Today, as we wash off yesterday’s ashes, we stand six weeks away from Easter. The long winter of sin is thawing; a new day is dawning as the Resurrection approaches. Easter and springtime seem to go together, and with the approach of spring comes yet another reason for hope—Opening Day.
While Opening Day may bring feelings of bright optimism (it is, after all, the only day when every team is in first place!), baseball fans do well to recall a dark cloud that does not appear to be going away any time soon. During the long offseason, just before the darkest day of the year, Major League Baseball finalized an elbow injury report that had some shocking conclusions. The report, prompted by a dramatic increase of elbow injuries to pitchers, concludes that “pitchers are willing to train in a manner that exposes themselves to injury because that style of pitching is economically rewarded, both for the league’s best players and for players trying to establish themselves.”
Pitchers are literally destroying their elbows in order to get noticed and paid. They do this because of the financial structures of Major League Baseball—the better players, naturally, earn bigger paychecks. They do whatever it takes to get paid, even if it means harming their elbows. This problem seems to have infected all levels of baseball; the report notes that “in amateur baseball, younger pitchers have similarly adopted the pursuit of velocity, ‘stuff,’ and a max-effort style of pitching and training, even though these practices may be inappropriate at such young ages.” Kids in Little League are pushing their elbows beyond what is healthy with the hope of one day making it big.
This problem is not limited to elbows or baseball. This is just one more symptom of the pervasive “throwaway culture” that has infected our culture at large, and which Pope Francis is well known for condemning:
The culture of relativism is the same disorder which drives one person to take advantage of another, to treat others as mere objects . . . . Is it not the same relativistic logic which justifies buying the organs of the poor for resale or use in experimentation, or eliminating children because they are not what their parents wanted? This same “use and throw away” logic generates so much waste, because of the disordered desire to consume more than what is really necessary. (Laudato Si’, 123)
Interestingly, the Holy Father identifies relativism as a cause of our throwaway culture. When we get to define what is right and wrong, there is nothing “unnatural” anymore, because whatever we say, goes. Thus we can sacrifice anything for the sake of whatever we want—we set the rules.
This attitude is wrong and destroys more than just elbows. It rubs against the very fabric of our being and ultimately harms us as we desperately attempt to satisfy every selfish desire. While baseball officials may rightly look for solutions to solve the issue of throwaway elbows, will we look for the solution to our selfishness?
The only solution is to fix our hearts on Christ. If we do that, our hope will last much longer than that of fans of losing teams. It will last through our lifetime of Lent here on earth and lead us to the happiness awaiting us in the eternal Easter.
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Photo by Jose Francisco Morales on Unsplash
