Winning in losing

By Jennifer J. Foster

Published: July 14, 2008

Finally tonight, I did something tonight I don’t usually do: I watched a Major League Baseball event.

I could write for a long time about why this lifelong softball player finds almost nothing redeeming in professional baseball, but in a word, it’s sportsmanship, and everything good and honorable that comes with it. Sportsmanship is lacking in professional baseball (and in all the other professional sports, for that matter). I get very angry when I see tape of bench-clearing brawls, disrespectful players screaming at or spitting on umpires about balls and strikes, managers throwing bats out of the dugouts and throwing rosin-bag “grenades” and sticking their armpits in umpires’ faces in protests about this or that decision, etc. You’d think that for as much money as they make, grown men like Manny Ramirez and Phil Wellman and Kash Beauchamp and others like them could learn to act a little less like moronic idiots and a little—just a little—more like men.

For example, Manny would do well to be less Manny, more Josh.

I came back to baseball a little bit tonight as I watched Texas’s Josh Hamilton ascend into the record books from the depths of a cocaine and heroin addiction that nearly cost him his career, his family and his very life.

Read Josh’s incredible story here. You can’t make this stuff up—and you wouldn’t want to.

Even though he went to Yankee Stadium tonight and hit 28 homers in the first round of Home Run Derby and 35 in all, he ended up losing the contest to Minnesota’s Justin Morneau.

But I suspect that after being through what he’s been through in his life, Josh Hamilton would tell you that by even being there tonight, he was already a winner—even if he hadn’t hit the first home run, much less three past 500 feet.

It was fun to watch. It was impossible not to pull for him. Josh Hamilton showed us tonight what baseball—and, indeed, life—should be all about.

Hamilton may have lost Home Run Derby. But he’s winning the battles that count: The daily fight against his drug and alcohol addiction. The fight to reclaim his career. The struggle of living with the knowledge that three years of his life have been poured out and smoked away.

It is the battle for his life, every day of his life.

I am among his newest fans.