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Out-Punting Our Coverage

March 19, 2013

Any traveler to the Atlantic coast of any Central American country will witness firsthand the arrogance of the human race.

Strewn along almost every shore is the waste of nations outliving their means.  Plastic in all shapes and colors, from products of all types – bottles, toys, sandals, tools.

Island nations to the east, unable to cope with the volume of their waste, cast it off covertly under cover of night.  Oceangoing vessels large and small heave it overboard.

My wife puts it this way:  “We’ve gotten ahead of ourselves.”  Humans have fantastic abilities to create, but we do so without conscience, without caring enough about consequences.

This clearly applies to the world’s waste problem – from cast-off containers to used cars to computers made obsolete in a matter of months.  We keep producing more and more, without plans for the waste of producing new products or the waste created by making existing things obsolete.

In the Pacific Ocean, a mass of trash the size of Texas is circulating as if there were a drain.  But there isn’t one.  No easy answer to flush human waste – the excrement of our greed – to some other place where it will do no harm.

In Chinese cities today the air, water and land are toxic – much as it was in developing US cities around 1900 – as China takes its turn to poison its people in the name of progress.

That we can do something doesn’t mean we should do it.  In sports terms, the human race has out-punted its coverage, and the consequences are far more dire than a punt return for a touchdown.

Change of Pace

January 30, 2015

Michael Schwimer is little known to us in Michigan. He was a 6-8, 240-pound relief pitcher out of the University of Virginia who was drafted in the 10th round by the Philadelphia Phillies in 2008.

In his minor league career, Schwimer earned 20 wins against 10 losses with a respectable 2.51 ERA. He struck out an eye-popping 12 batters per nine innings.

When Schwimer made his Major League Baseball debut for the Phillies in August of 2011, he served up a game-tying home run to the first batter he faced. He was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays in February of 2013, and was released by the Blue Jays the following August. You might say Schwimer majored in the minors. That’s where he peaked as a professional baseball player.

As a player, Schwimer made few waves. He wasn’t a “game changer.” And yet, he may still be known as one who helped to change the game itself.

Schwimer is widely reported to be the first MLB player to use a glove that was made of synthetics, not leather (which weighs twice as much), and was made using a plaster cast of his hand. It was a custom-made, form-fitting glove.

The result looks almost like a toy glove, fit for T-ball; but MLB gave it a “thumbs up” in December of 2011. MLB players have been warming to the glove, although very slowly.

To which Schwimer responds: “It takes forever for any change to occur. But when change happens, it happens really fast.”

That almost sounds like something Yogi Berra would have said – like, “it takes forever for change to occur, and then it doesn’t.” But experience very often teaches us the truth of this sentiment.

As the MHSAA reprocesses two of its toughest topics ever – out-of-season coaching rules and 6th-graders’ roles in school sports and the MHSAA – it seems like there is no progress toward change. And no change is the possible outcome of both long journeys.

But it’s also possible that, for one or both topics, the time will come when wisdom and will combine to create constructive change, which then seems to be occurring almost overnight.

My hope is that we find that formula before a rash of problems causes a tipping point that results in a rush toward solutions that are poorly conceived and/or politically imposed by outside entities.