the Romance of the Rockies

Please forgive the sad delay in posting! It would be a lie to say that I have been too busy - my days have been satisfyingly full, but I have also savored the hours with nothing in particular to do, a creature so foreign to my recent life as a student!

We here in Denver have been watching breathlessly and with high hopes the rise and tragic fall of the Rockies. I've never been a huge baseball fan, but living in a World Series city, bursting with pride over their Blake Street Sluggers, has made baseball fever nearly irresistable. I watched all four games, three from various taverns near our house and one from the comfort of a friend's home, with knife in hand, taking out my frustration at their lack of runs by carving a pumpkin!

Watching the games has helped me to understand why so many people expend so much time and energy watching or playing sports. I was struck again and again by the romance of the game - used in the same sense as 'the romance of orthodoxy' in my blog title - how every single moment, something entirely unexpected could happen. A wavering of the wrist, and a run is walked in; a cut of the bat centimeters too high or too low, and a grand slam becomes a double play; indeed, the very best baseball moments, the two-out ninth-inning homerun over the left field fence, are all a breath, a wobble, a millimeter away from heartbreak and disaster. Nothing is scripted once the game begins.

In C.S. Lewis' memoir about his wife's death, he comments, "We all think we've got each other taped." Too often we anticipate what each other will say before actually hearing it, or we are content to sum up another's personhood with a handful of adjectives based on what we have seen so far. Example from the Series: after the pentultimate out of Game 3, with the Rockies trailing by 5 and their last hope in the batter's box, the announcers proceeded to thank the producers, directors, etc, for the fine job of televising the game. Loyalty surged in us, and we shouted at the TV, "It's not over yet!" Sure, statistically speaking, the Rockies' chance of a 6-run, 2-out rally was just about nil. But that doesn't mean it couldn't have happened! Hope defeated and trampled over en route to the next block of programming corrodes the spirit and is just plain not fun! Give me any day the anticipation of the next best surprise, the thrill of mystery in people I think I know so well, and a childlike sense of expectation that maybe, just maybe, the improbable will, this time around, be.