The Greatest Game Ever Played

hy·per·bo·le

hīˈpərbəlē/

noun

exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.

synonyms:

exaggeration, overstatement, magnification, embroidery, embellishment

The best place to find hyperbole in this world is Facebook. We're all guilty of it. We eat a good steak or see a spider or celebrate a lost tooth, and it becomes the biggest event since The Eagles reunited for the Hell Freezes Over tour (and then toured like 6 more times). Often, we are the guilty party, with our gushing description of the events we just witnessed.

"OMG!!!!! Holly just got 4th place in Jump Rope For Heart in her class of 22 kids!!! #proudmama #olympics2020"

"I'm not sayin, I'm just sayin. I literally have THE BESTEST HUSBAND IN THE WORLD!! He bought me my favorite ice cream (Vanilla Bean!! YUM YUM!!) after my 11 hour kidney transplant surgery. AND I CAME HOME TO A CLEAN HOUSE!!!! I LOVE YOU BOO!!!!!!"

And sometimes, our parents and grandparents and drunk friends do the job for us.

"Feeling sad since my little pup has an achy tooth. Gotta go to the vet tomorrow. :("

      Sally Bickertooth and 41 others LIKE this

Sally Bickertooth: OMG sis, I am SOOOOO sorry. This just breaks my heart. You two are in my prayers!! Get better little snuggle bear!!! Txt me when you leave for the vet so I can say a prayer while you're driving to the vet!!!!!

On and on it goes like that on almost every page on the entire bloody website. It doesn't make me angry, but it gives me pause whenever I want to say something like I did in the title of this piece, because I'm probably just blowing smoke outta my ass like I do every time I like something and tell the world about it. BUT. 

I've had 12 hours to digest the AL Wildcard game at Kauffman Stadium last night, and I consider that enough time to make a bold statement and stand by it. That was the best baseball game any two teams ever played since Abner Doubleday invented the sport. 

You've probably heard all the story lines a million times already, regardless of whether you live here in KC or not. 1985. George Brett. Dick Howser. Frank White. Don Denkinger. CD's were invented. "No outs to go!" And the ensuing lifetime of banality, struggle, 100 loss seasons, bad management, absent ownership (still an issue) and generally apathy for baseball in this town. Good fans went to 5 games a year, 10 if their company or neighbor inherited season tickets. Then, on Dayton Moore's arrival, things started to change (and stay the same). We built the best farm system in baseball and promptly traded the best prospect in the sport and a solid #2 pitcher for James Shields and Wade Davis. The coin started spinning on that day; Dayton Moore called "heads" and we waited...

Last night, with Colon in scoring position and the best young catcher in baseball at the plate hacking like hell to advance him, the coin spun around one final and precariously slow time...and landed. When we exhaled it was heads up.

If you watched the game or talked to another human being today, you know how the game went. What you probably don't know unless you live here (or root from Arizona) is how it felt. I grew up in Wyoming, long before the Rockies existed, and my hometown was so far from any MLB team that the Sports Editor at the paper would take a poll (you had to mail in your vote) to decide which team to cover as "our" team each season. Sometimes it was the Cardinals, sometimes the Yankees, and once I recall Seattle as the victor. Someone may correct me on all of this, but my point is that "we" (people born there with no immediate association or family member in the Majors) had to try to feel good about something without seeing it very often or being fully vested. That sucked. I cheered for the Yankees on and off as a bandwagon idiot (even bail-bribed myself out of a Mexican holding cell with a Yankees hat in 1990). But I moved to KC in 1994, and for the last 20 years, I've metamorphosed into a die hard, blue blooded (literally had my blood dyed blue) fan of the Royals. After 20 years of doing anything, you automatically get into the club. I'm also, by that logic, a beer.

My two boys are Royals fans by birth, and they've only ever known heartache, boredom and grainy stock footage of Brett getting mobbed and champagne bathed to build their feelings about this team. Until last night, that is.

We watched together and we gave up after the 7-3 lead looked like too much to overcome. We left the watch party and retreated to our house to get ready for school, an 8-8 Chiefs season and 6 months of cursing Ned Yost and his devilish desire to over-manage at the most inopportune times. But we never stopped watching. Then we got glued and we got a run across and it became the most electrifying 120 minutes of my sports life, and Salvy swung at a pitch that wasn't in the zone (it might not have been in the zone if the zone was an Auto Zone) and Colon crossed the plate and we hugged and laughed and I had tears on my face. Over a stinking baseball game.

The Royals might play 11 more games and sweep their way into a second World Championship. They might go to Anaheim and lose two then fly to MCI and choke away more glory at The K in front of the very people they just gave life back to last night. I don't care either way, and I mean it. I WANT them to win 11 more, don't get me wrong. And I'm not setting the bar at, "well we had a great run and the WILDCARD GAME WAS WORTH IT AND NOW WE'RE HAPPY AGAIN FOR 29 MORE YEARS!!!" Whatever they do, they will never be able to do what they did last night. In one game, they tore off the bandage on the oldest wound in professional sports. No other major sport has a city with a longer post season drought, and it would be difficult to repeat it if you tried. For today, for right now, the slate is clean.

Do you know what has happened in the world since the last time the Royals won a playoff game?

Well, I drank a pot of coffee and wrote a blog. It rained a little. Oh, and they fueled a jet and flew the team to L.A.

HEADS!

