An All-Star Memory

By all appearances, it was just another rather meaningless game of little league baseball in the little farm town of Arcadia, Kansas. I was 12 years old, on a team my father coached. We’d gone to the championship game the year before in the 11-13 year old league, but the bulk of that winning team had moved up to high school ball, and the remnants left behind made for a fairly mediocre team. So much so, that I was forced to do a lot of the team’s pitching, though it wasn’t my forte by any means.

I started pitching the last game of the season, a season that saw us win four or five games at best. I’d shared pitching duties with another kid all year. We had a third boy, Kent, who was 13, and pitched in a pinch. Kent loved to pitch, but was really was better suited for the outfield.

Something came over my pitching skills that night that was unexplainable. My usual wildness off the mound turned into pinpoint control. My fastball was a little faster, and the curve balls we weren’t supposed to be throwing at that tender age were actually breaking. Seemingly, the spirit of Cy Young had overcome me and I became unhittable...literally.

We played six inning games in those days, and as I walked off the mound at the end of the fifth inning, there was a buzz going about the ballpark...the visiting pitcher’s throwing a no-hitter! I hadn’t allowed a single hit all game and with only three outs to go, the pitching gem was in sight...

As I sat fidgeting in the dugout, my father came up to me on the bench and put his arm around me. I figured he was just going to encourage me, tell me not to be nervous, just keep doing what I’m doing, etc. Instead, he told me something that made a 40 year impression on my life...

Proverbs 10:9 says

Whoever walks in integrity walks securely,
but whoever takes crooked paths will be found out.

Integrity may seem like a dying art these days. We’ve come to live in a world full of mistrust, largely due to integrity’s fading presence. I wrote last week about someone stealing ice water I’d set out for the garbage collectors on a scorching hot day. Jesus said it best when he instructed:

But let your word ‘yes’ be ‘yes,’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no.’ Anything

more than this is from the evil one.  Matthew  5:37

Be honest, upright, and a person of your word...

...Dad started out with "Hey, ol’ bud." Whenever he had something important to say, it seemed like dad used that phrase..."Hey, ol’ bud. You’ve pitched a heckuva game tonight. But I gotta let Kent pitch this last inning. It’s his last game in this league, and I promised him I’d let him pitch a little tonight. He’ll probably never get to pitch in high school ball, so I gotta let him pitch tonight..."

Nobody probably would have remembered that little league no hitter I might have finished that night, but me. No one but me remembers that the first batter Kent faced hit a clean base hit up the middle to break up the no hitter. And, I imagine my dad would’ve loved seeing his son pitch a no hit game that hot Kansas night. But more important to him was keeping his word, his integrity, to Kent. Forty years later, a little league achievement is far, far less important than the major league lesson I took from that night.