Thoughts on an Incident

Every time something like the most recent Ray Rice thing, or the countless examples before that, comes up, I have to question what I choose to do with my life. I choose to cover sports, a culture that endorses victim blaming, a culture that says that smoking pot deserves more punishment than raping someone, a culture that constantly finds ways to defy the amount of social progress and change seen in a lot of the world around us. 

Do I, by covering it, add my signature? Do I, in my silence because I find no words to speak, sign off on this? Am I tarred with the same brush as the legion of Facebook commenters who see nothing wrong with how their heroes act off the field when I stop typing because I am too tired to add relevant discussion? 

As a woman, I am outraged. As a human being, I am horrified. Making the victim of an assault…apologize? Apologize for what? For existing? For trusting someone enough to marry them? For "her role in this," her role being knocked out by her husband? How is this possible? How is this allowable? 

Maybe "making" isn't the correct word. Maybe "encouraging." Maybe "coercing." Maybe simply "allowing." Maybe it's even love, a love as I don't know it, as she married him after the abuse occurred. Maybe it's something I can't understand that makes her feel like she needs to apologize, not for him, but for herself. 

Maybe I'm too sensitive. Maybe I'm not allowing for time or place or circumstance, because God knows I don't know what it's like to be a professional athlete. Perhaps, in condemning the culture, I'm offending the good, upstanding, excellent human beings I know exist within it. That's what happens, though, when such atrocities like that are allowed to exist. 

I just know that there are fewer things that hurt more than being told through actions yet again that if anything were to happen to me while I was doing my job as a sportswriter, it would be my fault because I allowed myself to exist within the sacred sphere of sports. 

Prose on the Subject of a Joseph Gallo Homer.

I tend to do my best to stay away from the flowery prose of my youthful fictions, especially in the spotlit world of baseball. Turns of speech-like phrase have their place, but not when attempting to describe the future proclivities of a middle reliever to the world, especially when one is not paid by the word, or even by the average length of words one uses.

There are some occurrences, however, that call for every bit of flamboyant language I still have left in my soul. Watching a 20-year-old hit a baseball 450 and more feet may not seem, to the average reader, like one of those occasions, but it so very is.

To watch Joey Gallo hit a baseball out of a park is to watch ever-improving poetry in motion. It is to watch controlled violence, awareness, and sheer gut-wrenching power put into action, with the result of that action being a dent on a scoreboard possibly thought un-dentable. It is to put aside the rational thought, and think with the same part of the brain that imagines "Mitch Moreland Left-Handed Relief Pitcher," to think "Joey Gallo in Arlington 2015."

It is giggle-inducing. It is nearly not-safe-for-work. It is incredibly amusing. It is jaw-droppingly marvelous. It is all and none of those things, because with Gallo, it is also nearly routine.


[HR: Gallo 2 (12, 2nd inning off Ortiz, 0 on, 0 out; 8th inning off Hagan, S, 0 on, 0 out).]