Go Cubs Go: 2025 Opening Day

 

Baseball's Opening Day and the New Cubs

Yesterday was Opening Day for the 2025 season. I won’t pretend I’ve been following baseball closely for the last 5 years because I haven’t. Clicking through some of my old journals, I stumbled across one from last year with “baseball” in the title. My first thought was, “What’s this? I hardly watched any baseball last year”. But it was a preseason explainer to myself about why my interest had waned. Covid was the culprit, no surprise. Still, that was 4 seasons ago. Why bring it up? Because it’s just about the time I checked out. The George Floyd riots and the Black Lives Matter craziness, forced me to ignore sports for a while. I’ve probably mentioned this a lot in other places where I’ve written, but using sports as a platform to divide the country was unforgiveable to me.

The MLB allowed and promoted that.

While not unforgivable, it forced me ignore it for a few seasons. I remember seeing a preview of the Chicago Cubs doing long toss at Wrigley right before a game. Most of the players adorned with Black Lives Matter t-shirts and smiling like they were at the lake on a Sunday afternoon. I think I was at the gym looking up at the TV which was tuned to ESPN. Similar events happened all year like that. Athletes gave bland statements of support for the violence happening all over the country; to me it looked insincere. I’ll avoid going into that morass too deeply. Nothing was real, certainly not the genuflecting to left wing activism that these athletes participated in.

Whatever…I’m glad it’s over.

This spring I started listening to a couple of Cubs podcasts again. Mostly, the idea was to familiarize myself with a team I don’t know anything about. I used to call myself a fan but the title just doesn’t fit anymore. Would I like the Cubs to win? Absolutely. Are the Cubs my team, as much as any baseball team can be said to be “my team”? For sure. But true baseball fans follow their team much closer. I’m more of an interested party in the team’s success. Frankly, I don’t want to watch even 100 games during the season. The regular season is 162 games. Baseball isn’t conducive to the modern attention span. It’s too slow. Soccer is slow too but there is always action around the ball.

Major League Baseball has tightened up a few rules to make the game a little more fan friendly. They’ve put a clock on the pitcher so he can’t shake off the catcher 3 or 4 times and keep going to the rosin bag. It’s 20 seconds. That seems about right. The national league is now using the designated hitter rule. Not sure if this speeds the game up, but it does likely add more scoring opportunities. Another rule change is adding a runner to second base in every extra inning. This was made permanent 2 seasons ago. The idea is pretty simple, increase the chances of scoring and getting out of the game. Some of these 13 and 14 inning games destroy your pitching staff. A lot of guys have to pitch more innings than they should.

Remember it’s 162 games during the season. Burning up your pitching staff for one win is costly for the next series of games. I imagine everybody was for this rule. It seems like an easy one. As for reducing the time between pitching changes, every pitcher has to face at least 3 batters or go to the end of a half inning. If you realize how much time gets eaten up bringing in a specialist to deal with a good hitter, it makes sense. I’ve seen games where the team puts in a reliever just to face one batter. Then, he exits the game and a second reliever is brought up to finish the slate of hitters. Every change requires a new pitch and catch warm up routine with the catcher until the new guy is ready to go. I think advertisers are the only ones that like it. They can jam in a few extra commercials with every change.

Opening Day is this baseball thing that football doesn’t have. In football it’s just the first game of the season. I have friends that treat Opening Day like a holiday. They take off from work and spend the day watching multiple games. One of my buddies posted a picture of him and his son, with Royals hats and sunglasses just outside Kaufman stadium. What a cool tradition for them. Why is Opening Day such a big deal? I googled it just now. I guess it has something to do with hope and optimism for the season. Everyone still has a perfect record and all of that. It’s spring too, which does feel like an awakening from winter. Warmer weather is on the way, even in Chicago.  

I said that everyone team has a perfect record just before opening day. That’s True for all but one team. Can you guess which one? Right, it’s the Cubs. Technically their season opened in Tokyo this year against the World Series Champion Dodgers. So everyone but the Cubs are perfect. No worries, spring is here and baseball is in the air. Go Cubs!

Green Spaces: Seasonal Changes for Life

 

Winter Exposure Should Lead to Big Cleanup

 You can’t hide in winter. The green coverage of summer gives way to dead spaces and ugly holes in the landscapes. Cities can be quite ugly at the granular level. Everyone loves a city scape view from a distance though. Who doesn’t love the overhead photos  of New York City at dusk?

Close Ups

One of the best things about watching a TV show like Blue Bloods is the shots of Manhattan from afar. But zoom in and you’ll see a little more grit and grime. Trash piles up in corners and rats scurry into sewer drains. Modern cities started designing with green space in mind. It brings a touch of nature to an otherwise concrete jungle. Central Park was designed to be a center of urban activity from the beginning. But even the best cared for parks lose their canopies in the winter.

