Playing with Fire Podcast

Grace Abounds

“Baseball is the only sport where being a failure seven out of ten times is considered to be outstanding - only about a dozen players in each major league bat .300 annually. ”

“Hitting a baseball has been described as the single most difficult feat in sports. And for good reason. Imagine the quality of hand-eye coordination required to make contact with a little white sphere traveling at over 95 miles per hour, using a 2 ¾ inch wide piece of wood being swung at over sixty miles per hour. Consider the intense concentration. A batter standing just 56 feet from the pitcher’s hand has only about 45/100’s of a second to decide if he’ll swing, predict where the ball will be, instruct his muscles to move, and bring the bat to a point of impact. If all goes well, the bat and ball rendezvous a few inches in front of the plate. The ball is crushed to half its diameter, springs back, and is launched on its return flight at speeds close to a hundred miles per hour. Timing is essential. The difference between a hit over second base and a foul near first or third is a swing mistimed by 0.01 second. Baseball is the only sport where being a failure seven out of ten times is considered to be outstanding - only about a dozen players in each major league bat .300 annually. A basketball center who sank only 30 percent of his baskets or a quarterback who hit his receivers only 30 percent of the time would be selling insurance instead.”

Given the challenge of just making contact with a ball, stories about players making promises to hit a home run in a major league game and then actually doing it, seems the stuff of urban legends. For young Matt Herndon fantasy became reality courtesy of Mike Sweeney, DH for the Kansas City Royals.

“Matt Herndon is an 11-year-old kid from Overland Park, Kansas, who was in the hospital on Wednesday night with a brain aneurysm when he got a call from his favorite baseball player, Mike Sweeney. As Sweeney is his favorite player and the time seemed right, Matt asked Mike to hit him a home run in that night’s game. Sweeney, being the nice guy he is, goes out and does just that!

After Sweeney’s first-inning 2-run blast off Sidney Ponson — just his second of the year — you can see the excitement adding some juice to his trot. ‘I never ran so fast around the bases after hitting a homer,’ he says. Then, as Pat Borzi of MLB.com reports:
Thursday morning, Sweeney almost teared up when describing the postgame phone message he got from Herndon. The boy had called many of his friends in Overland Park to tell them of Sweeney’s call.
‘He said they couldn’t get the game at the hospital, but when I homered, all his friends from Overland Park started calling,’ Sweeney said. ‘He said, `You did it, Mike!’ ‘David said that Matt told him this was the greatest day of his life. That boy’s got some courage. He’s a hero now.’”

It is amazing what can happen when sport meets grace and players become doers of the Word (Mt 25:31-46). Be like Mike!