The 20-ounce Wolf Spider in the Room

I've been doing a lot of edgy (for me) things lately.

I'm generally the kind of guy that takes the exact same number of steps from bed to shower, shower to coffee pot, pot to car, car to office, and so on until my head explodes like a water balloon on a stove top. I don't mind routine, but once I shake it I realize the importance of seeing things from a different view. Our minds have a rigid tendency to conform to the known. We like to feel comfort, yearn to feel safe and it gives us great joy to be in control of our surroundings, feelings and vision. It starts from the first moment you were swaddled in your mother's arms and your heart rhythms still matched.

To get some edge back, I'm trying to drive a different way home from work, if only by a block, every single day. (So edgy you could just faint, right?)

You remember "Fear Factor"? The show pitted normal people (and sometimes B list celebrities) in a competition to take on physical challenges for glory and cash. Thing is, they really weren't all that physical to begin with. As the title of show implies, the challenges were almost always mental. I know I don't want to eat a 20-ounce Wolf Spider on my own time (and for free), but here I am with a bunch of strangers watching me do it. I'm confident this network has gone to great lengths to ensure that Wolf Spiders aren't in any way poisonous (lest a contestant die on National TV) and that its really no different than a sandwich.  I can see the $50,000 on the table over there, but I can't shake the notion that maybe, just maybe, this is the King Wolf Spider no scientist has ever seen and he's positively loaded with poison and this will become a Faces of Death movie on You Tube in 5 minutes.

It's not that I can't physically do it, it's that I'm mentally not WILLING to accept the challenge because I never physically have done it and survived. But after one Wolf Spider and seeing my checking account balance grow by the grand prize amount, I bet I could eat a Wolf Spider every day (provided the prize would repeat itself). No longer a fear...no longer a factor.

So the edgy thing I've been doing is reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, and applying some of his logic to my own thought concerning world events of today. Edgy in the sense that I was raised Roman Catholic and my kids attend really terrific Catholic and Jesuit schools and my wonderful Mom is the single most devoted and loving Christian woman I've ever met. Edgy in the sense that I have taken a different "route to work".

Dawkins is a noted atheist and an outspoken one at that, and I'm not writing to inflame anybody or to praise or quote him- or to state any particular fact about myself- other than to mention that, in reading and pondering some of the ideas presented to my brain that had been previously on the self-imposed "off limits list" I grew up with and around, it sparked me to write.

I'll try to keep this subject condensed, and if you already stopped reading I don't blame you, but here it is:

Michael Sam/Jason Collins/Arizona/Kansas/Uganda/Russia/Etc.

I am not asking that you try this exercise, I am simply telling you that I tried it. I promise you won't die if you close your eyes and reach into the cage with me. The prize if you can achieve this task is totally up to you, it's not mine to give. Oh you WANT to try it?

Ok, close your eyes tight. We are going back in time now to the day of your birth.

You are thirty seconds old. Your mother is cradling you in her arms, feeding and swaddling you.
Stop there.

We haven't yet been to the bris or the baptismal font and we never hit a synagogue or mosque. Stop there, at that moment when your mother first held you. That love that she felt right then, for you alone, unimpeded by any outside influence, was the truest form of love- more powerful than a thrashing atom bomb, tomahawk slam dunk, passionate pulpit-pounding sermon all packaged in a blazing guitar solo. Anything else you "learned" or were "taught" about love from then until now- about law and about right and wrong- were just watered down versions of true and pure love (or hatred), passed on from eons of error-prone human beings.

Keep your eyes closed.

Did she whisper anything in that first breath into your face about hell, damnation, bigotry or sin? She didn't, did she? Of course not. Because in the instance of pure and unalloyed love, there is no such thing. It cannot exist-this love- with any hint of hate or bigotry or fear. As soon as that part rolls in, it's just your path, your future routine. They begin to shape you, for better or worse, in their own image. It's out of love, quite literally and (sometimes) quite sadly.

Keep your eyes closed.

Now it's been a year. You've been to the bris or the baptismal font or the mosque. Does she still love you? Of course. Has it been reinforced by a belief system? In some indelible way, you must admit that it has, regardless of which outside influence you've been living in. That love is never pure like that again. It has boundaries and structure. Notice I am not singling out Christianity or Wicca or the Mosque or Hinduism or Scientology. It's earth, and it's huge and people are...well, strange and imperfect.

But if you could reproduce that instant post-birth feeling you only once had- bottle it and take a shot of it and and re-experience it again, how would it feel to immediately turn on your television in that state of mind and see a story about the Arizona legislature passing a bill that would allow for the discriminatory treatment of hundreds of thousands of people, once babies born into perfect circles of trust and love, now adults and no different than they ever were, except for through the eyes of...

God?

Surely not. Surely this is human bigotry. Surely the same God who gave a mother the love and energy to stare into her son's eyes and make that initial connection, surely that God hasn't also just coerced the Arizona legislature to give her the legal right to refuse service to him in the diner where she works because he's gay. Surely that God didn't just persuade the President of his own country to make it illegal and punishable by life in prison for a baby girl to be gay and to be born in Uganda. No way, right?

Hell. No. That hatred and bigotry is all yours and you are free to get rid of it any time you like.

Saying this out loud is me eating my giant Wolf Spider. My account balances are growing in empathy, respect and happiness- for myself and for all other imperfect humans.

You can open your eyes now.