8/22: Hitting On The Subject Of Cancer
• Well I’m offended. Shittsburgh’s mayor was recently diagnosed with several brain tumors and has been seeking treatment for his condition. No, that’s not what got my panties in a bunch. It’s that today a public prayer vigil was held from 11 a.m. to noon. On city property. OMG CALL THE ACLU! Where’s The Fascist Barry Lynn to tear shit up when you really need him? What a travesty. There could have been a little atheist walking by this public display of religious activity, and he or she could have been offended by what I had only thought went on in red states. I certainly hope the ACLU does something about this; at the very least they better write a scolding letter to the city threatening legal action if this sort of thing should ever happen again.
• This story cracks me up.
...But none of these guys would ever consider pulling the stunt Bob Farley and Shaun Farr pulled in the 9- and 10-year-old Mueller Park PONY baseball league in Bountiful, Utah — ordering an intentional walk.
If the story were just about ordering an intentional walk, Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated and others outside of Bountiful wouldn’t have bothered this week to dissect Farley and Farr’s action, which took place in late June. But it so happens the weak hitter they wanted to set up for the last out of the championship game against, naturally, the Red Sox, was a 9-year-old brain cancer survivor.
Reports from the game have the fans booing, the pitcher — one of the league’s best — visibly shaken, and the child himself, Romney Oaks — who has a shunt in his head, and who, unlike major leaguers, requires human growth hormone to keep up his strength — crying almost before he got to the plate.
Now these coaches who ordered the intentional walk are going to be vilified more in the press than Hezbollah. I think there are more important things in life than having your pee-wee squad winning some hippie championship, but so what if the weaker hitter was a cancer survivor? Would this story become a nation-wide topic if this kid were just naturally not athletic? Fuck that. If you are going to put a kid like this behind your team’s best hitter, even at the 9-year-old level, then you run the risk of having some win-at-all-costs manager on the other team willing to take advantage of this situation. The only thing I would see “wrong” with this story would be if not allowing intentional walks was an “unwritten” rule or something in this league. If that was the case, then that manager who issued the intentional walk pulled a bitch move; otherwise, all is fair in baseball. If you want to complain that the opposing manager issued an intentional walk of a team’s best player to get to a weaker hitter in a crucial game situation involving grade-school kids, that’s fine. But don’t play up the “cancer” angle because that won’t score any points (not to mention runs) with me.
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