I am not a frequent user of Twitter, and don’t really know how it works. I have discerned, however, that when you click on a Twitter link from your email, it sends you the thing you clicked on, and then a bunch of other stuff sort of related to it .
Anyway, the other day I clicked innocently on something and up came a long list of tweets from: GoodFaith media, West Coast League, Jamie Johnson, Do-Hyung Park (Seattle Mariners news)… these four came up repeatedly until #10 (David French) broke the ice. Then back to Jamie Johnson and Good Faith Media, then — other stuff, including a lot of politics. A lot of it was Jamie Johnson, and none of it was any of the rest of you.
What’s the matter with the rest of you? Why aren’t your tweets showing up unbidden in my twitter feed? Or are all of you just tweeting on the 29 days of the month I don’t check my twitter feed?
Anyway — one of the Gems from Jamie (TM) I found among the pile Twitter dropped at my feel was this:
“This is Rafael Devers’ world and we are just guests. Or he is an alien with extraterrestrial power. Either way, good grief!!”
I cannot tell when Jamie sent this. Almost none of the tweets in the list are dated. The last one on the list, way down from the Rafael Devers paean, was dated March 26. (From Johan Maurer. Come ON, EFLers! Johan Maurer might not even be a baseball fan, and I still get more tweets from him than from 9 of you combined.)
I cannot tell which glorious feat Devers had just done to elicit Jamie’s awestruck response. But what I can discern is very troubling: our campus pastor has an alarming view of cosmology. Someone should tell President Baker before more damage is done!
Jamie cannot decide whether this world belongs entirely to Rafael Devers. “It might!”, he thinks. “God might have made the entire universe just for Rafael Devers. The rest of us are accessories.”
Now this view might still leave room for a … stunted view of Christianity. Maybe Jesus died only for Devers’ sins. Jamie’s speculation that the world is Rafael Devers’ means God so loved the world that he sent his only Son to die for Rafael Devers, mostly. (Maybe the rest of us aren’t left out. Maybe we can get in on Raffy’s ticket, so to speak, sneak in while God isn’t looking. Or get the entry code from him.)
OR, Jamie says, maybe Rafael Devers is a superior extraterrestrial being.
This has the virtue of not being devastating to the Gospel, and re-elevates the rest of humanity back into essential equality, at least with other Earthlings. Devers is from another planet, a superior being to us mere humans. But, apparently, not the Supreme Being. That’s still God in Jamie’s cosmology… I hope.
The cosmologic logic here is still difficult. Apart from pinning down whether, or how much, Devers is a little higher than humanity, we have some practical issues. How did Devers get here? Baseball Reference lists him as being born in Sanchez, Dominican Republic in October 1996. Presumably they’ve seen his birth certificate, but I’ve heard people argue those things are easily faked.
Is what we see Rafael’s real body? Or is he some ugly greenish-purple gooky thing occupying a human body?
And, really, what are the odds they play baseball on other planets? They don’t even play baseball on most of THIS planet. I’m quite willing to believe they play soccer on almost all the other planets, it’s so obvious and easy to set up. Probably all the same rules, too. It just about has to be the way it is. Or if they don’t have feet, they just play rugby instead.
But baseball isn’t obvious. The mind has to twist and bend several times to go from a ball over here and stick over there to get to baseball. Probably most soccer-playing planets, if they have trees or other sources of sticks, would discover field hockey or perhaps lacrosse. Native Americans discovered lacrosse; that’s the sensible thing to discover if you want a ball-and-stick game. Or golf — which the native Scots discovered. But why complicate these simple games by having a person hit a ball and then run around in circles? If you want to hit a ball and run, then make golf a racing game. First to hit his ball from the tee into the hole wins! Number of strokes would be a tie breaker. Or even the other way around — speed from tee to green to break ties in the number of strokes. A much simpler concept than baseball.
That would be a lot simpler to invent with a stick and a ball than baseball was. An extraterrestrial who was otherworldly at speed golf would be a lot more probable than an extraterrestrial baseball beast.
Perhaps an intervention is in order for our friend and campus pastor Jamie.
First we can assure him that Devers is a normal human being, not an extraterrestrial, nor the One Person in a solipsist universe. But then we have to offer Jamie some other explanation, something that accounts for Devers’ outstanding feats consistent with a more accurate view of the Cosmos.
How about we say this:
“Jamie, Rafael Devers is great, but he has no special divinity, no higher humanity, no creepy alienity. It’s his Wolverinity that makes him so good.”
