So it turns out a broken nail really can ruin your day. Seriously. Just ask R.A. Dickey. I had no idea who R.A. Dickey was until about a week ago. Vance and I have this bonding ritual that involves getting absorbed in documentaries about things nobody but people who make documentaries think about. Last Thursday night, while waiting on the NBA Finals to start (which BTW turned out to be the best NBA finals game in history), the College World Series to start (I am very disappointed in the state of NC’s showing- although I really do think those guys from Mississippi are bringing home the title, which is another blog altogether), and Davis to come home from basketball practice, we were sitting on the couch mindlessly watching TV together. Vance, being male, was doing what all men do, channel surfing. I was just vegetating. He pauses on Showtime to watch this documentary called Knuckleball.
R.A. Dickey belongs to an elite group. For starters, he is a MLB pitcher. Second, he won the Cy Young Award, (at age 38 and the only knuckleball pitcher to do so). He never throws more than 84 mph and he really only throws one pitch-the knuckle ball. Turns out the most amazing thing of all about the knuckleball (besides it can’t be hit), is what it says about hope. Hope is also the most amazing thing about R.A. Dickey’s life too.
The knuckle ball is a magical pitch. It strikes out the best hitters in baseball. One would think more pitchers would want to throw it, but in MLB history, only a handful of players have ever mastered the knuckleball. Only about 5 in the modern era. Few are willing to teach it and even less baseball managers are even willing to give it a chance. In today’s game of baseball, the knuckleball is an endangered species. Managers hate it, because it is unpredictable and slow. Pitchers don’t want to throw it because it is difficult to master. Catchers don’t want to catch it. And I can guarantee you won’t see it being thrown tonight in the College World Series. In fact, if you dream of pitching in Omaha one day, you better not be throwing a knuckleball.
A knuckleball or knuckler is a baseball pitch thrown so as to minimize the spin of the ball in flight, causing an erratic, unpredictable motion. The lack of spin causes vortices over the stitched seams of the baseball during its trajectory, which in turn can cause the pitch to change direction – and even corkscrew – in mid-flight. This makes the pitch difficult for batters to hit, but also difficult for pitchers to control and catchers to catch; umpires are challenged as well, since following the path of the ball makes it difficult to call balls and strikes.[1]The knuckleball was originally thrown by holding the ball with the knuckles, hence the name of the pitch. This grip can also include digging the fingernails into the surface of the ball. The fingertip grip is actually more commonly used today by pitchers who throw the knuckleball. So, you can imagine if you break a nail on your throwing hand, your day is ruined if you make a living throwing a knuckleball. R.A. Dickey had a horrible day on the mound because of a split fingernail. Who knew?
If you are a baseball manager or a pitcher who throws a knuckleball, you better have a passion for endurance. Knuckleball pitchers are going walk a lot of batters, lose games, and throw a lot of wild pitches but also strike out just as many. Baseball managers are not usually known for their patience with pitchers and rarely can they watch someone walk three batters in a row without pulling him off the mound. If you are a pitcher who wants to learn how to throw a knuckleball, well, good luck with that. Rarely, will a pitcher who has his sights on a MLB career or college career for that matter, include a knuckleball in his pitching repertoire.
In 1996, R.A. Dickey was the Texas Rangers’ much-heralded No. 1 draft choice. Then, a routine physical revealed that his right elbow was missing its ulnar collateral ligament, and his lifelong dream—along with his $810,000 signing bonus—was ripped away. Yet, despite twice being consigned to baseball’s scrap heap, Dickey battled back. Dickey is now the starting pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays (he was previously a star pitcher for the New York Mets) and one of the National League’s premier players, as well as the winner of the 2012 Cy Young award. (Um, did I mention he threw two consecutive one-hitters?).
I mention all of this baseball trivia, because I think that maybe the kind of hope it takes to throw a knuckleball is kind of like the hope St. Paul describes in his letters to the Romans. St. Paul said hope doesn’t disappoint. Which I honestly have a hard time relating to since I, like many of you, have had a lot of hopes which have ended in disappointment. And sometimes it’s easier to not hope at all rather than to risk starting with hope and ending up with disappointment.We had hoped. We had hoped that the time and money spent on a graduate degree would mean we’d have a job by now. We had hoped that our parents would love us unconditionally. We had hope we would have had a baby by now. We had hoped we would beat cancer. We had hoped that by this time in our life we would be married or be able to retire or feel successful at something. And that didn’t happen.
Because hope as a starting point looks like Palm Sunday with the crowds entering triumphantly into Jerusalem shouting Hosanna. But Palm Sunday always turns to Good Friday eventually.
And maybe that is why Paul chose to speak of a hope that does not disappoint but he connects it to suffering of all things. Which feels a little suspect to me. Connecting hope and suffering. I, for one, have a hard time swallowing that particular pill. And I am not looking to be on one of those inspirational billboards either. I don’t like to be reminded that suffering produces endurance and endurance character and character hope and hope doesn’t disappoint us.
Whenever I am in hot mess, or I am in some kind of emotional or physical suffering, and some well meaning Christian says “Well, when God closes a door, he opens a Window” I start immediately looking around for that open window so I can push them out of it. I don’t find ignoring the difficult reality of our lives in favor of some kind of blindly cheerful optimism to be particularly helpful. I find it to be downright delusional.
But maybe the way suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope is that suffering, endurance and character actually free us from the burden of having to be naively optimistic. Maybe hope is not something we strive to muster up for ourselves. Maybe hope is a gift. Maybe real hope is always something we are surprised by. What does hope look like when all else has failed us?
Perhaps, just maybe, hope is something that so captures our souls that we can’t help but become more than who we thought we were and living for something that is seemingly impossible and absurd all at once.
And when it comes down to it, I want hope – I just want a hope that doesn’t disappoint. I want the beauty and the possibility that comes from something other than our own humanness and limitations. I want a hope that is not just Pollyanna optimism. Don’t we want beauty and possibility that comes from something other than our own limitations or the limitations of others?
Because a hope that does not disappoint looks less like being idealistic about ourselves and more like being idealistic about God’s redeeming work in the world. “It’s a hope that comes not from blind faith, but from being wrong and falling short, and experiencing betrayal and being a betrayer and it comes from suffering and the grave and what feels like a night from which dawn could never emerge and then how God reaches into the graves we dig ourselves and each other and again loves us back to life.”
The kind of hope that never disappoints has nothing to do with optimism or the avoidance of suffering, but rather it is a hope that can only come from a God who has experienced birth, and love and friendship with lepers and prostitutes and betrayal and suffering and death and burial and a decent into hell itself. And I will take resurrection any day of the week over everything in life turning out as I had hoped. Life is brutally hard and St. Paul wrote about the kind of hope that sustains reality. This is a faith that does not offer platitudes to those who lost children this week to suicide or a tornado. This is a hope that does not waver in the face of broken relationships, illness, poverty, violence, economic hardship or even death itself. This kind of faith creates a defiant hope that believes God is still writing this story and despite the darkness of it all, a light still shines. God can redeem the ugliness and turn it into something of beauty despite every single mistake we have made, every poor choice, and all that we have endured, even death itself.
So it turns out that God loves the knuckleball. In fact, it just might be God’s favorite pitch. I suspect if God were a baseball manager and God walked out to the mound to give his struggling knuckleballer some advice, God would say, “Just throw some more of that stuff that moves a lot.”
1. Hoffman, Benjamin. "Not So Easy on the Eyes" New York Times (June 23, 2012)
