Forgotten Virtue: The Baseball Hero Nobody Knows

By |2024-02-14T18:57:33-06:00February 14th, 2024|Categories: Baseball, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays|

Gil Meche His career stats indicate that he was a mediocre baseball pitcher—perhaps the epitome of mediocrity: 84 wins; 83 losses; a 4.49 Earned Run Average; a Walks-plus-Hits-to-Innings-Pitched ratio of 1.42. Yet Gil Meche, who played for the Seattle Mariners and Kansas City Royals, was responsible for one of the most astounding, yet almost unnoticed, [...]

Should We End College Football?

By |2024-01-24T05:39:13-06:00January 23rd, 2024|Categories: Football, Sports|

The term “student-athlete” is at best inaccurate and at worst a fiction. Once upon a time college football was organized and run by and for students. Maybe it’s time to return to that by starting all over. Which institution of higher learning in America will one day become the University of Chicago of the twenty-first [...]

The Day Rick Monday Saved the American Flag

By |2023-06-13T18:07:21-05:00June 13th, 2023|Categories: American Republic, Baseball, Independence Day, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays|

On April 25, 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial celebrations, Chicago Cubs outfielder Rick Monday saved an American flag from being burned by two protestors who had trespassed onto the field during a game at Dodger Stadium. As the bottom of the fourth inning got underway, the protesters placed the flag in left-center field [...]

The Moral Decline of the Dodgers

By |2023-06-12T16:33:45-05:00June 12th, 2023|Categories: Baseball, Catholicism|

More than 75 years ago, Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey made history for the Brooklyn Dodgers by breaking baseball’s “color line." But today’s Los Angeles Dodgers are making a different kind of history by honoring men who put on nuns' habits in order to mock the Catholic Church. The devoutly Christian Robinson and Rickey must [...]

No Time for the Pastime

By |2023-03-29T18:48:47-05:00March 29th, 2023|Categories: Baseball, Catholicism, Christianity|

Baseball is beautiful, fun, and enjoyable. It can also help us learn how to enter into the present moment. Of course, one does not have to be a fan of baseball to enjoy life truly. But loving a sport such as baseball can help us to appreciate life as it comes to us in the present [...]

Baseball and the Cure of Souls

By |2023-03-29T18:50:43-05:00March 29th, 2023|Categories: Baseball, Culture, Paul Krause, Senior Contributors, Sports, Timeless Essays|

Baseball has an essence that mirrors the heavenly city and the precision of creation better than other sports. Its calmer nature also embodies that sense of tranquility which the restless heart seeks. The baseball season has arrived. America’s pastime sport returns, like Persephone from her bondage in Hades, to signal the return to life that [...]

“Field of Dreams”: Baseball, the Prodigal, & Paradise

By |2022-06-19T14:55:06-05:00May 26th, 2022|Categories: Baseball, Featured, Film, Imagination, Timeless Essays|

The film “Field of Dreams” beautifully portrays in a contemporary idiom the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but even more so, the grand cosmic drama to which that Parable points: that of Paradise lost and Paradise regained. In view of the beginning of baseball season, and as the father of two Little Leaguers, I thought [...]

The Republic of Baseball

By |2021-05-04T16:37:16-05:00May 4th, 2021|Categories: Baseball, Timeless Essays|

Our deepest norms of order can still be seen in operation on the diamond when they’ve been adulterated everywhere else. Baseball is our Utopia — not in assuring us of the victories we dream of, but in guaranteeing ideal conditions even of defeat. We are players or spectators of other sports, but citizens of baseball. [...]

Baseball Goes For Woke

By |2021-04-27T20:52:19-05:00April 6th, 2021|Categories: Baseball, Civil Society, Stephen M. Klugewicz|

In a sadly predictable development, Major League Baseball continues to go the way of the Woke, demonstrating a contempt for its audience and the players' and owners' narcissistic need for self-validation through virtue-signaling. This past weekend I tried listening to an Orioles game for the first time since swearing off baseball last year because of [...]

Let’s End the “Greatest of All Time” Talk

By |2021-03-15T09:12:35-05:00March 12th, 2021|Categories: Culture, Religion, Sports|

To believe that a certain athlete, musician, artist, political leader, or writer is not just “great” but “the greatest of all time” is to give undue weight to our time and to our own experience. It also unnecessarily forecloses our imaginative horizons that something or someone can indeed come along and surpass what we may [...]

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