We get accustomed to having some of the uglier elements of life hidden during the lush summers. Even small cities like Tulsa have enough greenery along the highways and downtown parks to cover a lot of unsightliness from a distance. Winter forces us to confront how actually trashy our city is. Once the leaves fall and tall grass dies off, we see the place in a whole new light. Here though, I’m not sure what a normal level of debris is for American cities. 

Trashy Living

Why did I become so concerned with the amount of trash along the side of the road? A more pointed question is this, what’s being done to clean it up?

American cities have gotten dirtier and less functional in my lifetime. I won’t pretend things have never been this bad. All you have to do is watch a movie from the 70’s set in New York to see what real blight looks like. I covered one in my movie review from a week ago. One source (HUD) found that homelessness increased 32% from 2022 to 2024. It’s getting harder to hide the rot.

I think there is a biblical principle at work. We can hide ugly behaviors, attitudes and addictions for a while but exposure is just a season away. Samson served Israel during the time of the judges. He was gifted with incredible strength. In one incident he killed over a thousand Philistines with a donkey’s jawbone. Imagine seeing a thousand dead bodies in one place, talk about blight. Samson had appetites that created the conditions for his downfall. He liked women who didn’t share a covenant with God. It cost him a wife and then a girlfriend. He put his people at risk by taking a Philistine wife and avenging her death.

Blind Spots

I don’t get the idea that Samson hid very well though. His strength was in some ways a covering. It allowed him to live life on his own terms and destroy people who got in his way. God gave him a season. Samson's strength was a promise to his parents because of their covenant with God. Samson was hardly a devout, servant of the Israelites. He seemed very selfish. Despite his flaws, God honored the commitment to Samson’s parents and he honored his vows, for a while. But the covering eventually ran out and Samson’s behavior was exposed.

The best solution is to clean up the messes in life. The scripture convicts us when we let it. We ignore the piles of trash at our peril. The trees and brush we’ve built up around it eventually lose their ability to provide cover. Exposure is sure to come.  But we can avoid the embarrassment of a dumpy façade by renewing our mind each day and letting God’s word change our hearts. We might prefer to live in the warm summer seasons of life, but we need the exposure of winter to bring about change and get rid of the trash.

This doesn’t just refer to hidden sin and addictive behavior either. Maybe your trashy space is laziness or unhealthy eating. It’s no secret that gym memberships spike in the winter. The upcoming summer makes us realize we should lose a few pounds and subtract sugar from the diet. Maybe you need to turn off Netflix and do something creative. TV has a way of numbing our senses. It’s a trap we all fall into some of the time.

 The point is, life gives us these repeating seasonal changes to bring attention to areas that need improvement. It took me multiple winters to stop using tobacco. I tried for a while and failed. I tried again the next year and failed, again. Eventually I made it stick. Thanks to God’s goodness and His constant, gentle, pressure to change. He points to the trash in a loving way and reminds us that it has to go.

Conclusion

In cities and in life, winter exposure reminds us where the ugly spots are. We can’t count on the green spaces to cover up the trash. Exposure is necessary and rewarding, although painful in the short term. For cities the solution is collective action, for us it's individual choice. Don’t go another day without ignoring some debris pile that God has warned you about. The author of Hebrews says it best.

“Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us” (12:1)

 

The French Connection: Review

Gene Hackman Owes His Career to Popeye Doyle

If The French Connection were made today, we’d have more detail about the heroin enterprise run out of Marseilles by the smugglers. Writers would create more backstory on the Roy Scheider character, Cloudy Russo and the beleaguered captain. We’d certainly have a compelling story arc about the black bartender, who feeds information to the police when they rough up the patrons. But writers can do too much with a movie and make a mess of the whole thing.

Simple Stories

Sometimes simple is best. Focus on one character…amoral, racist, vitriolic, determined. Don’t even bother to give him a family or a pet or an interest outside of kicking in doors and roughing up junkies.  

 Thankfully it was made in 1971. If you want an antihero with a singular focus on winning, Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) is your guy. There were a few detective movies at the time with rule breaking cops and evil criminals without an ounce of humanity. Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry (also 1971) comes to mind, as does Death Wish (1974). Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey didn’t carry a badge, but in a lot of ways he’s a more sympathetic character than Hackman’s Doyle.

 I’m not sure what it was about this time period, maybe the urban crime rate was high in big cities. New York, as the largest American city, was notorious for muggings, murders and all purpose felonies. The mafia ruled the city’s underworld and drug use and crime soared.

