THROW HARD EVERY DAY

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… ©

I have been reading David Halberstam’s October of 1964, about the baseball season leading up to the unlikely World Series between the fading white Yankees of Mickey Mantle and the increasingly fast and black Cardinals of Bill White and Lou Brock. [It was a gift from daughter Mary Beth’s baseball fan friend, Bill Napolillo.]

Like all of Halberstam’s work, it is a marvelous read, a complete melding of accurate journalistic reporting, smooth writing, and social awareness.

Much of it centers on the pitchers, those rising in their careers, and those declining, so there is a lot of pitching philosophy in the book. One older pitcher explained to a younger one that the body wants to keep doing what it has been doing. If you’ve been sitting around doing nothing, the body wants to keep sitting around doing nothing. If you’ve been running every day, the body wants to keep running. So, you need to throw hard every day, so that when it comes your turn to pitch, your body will want to throw hard.

I’m not sure you should throw hard every day. The body needs rest as well as work. There is a necessary rhythm. But there is a lot of truth in the old pitcher’s philosophy, too, especially for old people. If you sit around doing nothing, the body gets used to it and wants to keep on. Life is not much fun that way. Even if you can’t throw hard anymore, get up and throw.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I started this blog several years ago, when we followed the grandchildren to the “place of winter,” Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [The UP]. I put that in the sub-title, Reflections on Faith from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter, where life is defined by winter even in the summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.]

I tweet as yooper1721.