OOOOoooooffffff!!!!

WARNING!!! The following blog contains disturbing images that may offend the sensibilities of many female readers, and cause actual physical pain to many male readers. Proceed with caution.

During my first week back in the salt mines, the one saving grace in an otherwise horrendous week has been the baseball playoffs. So far, four games have been played. The two wild card affairs were truly wild, and the openers of the division series last night were both great fun. Unlike another famous American sport, I have been able to watch each game without having any clue as to the politics of a single player. Our National Anthem was performed before each game without incident. It was quite refreshing. But, this blog is not about political protest. It's not even about baseball. It's about one isolated image from one of the games that I found...priceless.

It was the fourth inning of the wildcard game between the New York Yankees and the Minnesota Twins. On the hill for the Yanks was reliever, David Robertson, who throws a baseball 100 miles per hour with great movement. He is not only hard to hit, but hard to catch. On one particular pitch, Mr. Robertson uncorked a wicked 98 mph sinking fastball towards the plate. Yankee catcher, Gary Sanchez was about to catch it when the hitter swung wildly, desperately trying to catch up with the pitch, but only catching a tiny piece of the ball. This is the nightmare of anyone who has ever played catcher in baseball...the dreaded foul tip. Only, when the foul tip in question is slight...and comes against a 98 mph pitch, this happens:

Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you...this particular foul tip ended up in a terrible place. On national television, played live and many nauseating times on super slow motion, Gary Sanchez took a direct hit in the old family jewels. All across America, in living rooms great and small, across a broadly diverse audience of both liberals and conservatives, rednecks and metro-sexuals, gays and straights, meat eaters and vegetarians, men from every imaginable background let out a collective groan of sympathetic agony. Suddenly, even avowed Yankee-haters like me, put all of the vitriol aside for a few agonizing moments of commiseration with this suffering brother. Sanchez went down in a heap, like a sack of potatoes. Grandfathers all across the country turned to their sons and grandsons whispering, Boys, this is why you wear a cup.

Of course, the one man in America who had the best view of what happened was the guy who threw the pitch, David Robertson. His reaction, caught on camera for all the world to see was....priceless:

Exactly!!! Here's a big league pitcher, performing in a pressure packed game on national television, who suddenly isn't thinking about himself or even his team. He's only thinking about one thing, ladies and gentlemen...and it isn't his next contract!

      

To the everlasting credit of Mr. Sanchez, he remained in the game, as did Mr. Robertson, to the great relief of men all across the fruited plain. Perhaps there's a greater lesson to be learned from this unfortunate incident. Perhaps it's possible, after all, for men to put aside their considerable differences and unite around a common theme greater than ourselves. Maybe it's possible for men and women to lay down the things that divide us long enough to unite in compassionate empathy for the excruciating suffering of a fellow human being brought low by a foul tip. If we can do that, maybe we can eventually figure out how to get along outside of the ball park.