantastic place to see a ballgame. It is a classic stadium. They layout gives you a feel for what it must have been like to see games at the Polo Grounds or Ebbets Field. The weather was a perfect 62 degrees with a beautiful sky overhead. Off to the right you could see Lake Michigan over the right field wall. I always feel revived after attending my first baseball game after a long winter, and a game at Wrigley field is a great way to start the spring.

For the record, this is my ninth major league ball park. The others where I have seen games are (in order):

• Fulton County Stadium (Braves, now replaced by Turner Field)
• Yankee Stadium (Yankees)
• The Holy Land Oriole Park at Camden Yards (Orioles)
• Miller Park (Brewers)
• The Metrodome (Twins)
• U.S. Cellular Field (White Sox)
• Great American Ball Park (Reds)
• RFK Stadium (Nationals, now replaced by Nationals Park)

I also made it over the Petco Park (Padres) during the SBL last November, but of course it was off season.

After the game I headed down to the Loop. I wandered around Millinium Park for two hours and took some pictures. At the left is the Pritzker Concert Pavilion on the Great Lawn, and below is the Cloud Gate sculpture. I like the pictures I took, but more than ever I am dying to get a digital SLR. I can get pretty good results with my digital point-and-shoot, but I miss the control of an SLR.

Afterwards, I met up with Anna Brawley, a friend from seminary days. As it turns out, she was also a classmate of my current roommate, Jin Yang Kim of Old Testament Story. Anna and Jin took Ugaritic together from Denis Pardee at the Oriental Institute. Anna and I want to the Billy Goat Tavern. It was an appropriate spot for dinner after my first Cubs game, since the original owner of the restaurant is the one who placed the curse on the Cubs after he and his goat were kicked out of Wrigley Field during the 1945 World Series.² If you watched Saturday Night Live in the 1970s, this is the restaurant that inspired the “Cheezborger. Cheezborger. Cheezborger” skit with John Belushi. Of course, I had a cheezborger with chips (”No fries. Cheeps.”).

1. I noticed on the back of my ticket this morning that it said that the holder of the ticket agreed not to transmit any information about the game. I broke that rule yesterday when I text messaged the score to a friend of mine, and I am breaking it again now via this blog post. Of course, right now I am not actually holding the ticket, so those rules may no longer apply. [back]
2. For those who don’t know their baseball lore, this curse is the reason the Cubs did not win the World Series in 1945 and have not won one since. [back]

No, this is not a deep essay on how wonderful baseball is. I will leave those to George Will and Bob Costas (although I agree with everything they write on the subject). Instead, here are a few thoughts — mostly pet peeves — that came to me while watching the Atlanta Braves vs. the Washington Nationals on Sunday and the Milwaukee Brewers vs. the Chicago Cubs on Monday, and while following the Tampa Bay Rays vs. the Baltimore Orioles through MLB’s gameday on-line that gives pitch-by-pitch updates.

• The Orioles are horrible again this year. The only thing that allows me to keep going as a Baltimore fan is my love for the city and the practice I have had waiting for Jesus to return.
• People all over Nationals Park were taking pictures with their digital cameras to catch the first pitch, the first home run, the first player to score, etc. Flashes were going off all over the place. Don’t people realize that the flashes on most cameras are only powerful enough to light things within 15–20 feet? Every flash going off in the park was absolutely useless. Now, if it was only a question of wasting batteries, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. But when the flash goes off, a digital camera expects thing to be lit fairly brightly and reduces its sensitivity normally. When the flash distance is too large, all this does is make the picture dimmer. If the people took the time to read their manuals (or perhaps a good book on digital photography) they would learn that turning the flash off would cause the camera to adjust to the actual light down on the field, thereby resulting in better pictures. Some people don’t deserve technology.
• Eric Gagne really, really needs to shave.
• The only thing that keeps the Tampa Bay Rays’s name change from being the stupidest ever is the fact that the Angles became the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim last year. And do they really think abandoning teal for blue will turn them into a winning team? Or is this just a cynical marketing ploy?
• Teams that began more recently than the 1970s should not be allowed to wear pinstripes.
• Players who wear baggy uniforms look really stupid. You make millions of dollars a year; you shouldn’t dress like a fourteen-year-old.

I had some time in between an editorial board meeting in the morning and the AABS meeting in the afternoon. Since I am at a biblical studies conference, I thought it would be appropriate to visit some holy ground in the city, so I headed over to Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres.

Now, I am not a Padres fan, even though one of my favorite pitchers, Rodrigo Lopez, now pitches for them (he played with the Orioles when I lived in Maryland). But I love ballparks and consider them about as close to heaven as we can achieve here on earth.

Petco Park has an area out past the outfield that is open to the public on days when games are not being played. I was able to go in and look around. The picture above was taken with me standing just outside the center field fence, with the camera on my phone poking between the links in the fence.

It is a pretty park - despite being named after a business - and it has a fantastic location right downtown. Looks like a great place to see a game.

My previous post about my original blog at Xanga got me reading over some of my posts from that blog. One in particular I still think is a good read. Although I moved many of my Bible-related posts to Blue Cord, this one never made it. So, to ensure that it gets included on Blue Cord - and because it is related to All Saints’ Day - I thought I would repost it here. It was originally posted November 5, 2005.

Original post:

I have been thinking for some time about the concept of heroes. The genesis of this line of thought lies in this past summer when my favorite baseball player, Raphael Palmeiro, was found to have used performance enhancing drugs and lied about it to Congress. It reminds me of my first experience with a fallen hero. When I was a teenager, I found out that my hero James T. Kirk from Star Trek was played by an actor who was quite egotistical.

