It’s an old saying in baseball – “hit it where it’s pitched”.  It means that a batter shouldn’t try to force things based on what he wants to do but should take the pitch that comes and do what’s best for the team.  Oakland A’s prospect Grant Desme is taking that adage and applying it not just at the plate but in life:

Regardless, today is the day: As first reported by FOXSports.com, the 23-year-old star prospect has informed the A’s that he will retire and become a priest.

“I’m doing well in baseball,” Desme told reporters on Friday, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “But I had to get down to the bottom of things, to what was good in my life, what I wanted to do with my life. Baseball is a good thing, but that felt selfish of me when I felt that God was calling me more. It took awhile to trust that and open up to it and aim full steam toward him. I love the game, but I’m going to aspire to higher things.”

Now we all know that the road to the priesthood is a long one, and not everyone who goes to seminary comes out as a priest, but to come this far and turn away from a potential career in Major League Baseball to answer God’s call says much.  From the rest of the article this young man already is truly living his faith, and that in a career that all to often lends itself to terrible moral challenges.  As with anyone willing to pursue the priesthood, my prayers go with him.

The strangest thoughts come to me after I’ve shut down my computers (yes, the ‘s’ is intentional) for the night. Last night for some reason it came to me that, in a way, there is a lesson to be learned about evangelization from how I’d turned my wife into a red-blooded baseball-lover. Your likely reaction mirrors mine – baseball … church … eh?

Way back when my wife and I were dating she came to realize that I am a huge fan of baseball – not just of the Red Sox, but of baseball as a game in and of itself. She, shall we say, had no use for the game. But being the good woman she is, she watched a few games with me. It was never like a switch audibly clicked or her attitude suddenly changed – no, she still couldn’t stand the game. Too boring, too slow, too nuanced for her – give her a good ol’ game of knock-em-around high-speed football and a bowl of queso and chips and she’d be happy. Baseball, though, is a game that is best understood slowly. The nuances, the quirks, the hidden corners, the nooks-and-crannies are what separate the sandlot guys from the pros and the pros from the future Hall-of-Fame types. It’s that little extra thing that makes the difference- avoiding the in-between-hop, seeing the shortstop move just before the pitch, remembering how the pitcher got you out last time. And the time before. And the time before that. Baseball watchers like to say that anyone can hit a straight fastball if they know it’s coming – but what about the cutter, the slider, the curve, splitter, changeup, two-seamer, sinker… And the more you know about those things, the more you internalize them, the better you are as a player – and as a fan. Baseball makes no sense as a game – until you know it.

I’ve found Catholicism to be so much the very same. All the small things – the devotions, the prayers, the almost-never-heard-of Saints, why the priest wears black and the Cardinal red, the difference between transubstantiation and consubstantiation and transignification… Each one of them, if you look at them from the outside without any basis for understanding, seems to reach the hight of picking at nits. Nothing, simply, could be further from the truth. The trick, however, is in picking up those bits when the question arises and helping that question to arise without forcing it. Fides quarens intellectum can also occasionally start with intellectum quarens fide (please, correct my grammar – my Latin book is still waiting for me) – sometimes there are those who in learning come to have faith.

You see, my wife never saw the beauty of baseball until she came to understand the intricate nuances of each play and how, when played well, it almost has an orchestral feel to it. If you’re not looking for the notes though, it’s just a bunch of overpaid guys whacking around a ball to appease their testosterone. Oh, and a lot of standing around. The Church, the Faith handed down from the Apostles, is much the same. If you don’t know what you’re looking at, it’s just a bunch of disinterested people doing what their parents did and ignoring a bureaucratic, patriarchal and misogynist hierarchy that hasn’t been “in-touch” with anything in hundreds of years. Learn a little bit though – feed that infant fides with a little intellectum and vice versa – and they scales fall off and that bread-thingy is never again a “cookie” but Christ the Son of the Living God brought to us at the hands of a priest acting in persona Christi as Heaven and Earth touch. It is, in short, the most beautiful thing this side of Heaven.

To get there though takes small steps. Perhaps that is why St. Augustine took so long to convert – one does not run a marathon in ten easy steps, but in hundreds and thousands of slowly progressing sometimes arduous movements forwards. Does my wife like baseball now – you’d better believe it. She even knows what a “magic number” is and what it means to “work the count”. She sees the beauty of the minutiae. So it is with the Church – the more you learn, the more there is for you to love. Each step, taken on its own and explained with proper and due care, bring the soul that one step closer. It’s our job, as much as we are capacitated to it by the Spirit, to help facilitate each of those steps for any and every one who needs it. Hey, if I can help my wife to come to love baseball … “[A]ll things are possible to him who believes. (Mk 9:23)”

Congratulations to the Boston Red Sox, 2007 World Series Champions!

And now, my wife and I can get some sleep, finally.

Image from ESPN.

ESPN ran a nice feel-good story about a kid who everyone used to consider a prime example of a kid who bought into the lie that is offered to almost everyone who sees too much success too early, and too easy. Josh Hamilton was once a “can’t-miss” prospect, someone who seemed to have an unbounded ceiling. Then he found drugs and lost nearly everything – his job, his wife and baby, almost even the one last person (his grandmother, naturally) who would try to help him.

For his sake, and indeed for ours, I hope his new trajectory takes hold and he can become one of those positive stories of people who sank to the depths and was raised up and then made it their mission to help keep others from following their path. Even if he never hits another 500 foot home run, if he stays clean and helps others to do the same, the greater part of the story will be his. He’s as deserving of our prayers as anyone else.

I know it’s not my usual fare of semi-directed thoughts about Catholicism, but the Cory Lidle story has caught my attention. Anyone who knows me knows I’m a hard-core Red Sox fan, and I’m sure some think that would make saying anything positive about a member of the Yankees almost impossible. But it’s times like this that make everyone take a step back and think about what is really important in life. And if contemplating the truly important isn’t Catholic, I don’t know what is. Cory Lidle – father, husband, teammate, friend. Requiscat in pace.

Jayson Stark at ESPN has an excellent piece on this today. Go ahead and read it. It’s not in Latin, and it has nothing to do with Bishop Millingo or the celibate priesthood. It’s just about taking account of what’s important in life. From the article:

“I think it just goes to show how insignificant some of the things that we think are significant really are,” said Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson, a man who had once been Cory Lidle‘s pitching coach in Oakland. “We’re about to play a baseball game, and how important is that, really?”

That was the question they all were having to grope with Wednesday, at a time they least expected to be groping with any question more basic than how to attack Tom Glavine‘s changeup or Jeff Weaver‘s sweeping breaking ball.

How important were these baseball games? Who could have expected that, on the day of what was supposed to be Game 1 of the National League Championship Series, anyone could possibly answer: Not very important at all?