I think he’ll buy that, the souls of our college students will be safer, and the rest of his life will be happier and more productive for it. It would make a great present for yesterday’s birthday boy.
Notes:
Pittsburgh: Oneil Cruz had his Allegheny (and Pirate) debut Monday. Pittsburgh fans of both local teams and thrilled: he effortlessly throws 96 mph across the diamond, and drove in three runs with a double in his debut game.
Peshastin: The Cubs, facing off against the Pears this week, scored 2 runs and surrendered 19 Monday and Tuesday to ease the Pears’ path to a win. And Jack Flaherty pitched his first 3 innings of the season. They weren’t superstar innings (2 earned runs), but getting the ace back has to feel good for Pear fans the world over. As does Cal Raleigh getting hot: .333, .500, .750 this week, including two doubles, a homer, three walks, and a hbp.
Portland: The Nationals are not cooperating this week, scoring 23 and allowing only 18 runs. That eats into the value of the Rosebuds’ very strong week: scoring 31.3 and allowing 18.2 for a .747 raw winning percentage, behind the 1.000+ OPSes of Nolan Gorman (1.400), Tyler O’Neil (1.372) and Ryan Jeffers (1.111). The Nats cut the ‘Buds winning percentage to a mere .644 — not enough to match the Pears’ Cubs-assisted .767, and leaving Portland back in 10th place.
Bellingham: The Cascades face the Padres this week, which had to be intimidating. But through Sunday, the Padres were only playing at a .186 raw winning percentage this week. The last two days have been better — San Diego is up to .324. Anthony DeSclafani came off the IL, but only lasted 3 innings at the cost of 5 earned runs, leaving the team ERA at a sub-replacement 6.22. But the Cascade offense is humming along a 5.6 rc/g, led by Corey Seager’s .385, .500, .923 batting line, giving the C’s a raw winning percentage of .401 which adjusts to .583.
Kaline: The Drive got 19 innings from starters JT Brubaker, Max Fried, and Jose Urquidy at the cost of only 2 earned runs. And the offense, mired at a sub-replacement 2.4 rc/g through Sunday, revived to bring production up to a much-better-but-still-too-little 3.7 rc/g, thanks largely to Jesse Winker’s 2 for 4 with a double, a homer and a walk yesterday, more than matched by Patrick Wisdom’s 2 fo 3 with a homer and a walk. However, all that was seriously blunted by the uncharacteristically feisty Royals, who outscored their foes 18 – 13 Monday and Tuesday.
Canberra: The Mets — Canberra’s matchup this week — treaded water these last two days, scoring 8 – 8. Reid Detmers’ 5 er in 5 ip threatened to make the Kangaroos’ .323 raw winning percentage even worse — but the rest of the team responded, adding 5 more scoreless innings, and exploding at the plate for a team .355, .474, .694 line Monday and Tuesday. Isaac Paredes was incandescent, with 3 homers, a single, and a hbp in 8 trips to the plate. Julio Rodriguez nearly matched him with 3 for 4 and a homer. That brought the ‘Roos raw winning percentage all the way up to .684 (.621 adjusted).
Flint Hill: Like the Mets, the Giants coasted Monday and Tuesday, their 13 – 12 combined score cutting their weekly winning percentage from .640 to .586. Unfortunately, the Tornados also coasted, their pitchers’ goo efforts Monday and Tuesday (10 ip, 4 er, 3.37 ERA) offset buy their hitters’ weak work (.182, .250, .258). Debutant Michael Harris II was the offensive bright spot: 4 for 6 with a triple and a hit by pitch or a 1.714 OPS.
Haviland: The Oakland A’s lost 2 – 8 to the Mariners last night, lowering their raw winning percentage to just .174. So the door is wide open for the Dragons to undo some of the disadvantage they’ve accumulated from our head-to-hear system. Unfortunately, poor outings by Jon Heasley (5 ip, 4 er) and especially Spencer Strider (3.7 ip, 6 er) undid good work by other pitchers to leave the Dragons’ team ERA virtually unchanged at 6.83 (up from 6.81, if I remember correctly). The hitters did better, raising the team’s 5.1 rc/g to 5.5, led by the inspirational Daniel Vogelbach’s 4 for 6 with 2 doubles and 3 walks (1.778 OPS).
…
I’m out of time. Really — I have to go install shower heads at my in-laws’ house, which is up for sale. You can look at the standings and see what happened: the Wolverines decisively collapsed all the way to third place, and the Balk and the Seraphim are gleefully running away with the lead. Not even the great, perhaps superhuman Rafael Devers could keep it from happening.