Rico Petrocelli is one of the most popular players in Boston
Red Sox history. He had a 12-year major league career, all with Boston, and was
the shortstop for the Red Sox legendary “Impossible Dream” season in 1967 –
taking the St. Louis Cardinals to seven games in the World Series.
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| Rico Petrocelli, like most players from his era, had a simple approach to hitting a baseball. |
Today, Petrocelli co-hosts the weekly radio show “Remember
When” with Ed Randall on MLB Radio. The show is basically a couple of
old-timers talking about old times with mostly old-time players and managers. It’s
no surprise the show’s tone is heavily tilted toward “remembering when.”
One of the more frequent topics is the influence of
sabermetrics on the modern game – front office mathematicians quantifying
performance in more than two dozen categories to determine a player’s value and
role. Instead of baseball coaches and scouts looking at batting average,
fielding percentage, or earned run average to determine if a player is any
good, numbers crunchers pour over BAPIP, OPS, DIPS, WAR(P), and Pythagorean
expectation.
Players, of course, have adapted to this new assessment, and
that’s changed the game. For instance, since sabermetrics places a high value
on home runs, strike-outs are way up as players swing for the fences. Instead
of trying to simply make contact, they’re thinking about bat speed, launch
angle, and exit velocity. This led Randall to ask Petrocelli on one recent show
to describe his approach when he was hitting.
“What approach?” Petrocelli answered. “I get in the box,
make a quick sign of the cross, and try to hit the ball!”
It doesn’t get much simpler than that. Even though the
numbers crunchers are able to cook an alphabet soup of acronyms, there’s still
no escaping the simplistic “See ball, hit ball.”
This may be a good time of year to transfer that lesson of
simplicity to our lives. We’re on the cusp of what is now the Christmas season
– it used to be called Advent – when life gets crazy. On top of everything else
in our lives, we now face buying presents and planning parties, trimming trees
and making travel arrangements, and cooking and baking for armies of family and
friends. Before we know it, it’s Christmas night and we’re collapsed on the
couch – all before we’ve really had a chance to prepare ourselves spiritually
for the birth of our Lord.
And while we’re at it, this is a perfect time to simplify
God, too. We’re all aware the Church has many requirements we’re supposed to
follow. But most can be summarized in the one-sentence Golden Rule: “Do unto
others as you would have others do unto you.” It’s not brain surgery. God loves
us; we just need to love him back by the way we treat others. That’s about as
simple as “See ball, hit ball.”
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