Teddy Ballgame, The Science of Hitting, and an exam on the Gospels.

Spring training, surviving the first semester, and realizing that I haven't written in a long time have all gotten me thinking..

Ted "The Splendid Splinter" Williams in his first at bat as a
member of the Boston Red Sox at Fitton Field at the College
of the Holy Cross.. He hit a homerun. 

When I was about 12 years old I tried out for little league baseball. I have to say that the simple truth is that I wasn't very good, and I was almost immediately placed in the minor league division. In any event, a big part of the reason why I wasn't very good was that I discovered that I could hit the ball pretty far when I really got a hold of it. Now, for those of you who are baseball fans, this may seem to make absolutely no sense, but the simple truth is that once I got a mere taste of hitting the ball hard, I never again saw a pitch that I didn't like. It could be high, low, fast, slow, I was going to swing at it, and I wasn't just going to swing at, I was going to crush it. This lead to a batting average that was well south of the feared mendoza line, and a baseball career that ended very abruptly as soon as my parents decided to put a Tennis racket in my hand.

            I was still a huge fan of the game though, and this week the wisdom of one of the greats hit me hard. Ted Williams wrote a book called The Science of Hitting, and the most basic, and best advice that the Splendid Splinter had in that book was that you should wait for your pitch. At the foundation of this is a basic humble admission, you can't hit every pitch, so you wait for the one you can and go with it.

            So often in my life I know that I can still be that 12 year old kid out on the Highcrest School Little League field, wanting to destroy every pitch that comes my way. The difference between now and then is, of course, that I have learned to hold up on swinging at a pitch that I can't hit (and now of course I am speaking in metaphor) and wait for what I can. The clearest example came only a couple of days ago in my Synoptic Gospels final. I walked in, and as with all other exams here, I had 10 minutes to prove to the Professor what I had learned over the course of a semester, the professor gave me two questions that I could answer. Question 1: Talk about  a question about hermeneutics according to the pontifical biblical commission. I hadn't anticipated this one. This was a pitch that was low and at my knees, nearly unhittable. I held back, strike one. Question 2: Do exegesis (explain) of the passage on the primitive Christian community. This pitch was a little high, I could hit it, but it was risky, no swing. Strike 2. I asked for a third pitch, and it was graciously given. Question 3: Exegesis on the Parable of the Lost sheep in Luke. Fastball, 90 miles and hour, right down the middle of the plate... swing, contact, over the fence... Homerun!

            You see the simple truth is that somewhere, deep down, I didn't want to wait for that last pitch. I wanted to try and answer one of those first two questions to impress the professor, but I held back, I was humbled by the fact that I didn't know the responses to the questions well enough to try to answer and do well, I would have had to fake it, and in the name of protecting my own pride, I may have lost out in the end. So often it is the case in our lives, we hesitate to do anything that might demonstrate that we are weak, and in doing so we can find ourselves undone. I had to ask for that third question, I knew I couldn't do the other two justice, and when I did, when I admitted my weakness, I was able to wait for a question that I could. Jesus once said that the truth sets us free. The truth here was simply this, sometimes we need to be honest about who we are and where we are at to have any hope of success, even if that truth is that we can't hit a given pitch.