The "Natural" is Real

And He Ain't Robert Redford

Sure The Home Run Derby was a fake event staged for TV but like a moron when I heard the kids screaming in the family room I snuck in and watched. I saw this fucking guy from Texas---who they got from Cincinnati in the worst trade since Boston dumped Babe Ruth on the unsuspecting Yankees--casually hitting 500 foot home runs, again and again and again. A performance for the ages. Josh Hamilton, the creature from Batman's brain, has casual super power, a gift that is matched with an uncanny hand eye coordination, making it a combination we rarely, if ever, see in the flesh. He's been a drug addict and alcoholic because he never experienced failure on any level in baseball. After graduating from high school as the number one player in the draft, and rated the best high school player any scout ever saw, the professionals issued him a few failures, nothing major but he wasn't hitting sixty home runs by Mothers Day. He was a failure in his own eyes and turned to the feel good pill or liquid so he could feel successful, or imagine he was. Nobody can know how a prodigious talent of that magnitude can drift into crack cocaine and everything that goes with it, leaving all his potential on the table so he could drop out of the sight of failure. He felt so bad about who he thought he was that he couldn't stand himself. Pretty soon he needed a drug just to feel feelings and to grope around for the next fix. One can know how he came out of it. Any of us who have ever surrendered to a Twelve Step Program in a last desperate try at understanding and confronting our imaginary demons knows. We become so desperate that we actually surrender to something we know doesn't exist. God. God is that guy who knows everything about us so he's safe for us to speak with; no sense hiding from Him. We immerse ourselves into a process that demands surrender to God (Higher Power is just a cop out til you admit God is real) in order to come to grips with the the self created phantoms haunting our lives. It really is a miracle that Hamilton came back from the dead and is able to realize his abilities and potential. Hitting .350 ain't failure. Nor is .275. He can now face reversals one day at a time and still live with himself. Josh Hamilton is a miracle we can see whenever the Texas Rangers baseball team is in town.