Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Surrendering to the Common Wisdom
Being non-conformist should be done wisely. Many have observed before that if you just think the opposite of something on reflex, you’re just as confined as a conformist. You’re “conforming to the non” as I like to put it.
Still, there are some clichés, some bits of common wisdom, that I resist because of their pessimism. For example, one cliché I don’t like – but I have to acknowledge is true – is, “Life isn’t fair.”
I used to hate the idea of calling life unfair. It just seemed so… unfair. I tried to say that it was people that are unfair, not life, but that’s wrong. Some people are born with horrific diseases, that’s not the fault of optional human action. That’s biology. That’s life.
Fine. You win. I lose. Life is unfair.
Now when it comes to calling life unfair, I burn with the passion of the converted. I look back at my ultra-naïve youthful self and laugh with contempt: “You once believed in the Tooth Fairy. Even worse, you clung to the idea that life could be fair!”
So what finally convinced me? What does this have to do with catching a baseball hit foul with my butt?
Well…
Getting What You Don’t Want
I have realized life is really unfair because it seems to have this annoying tendency to give you things you don’t want, and keep things away from you that you do want.
For this story, let’s review people’s tendency to lose their minds trying to catch balls that go out of play in major-league baseball games.
There’s the story of a man who fell and died.
There’s a guy who almost died.
There’s a woman who stole a ball from a child.
There’s a guy who dropped his child as he went for a foul.
There’s plenty more examples of injuries and bad behavior as people chase baseballs if you want to search for them.
People really really really want to get their hands on a ball at baseball games. I don’t understand it, and never have. It’s fun, but not worth dying over, or acting like a horrible person. It’s just a ball. And that’s exactly why life, being the unfair jerk it is, delivered one to me with the greatest of ease.
Catching a Major League Baseball Foul Ball
Back in my early teens, my father scored some good tickets from his job. The seats were a couple dozen rows from third base for a Philadelphia Phillies game. It was a great day, just me and pop watching a daytime, weekday ballgame. I wasn’t that into baseball. Never was, but it was fun.
I was bummed the game wasn’t televised. Being a kid, I wanted to be on TV!
The date was August 9, 1983 [game stats]. Greg Gross [info] knocked a pitch foul. Everyone around us stood up. I felt confident it wasn’t going to come near me, but I stood up anyway, so as not to get hit in the head, just in case.
The ball entered the crowd a few rows in front of me. Everyone was shoving and grabbing for it. The ball hit the back of someone’s seat and took a crazy bounce. The feeding frenzy was on. People scrambled and flailed trying to snag the ball. In the chaos, the ball tumbled closer. After a bunch of weird bounces off people, chairs and the cement of the stadium, just like that, the ball landed in my seat. I sat down on it.
And that’s how I caught a foul ball with my butt.
Totally awesome, right? Well yeah. It was fun and funny how it happened, and I felt lucky, but once the foul-hunters sat down again, I grabbed the ball and stood up with it triumphantly. That’s tradition! And it’s also customary to show the lucky fan on the jumbo screen! Now that was something I wanted. If I couldn’t be on TV, at least I could have that.
But whoever was running the camera for the jumbo screen didn’t care to show me. People around went back to their seats, and the game went on. Dang it. But so what? You’re saying. You caught a foul ball! Years later a man would fall to his death in front of his son trying to get one!
True, but I wanted to be on the jumbo screen! Life is unfair!
Being Lucky in Ways You Don’t Want to Be and Unlucky in Ways you Want to Be Lucky
After the game, I gave the ball to my dad. He’s the baseball fan. I’ve always been a follower of faster-moving sports, like… well, like anything. After years of my dad holding the foul ball he finally insisted I take it back. You caught it, he said, you should have it. And I still do. In a plastic box, that’s in a cardboard box, under my bed, under a fine layer of dust.
I can hear you now: you could sell it online. I could. Online sales have created a reason for people to collect anything and everything, because surely someone else will pay more for it than you did, even if it is intrinsically worthless. What’s that? No, I didn’t intend that as a critique of “investing” in gold, but yes, it does serve as one.
Anyway, yes, I could sell the foul ball. I could even donate the money to charity, but I won’t now. It’s become a symbol to me: a reminder that life is unfair. That sometimes annoying clichés are true and that the grass is always greener on the other side.
I think the trick is, for the things we want, we should pretend we don’t want them and sneak up on them. Then when life isn’t looking, we make a quick grab. But when isn’t life looking?
It might just be easier to appreciate what we get, even if it’s not what we want. That’s a good defense against life’s unfairness.
