June 3, 2004
Game
In baseball, a perfect game is a complete game in which the pitcher does not hit any batter with the ball and does not allow any hits, walks, or errors. A no-hitter is a nine-inning complete game in which a pitcher does not allow a hit to the opposing team. The opposition can have base runners through fielding errors or walks. I suppose this means that a pitcher could pitch a no-hitter and yet lose it by walked-in runs or runs on errors.
Randy Johnson of the Arizona Diamondbacks recently pitched a perfect game. He is the oldest pitcher ever to do that. If he or anybody else did that often enough, might we not soon hear charges that baseball was being ruined and was no longer a game, but had become a sideshow?*
Life remains a game, perhaps because of and thanks to original sin and to the covering admonition to be perfect like God is perfect. Of course, gospel perfect suggests more to mean what you say and follow through with what you mean rather than goody-two-shoes-ism. When we get that straight, we can attend more to the tasks at hand.
Meanwhile, we parsons can relish Peter Arno’s classic drawing of two young clerics enjoying a brandy and a cigar in their walnut-walled library where he has the one say to the other, “Do you ever wonder where we’d be if there were no sin?”
(* cf John Dominic Crossan on game and sport in “The Dark Interval,” Argus, 1975, pp 15-18)