As I have gotten older, my concept of heroes has changed, whether they are fictional or real. I used to focus on those people who had accomplished great things: the adventurer who overcame great odds, the scientist who made great discoveries, the athlete who performed well. I still admire those people, but they are no longer my heroes. The quality that makes someone a hero now is his or her ability to deal with failure, especially moral failure.

This change in thinking has come about because of my change in understanding about the Christian life. Back in youth group in church, I thought of myself as a good person. I didn’t do the things that the “bad kids” did. I didn’t do drugs or have sex before marriage or stay out late. I was a good kid. That, to me, was what it meant to live as a Christian.

I can no longer have such delusions about myself. I know myself now to be a failure in so many areas, including the moral realm. I don’t pretend now that I am better than others just because I don’t do what some versions of Christianity have defined as the obvious sins. Instead, I know that my sin goes much deeper, affecting all areas of my life. I recognize sin as brokenness. I am not a sinner because I sin; I sin because I am a sinner.

The question for me now is how I deal with it after I have failed. How do I incorporate my failure into my self-understanding? Do I have the courage to recognize the sin and name it as such, or do I go on deluding myself that I am a good person? How do I learn to live with myself, knowing myself to be capable of the kind of things I have done in my life?

The heroes I seek now are those who have come to grips with the sinful condition of humanity and have learned to move on, not by denying their sin but by overcoming it. Palmeiro has not done that. He has continued to deny wrong doing even in the face of overwhelming evidence against him. And he has blamed others for his fault. This, much more than his use of drugs (which was bad enough), is the reason he is such a fallen hero for me.

As an aside, I also have trouble with his drug use because it goes against the essential honesty of baseball (baseball as a concept, that is, not as they way it is actually played in the major leagues). Baseball is always about who plays better. Everybody comes to the game equal in the eyes of the game, with only their difference in skill to make them a good or bad player. And even when you are winning, you still have to give the other team their chance. You can’t just hold onto the ball and let the clock run out like you do in football and basketball. You throw the ball to the other team and give them a chance to hit it. Drugs are a way of succeeding without having to have as much skill. What you are saying is that you don’t care what skill the other guy has, you are willing to use artificial means so it will look like you are better than he is. I despise that in life as much as in baseball.

Who then are my heroes now? There are many of them, both fictional and real. My father is one, for he as much as anyone knows what it was to experience personal failure repeatedly and still have to go on living. He did not do it as well as I would have liked, which is why he died during a drinking binge at the age of 53. But he did not give up trying. It is a shame that he died knowing only some of the respect that I have for him because of that.

Dostoevsky is another (the picture to the right is me next to his grave). I know I have mentioned him several times is recent posts, but my visit to St. Petersburg has renewed my interest in him and his literature. Dostoevsky was addicted to gambling. Repeatedly he would lose everything he had and have to start over again. But he always did start over. He incorporated the experience into his self-understanding and moved on. And he passed that understanding, which is in reality an understanding of all people, on to us in his writing. The genius of Dostoevsky is not that he overcame gambling, which he never truly did, but that he never allowed gambling to overcome him. He kept moving forward and never gave in. The same is true of Rashkolnikov, Dostoevsky’s “hero” in Crime and Punishment. The salvation Rashkolnikov receives at the end is in recognizing what he has done and accepting the penalty for it.

Being someone with several aspects that are not only acts of sin but lifelong problems, I draw strength from this. One of my problems is depression, which is not a sin in the sense of something I have done wrong but is certainly sin in the sense that it is a part of my brokenness. (I have other sins that are wrongs I have done and still do, but this is the one I chose to mention here.) It is not that God cannot overcome this, but that God chooses not to. What God does is give me the strength to move forward, recognizing this as a part of who I am but ultimately not the final word. Paul had to deal with the thorn in his side, but God refused to take it from him. God’s answer was that God’s grace was sufficient to make it through (2 Cor.12:7-10).

I have come to rely more on that grace and the recognition that it allows me to be honest about my brokenness. I do not have to hide the evil parts of myself, even from myself. I can acknowledge them with such and still continue. I think this is why Leviticus is so powerful. In it, God meets us where we are, demanding holiness from us, but knowing that we will not reach that standard. In those cases where we fail, God provides the sin offering and the restitution offering, the sacraments of grace. God does not abandon us in our sins, which allows us to recognize them for what they are. This makes the people of God the most honest of all people. As Christians, we can be honest because of grace, not because of our goodness.

Thanks be to God for those people in my life, famous or not, who provide me with examples of how to go on living in the midst of brokenness. They are my heroes.

Ten days after giving up the most runs ever allowed in an American League ball game, the Baltimore Orioles have once again found themselves on the wrong side of a record.  This time the game was against the Boston Red Sox, so I was able to watch the game.  We won last night when I had to work and couldn’t watch the game, but tonight when I could watch the game we lost.

But we didn’t just lose.  We also allowed Clay Buchholz to become the first Boston rookie ever to throw a no-hitter.  Buchholz was making the second start in the majors, having just been called up from Triple-A Pawtucket a few hours before.  He had come up in mid-August but was sent back down after one start, which he won.  Tonight, he was untouchable.  He walked three and hit one batsman, but gave up no hits.  His change up was particularly nasty and had more movement on it than a change up has a right to have.  Jason Varitek, the Boston catcher, certainly deserves some of the credit, as he called an amazing series of pitches throughout the night.

The Baltimore Orioles . . . making other teams feel good about themselves.