Last night the Rangers and Cardinals played one of the most astonishing World Series games ever. People seem to be praising it as one of the best games ever, which I disagree with. Of course this may be because sports writers tend to believe that the game that they are assigned is always The Greatest Game of All Time! The last 5 innings or so of last nights games were amazing with the lead flip flopping and the Cards coming so close to elimination, but the first 6 innings were sloppy and badly played. We need to calm down a little bit and realize that, as a whole, that game can't even come close to game 7 of 1991 for example. I digress, back to last night. Josh Hamilton hit a potential Series winning two run home run in the top of the 10th inning. I was surprised that he was able to do it. He had been on a huge homerless drought, is playing with an injury, and he had been having a pretty lousy Series overall. You know who wasn't surprised? Hamilton. He knew he was going to hit a home run the entire time. How did he know this? It wasn't because he was supremely confident in his skills, it was because God told him he was going to do it.
Few things in this world piss me off as much as when I hear an athlete say that God is the reason they hit a home run, made a sack or won a curling bonspiel. I understand that faith is very important to many people and I'm not trying to attack said faith, what I'm saying is that God doesn't care about sports. There are 7 billion people in this world, that's a heck of a lot of sporting events for God to pay attention to. I'm an only child and my parents had a hard time making it to my little league games. It seems amazingly narcissistic to think that God cared so much about you that he gave the ball a little extra push on it's way out of the stadium, and more so that he did so to spite everyone on the other team. Baseball isn't played in a vacuum, it's played by two teams against each other. If God helps a player achieve something it means that he is also actively making another player fail. So is it that God is a Hamilton fan or does he have some sort of grudge against Jason Motte? And if He wanted Hamilton to hit a home run and succeed why did he still let the Cardinals win? Oh, I know why, because God had nothing to do with it.
The thing that made what Hamilton said slightly different than other athletes is that he said that God told him he would hit a home run. Usually athletes just praise God and thank him, Hamilton said that he had an actual conversation with God guaranteeing his homer. This made me wonder a couple of things. First, what would have happened if Hamilton didn't hit a homer? I'm sure that he would have never mentioned anything to the press, no one ever talks about how God made them hang a curveball after giving up a walk off, but would it shake his faith? Usually if God tells you something you assume that he isn't lying, so if that ball only traveled 399 feet for a very loud out would Hamilton have become an atheist? Secondly, what if God had told Hamilton he would go 0-5 with a couple of errors and cost his team the game. What's Hamilton to do in that situation? Do you go up to the manager and tell him you need the day off? Lastly, if God decides to actually affect the outcome of sporting events why isn't his fandom more evident? I guess you could make the argument that he must be a Yankee fan because they have won the most championships but to me that is just proof that the devil has more pull over sporting events. Sports fans by nature are selfish. Every year our team doesn't win is a failure. Thus I would think if God was a sports fan that he would definitely have a favorite team and they would win (almost) every single year. Unless of course God is one of those sports fans who doesn't have a favorite team and just likes players, which means that God is a horrible sports fan who nobody likes.
I realize that I'm taking a pretty flippant tone while talking about God here but it's not like I'm talking about life and death or morals, I'm talking about sports. Recreation. Every day roughly 35,967 more important things will happen in your life than a sporting event. I would especially think that a person who has gone through all of the horrible things that Josh Hamilton has would have a little perspective and realize how insignificant 1 at bat in a fairly important baseball game is given the grand scheme of things.
The only thing we can really be sure of is that God is most definitely not a Cubs fan.
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