I don’t enjoy watching Randy Wolf pitch. It is not personal, I don’t know Randy Wolf and I have never heard a bad word against him but I don’t like to watch him pitch. This has bothered me for quite some time, not the what but the why. Why don’t I like to watch Randy Wolf pitch? And it occurred to me earlier today; the reason I don’t like to watch him pitch is that his pitching lacks poetry. It is not that Randy Wolf isn’t graceful or a good athlete. His mechanics are solid, and his pitches have good movement and he is a pitcher, not a thrower, but he has no poetry. When Randy Wolf pitches I do not see a man fighting his demons or on some sort of quest to overcome his shortcomings; I see a man who is doing his job. I see a man who goes to work and that is not worthy of the great game of baseball.
In our time, man is a slave to the corporate machine; we live in a world where everybody is depressed and/or has ADD or ADHD. Where our attention span has dwindled to such an extent that we can’t pay attention to our loved ones. A time when most of are too stupidass lazy to raise our hands and choose those who would lead us. A time when we all tune in to however many TV stations we can get beamed into our homes; a time when most of us don’t bother to make up our own minds, we just let let Glenn Beck, or Charlie Gibson or Sean Hannity tell us what we should think, never mind the why. Mark my words friends, Wal-Mart will rule the world. Our time is a not a cynical one as so many of us are fond of saying; they are not cynical because cynicism requires thought, our time is an apathetic one. In all aspects of our society man is devoid of poetry, not because he wants to be but because he doesn’t know that he needs poetry. He doesn’t know that poetry is lifeblood, it stirs in our loins and drives us to rise up against our lesser angels. I don’t mean poetry in the sense of Emily Dickinson or Wallace Stevens, I mean poetry in the sense of man confronting and transcending his own condition. Poetry is what causes us to rise up and say “Enough”! Poetry is what causes us to forsake that which is easy for that which is right. Poetry is what gives us the strength to carry on through the bitter winter because poetry tells us that spring will come, no matter how cold the night or how deep the snow, the flowers will bloom again.
To live a life without poetry is what most of us are consigned to do because the machine has broken our society to such an extent that we cannot afford to entertain our own friends, let alone poetry. However, there are a few places that the machine does not own and one of those places is baseball. The machine cannot break into baseball. It can encircle it with $100 seats and $7 hot dogs. It can bombard it with ads and corporate logos but it cannot penetrate the game itself because the machine cannot penetrate something that is pure. It is not that it cannot defile and rape those things which are beautiful because it can. What it cannot do is penetrate that which it does not understand, the computers can’t run the equation and what the machine does not understand is purity. Baseball is not mostly or made up of purity, it is purity. The game is not for sale and that is why it cannot be bought or forced to submit to the machine. However that does not mean that it cannot be played by those who have submitted and bowed before the machine. What the machine needs to function is submission, it needs people who just go to work. I don’t pretend to know if Randy Wolf is one of these but it seems to me like he might be and that is why I don’t enjoy watching him pitch.
We must have poetry if we are to weather the machine age and baseball is where I find it.
-dodgerdave
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