The Perfection of Civility

Armando Galarraga peers in for the sign.  His heart is pounding.  Each player on the field has muscles taut, pounding his glove, hoping the ball comes to him so he can be a part of history.  The crowd is clapping yet breathless.  There have only been 20 perfect games in the history of the game.  No one is expecting this, not tonight, not from this pitcher.  He winds and delivers, just as he did for the first 26 batters he has faced.  Jason Donald defends the plate and gets some wood on the ball.  It's a bouncer towards second.  Miguel Cabrera moves to his right, grabs the ball on the hop, turns and fires to where Galarraga is headed - the first base bag.  The throw is on target, he taps first base with his foot just ahead of the sprinting Donald, and he's....safe?  Jim Joyce blows the call, as replay will prove, and this becomes just another game with 28 batters instead of the perfection of the minimum 27.  Anguish and disbelief.

Baseball as a game can sometimes be unfair, and by extension, sometimes life is unfair, too.  It's a lesson I teach my kids, and it's a lesson that both Jim Joyce and Armando Galarraga learned on this early summer evening.  Yes, it's a hard lesson, but sometimes bad things happen to good people.

I wonder how our current political parties would handle such random unfairness.  The Democratic response would be to condemn the mistake, chalk it up to the flawed structure of the game, and demand more oversight, more regulations to prevent another such injustice from ever happening again.  The GOP would argue that mistakes happen, and had the pitcher struck out the batter, the play never would have happened.  He had every opportunity to try harder to place his pitch in an unhittable area for the batter, and he blew it.  The Libertarians would wonder if an umpire is really even necessary, and the Socialists would centralize all judgment calls in a single, all-powerful committee of experts for a determination of each play's result.  Of course, the Tea Party would blame the government and believe that more guns would solve the matter.

At the end of the day, all of these political approaches would fail to address the ultimate issue - life is unfair.

The true lesson for us all might be best demonstrated by the reactions of both the pitcher, Galarraga, and the umpire, Joyce, after the game.  Jim Joyce accepted full responsibility for blowing the call.  Armando Galarraga accepted his apology, and has moved on to prepare for his next turn.  For me, the perfection of the moment has come through the way these two gentleman have handled this matter, not through a mere 27 consecutive outs in a game.  Our leaders should strive for nothing less than perfect civility in a world that is sometimes unfair.

That's what I'll tell my kids.