The Pecan Park Eagle

Part One of "Persistence of Time" Series by Salvador Dali.

As one born on the last day of 1937, somehow loving baseball biogenetically, I have enjoyed figuring batting averages since about the time of my tenth birthday on December 31, 1947. Hitting double digits on the age-in-years chart is big for all of us in this culture, but my fascination with it crossed over and quickly mixed into my new interest in keeping up with batting averages of players on my first favorite team, the 1947 Houston Buffs.

The problem on my tenth birthday was simple too. The 1947 baseball season had been over for three months by the time my birthday arrived and the need to do any more figuring on the Houston Buffs was complete. Their seasonal batting average were now set in stone forever, with no need for any further calculations until a fellow named Bill James and his SABR followers would come along many years later and invent other mathematical tricks to perform on measurable baseball deeds.

That being said, the ten-year old mind can be a playful calculating thing. Mine had quickly learned from the Houston Post and The Sporting News that “batting averages” were simply a percentile statement of how often batters racked up clean official “hits” in the usually larger number of “official times at bat” that each man had come to bat in the season. The only was for the enumerating figure (hits) and the denominating figure (official “tab”) to be equal was for a batter to get a hit in every single time at bat on the season and it never took long for more than a few put outs to distance the player’s hit totals from his times at bat totals.

I learned from batting averages that the very best offensive performers in baseball only succeeded in a little more than three times out of every ten official times at bat – and that for most players, succeeding at some percentage less than three times out of every ten official trips to the plate would be good enough for most of them to keep their jobs at some level of professional baseball play.

Figuring batting averages became my earliest remembered obsession. I once got sent to the principal’s office for figuring batting averages in class when we were supposed to be working on an exercise that would teach us how to do division. When I tried to point out to the nun who was my teacher that I was already doing division, she simply told me that I wasn’t supposed to be doing anything like batting averages for at least two more years. That’s when she also decided that my comment to her was an “impudent questioning of her authority” and sent me to the principal – where the only thing that happened was that I was forced to sit and do nothing for the rest of our math period that day.

At some risk, I went back to figuring batting averages in class once I regained access to pencil and paper, but I did cool it for the rest of that day that Sister Marian sent me to Sister Immaculata’s office. It’s the nature of obsession. Nobody scolds you into change.

Batting averages also flew in the face of some other teachings we were getting in parochial school. It bothered me, for example,  that we were being told by the nuns that we needed to strive for perfection in our efforts to walk in the path of Jesus Christ. Yet, I also knew that the greatest percentage hitter in baseball, Ty Cobb, only batted .367 for his long career in the big leagues – and he was only competing against other human beings. – How well could we really expect to carry out the goal of the nuns. To have a life-emulation average in the .900s, trying to copy the Son of God, seemed a little on the high, off-the-chart side.

In time, I just learned that my best shot was going to be to try to be the best person I could be, try to learn from my mistakes, try to do no harm, and try to give of myself to others, wherever possible, for the greater good. I’ve never tried to put any of that settlement style to a batting average. I just try to live it, however imperfectly it unfolds.

The batting average figuring and way of thinking does survive in me to age 74, however. It’s not lost on me that in 2011, I have lived through 74 of the 235 years that have passed since 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence. That works out to a percentage of .315. I have been alive for 31.5% of this beautiful country’s history.

If I live another ten years to 2021, I will have jumped it up to .343 or 34.3% of the time. If I die tomorrow, my average living participation in the history of America will drop to .302 by the year 2021. Nobody bats .300 in this league for long.

Hmmm. In the League of Life in America, yes, it’s true. Nobody bats .300 forever. In light of that fact, it’s best we just keep that certainty in mind and simply live each dawn that comes along and finds us still breathing – and live it as well as we are able.

Happy New Year, Everybody! May you each find the beautiful Here and Now in Life – one day at a time, from moment to moment, from here to forever.

Tags: a new year reflection, batting averages

This entry was posted on December 31, 2011 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.