This article is printed in the July Tidings.
It was an unexpectedly grace-filled moment.
Some of you heard the news last month about the perfect game that wasn’t. For those of you who aren’t baseball fans, a perfect game means the pitcher retires all 27 batters of the opposing team without one of them reaching base—no hits, no walks, no errors. It is such a rare event that in the 131-year history of Major League Baseball, there have been only twenty perfect games ever pitched and two of them occurred earlier this season.
On June 2, Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga was one out away from pitching a perfect game as well. The batter for the opposing team hit a ground ball which was fielded by the Tigers first baseman and then thrown to Galarraga covering the base. The ball was caught and the pitcher’s foot touched the base before the runner arrived. It should have been an out, thus ensuring the perfect game was completed. The pitcher, his teammates, and the fans were ready to cheer the historic moment, but for some reason the umpire Jim Joyce called the runner safe. Teammates and the manager ran over to Joyce and argued the call, but Galarraga did not. He looked puzzled and then smiled in a way that seemed to say “Oh, well!” Once the argument ended, he got the next batter out which meant that the game officially ended with one hit.
Part of baseball’s culture is an acceptance that mistakes are part of the game and the umpire has the final word. Other than times when a home run is questioned, Major League Baseball doesn’t allow for rulings on the field to be over-turned through the use of instant-replay technology either. So the most remarkable part of that drama for me was what the two key participants did next. Joyce went to look at a videotape of the play. Upon seeing that he had made a
mistake, he immediately sought out the pitcher and apologized with tears in his eyes. Joyce told the media “I just cost the kid a perfect game. I thought [the runner] beat the throw. I was convinced he beat the throw until I saw the replay. It was the biggest call of my career.”
For his part, Galarraga told reporters that after the apology he felt worse for Joyce than himself. “You don’t see an umpire after the game come out and say, ‘Hey, let me tell you I’m sorry’” the pitcher said. “He felt really bad. We all make mistakes. None of us is perfect.” (Noonan, Peggy. ”Nobody’s Perfect, But They Were Good,” The Wall Street Journal, June5-6, 2010, p. A15.)
While not all of us are baseball fans, each one of us encounters moments when we miss the call in countless other settings, reacting to something we thought we saw or heard which turned out to be untrue, hurting someone else as a result. We all have times, too, when we are bruised by the actions of others; deeds whether intentional or not cause us to miss out on a wonderful celebration, fail to receive an honor we’ve earned, or worse. Yet whatever part we play in such occasions—the one who made the mistake or the one hurt by it—we have the opportunity to choose if we will extend grace or accept it, forgive or hold onto resentment.
I hope over the course of this summer you experience and model the kind of unexpected choice by one baseball umpire and pitcher in June. Chances are your decision will not cause you to be credited with a perfect game, but it can allow you to experience once more the surprising and unmerited grace that set each one of us on this playing field in the first place.
John
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