The Breakdown

William Friedkin’s The French Connection begins with 2 narcotics detectives chasing down a black heroin addict in a foot chase. Popeye Doyle is undercover as a street Santa Claus while Cloudy Russo serves hot dogs from a vendor’s cart. It’s clear that most of their time is spent roughing up junkies while hoping for larger scores. Both men go out to a disco club one night and tail an Italian café owner who they assume is a big-time dealer. Their hunch pays off, but only after they convince their captain to get the necessary warrants to wire tap the café. The heroin is coming from Marseilles on a ship, with a famous French businessman and his entourage.

The rest of the film is a chase. Either on foot or in a car, it’s cops against criminals. There isn’t a lot of detail to the plot, it’s very focused in the person of Popeye Doyle. The film is known for its riveting car chase. Doyle steals a car from a random passenger and follows the elevated train to the next stop. A sniper who tried to shoot him just minutes ago evaded him and hoped onto the train as the doors were closing. Doyle barks at the attendant for directions and tries to outrun the train to the next stop. After countless near misses and swerving onto the incoming lane he gets to the station only to see the train blow past the stop.

The Chase

The sniper held the train conductor gunpoint, forcing him to keep moving. Doyle jumps back in the car and continues his high speed, frenetic pace below the tracks. Eventually the French assassin runs out of space and Doyle shoots him. Filmed mostly from the viewpoint of the driver, it’s nerve wracking to see cars miss and oncoming traffic peal off just in time. He gets sideswiped at one point and keeps going.

The second great scene shows the wealthy drug kingpin Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) trying to evade Doyle at the subway station. Charnier is slick where Doyle is clumsy. Realizing the police are on to him from very early on, he tricks them into following and then dumps the tail. Charnier is relaxed and stylish throughout. He dines with the wealthy in exquisite restaurants and stays in 4 star hotels. He is charming and evasive.

Popeye Doyle is messy and violent. He drinks until he falls asleep on the bar. He wears an old porkpie hat and looks as if he’s slept in his clothing. If we could smell him, he’d smell like day old bourbon. His quick and dirty nature is a perfect contrast to the sophisticated man he chases.

The French Connection doesn’t have time to develop a lot of characters around Gene Hackman’s Doyle. That makes it very similar to Dirty Harry. But what we get is a very crisp movie about a man on a mission. It doesn’t leave us with a sense of pride in the police force, but we accept his behavior because he gets results. One of the detectives complains that Doyle’s assumptions lead to good cops getting killed. Doyle takes a swing at him in a later scene. It’s a way to explain his recklessness and reinforce the image of an emotional detective who goes hard and doesn’t explain himself.

The Classics

I watched this movie for the first time probably 20 years ago. Like classic novels, I like to find out for myself what the big deal was. I’m not one who loves everything that won an Oscar (this one did) or was selected for some literary prize. But The French Connection is a fantastic movie for people who like cop movies. I like the straightforward portrayal of New York in the seventies. I like what one reviewer said, “This is a story about ugly things and awful people”. And I would add, told with excellent pacing and energy.

There is a scene that catches my eye every time. As someone with almost no flair for the camera, I don’t generally pick up on cool shots. But I love the image of Doyle leaving the bar when the sun comes up. It’s framed beautifully with the bar in the lower left corner of the screen while the Manhattan Bridge runs overhead and parallel while an opposite highway runs perpendicular. It looks like dawn. The only real light is from the electric red and green horizontal images on the tavern. The rest of the shot has a blueish grey hue suggesting another cloudy day is in store. It seems like a perfect image for the film somehow.

Living in the New Covenant: Thoughts on Healing

 

Learning of God's Goodness in Pain and Sickness

I’ve had a painful abscess on my back for a about a week now. At first I thought it was a pimple or ingrown hair. I was careful not to roll over on it while sleeping. But after a few days it started to become more painful; I went to a local clinic for some antibiotics. The doctor gave me a prescription and a phone number for a surgery center that, I guess, specializes in this kind of thing. What does that mean exactly? I’m not sure yet, but I think it’s a simple procedure to cut open the infection and drain it. The word surgeon sounds like “surgery” though. I hesitated to call, hoping the antibiotics would take care of it. They still might knock out the virus enough to cancel the procedure. The doctor was concerned that it hadn’t drained up to this point.

Clinic Trip

I set up an appointment with the surgery center for this Monday afternoon. Hopefully I’ll get there and they’ll say “It’s not necessary”. But we’ll see. I missed a lot of workouts this week. Partly because of missed sleep and partly because of the pain of moving around too much, I stayed in bed an extra hour. Today is supposed to be my big run day. I think we were slated for 12 or 14 miles. That’s not the kind of distance I can make up easy. Most people miss at least a few weeks during the training session, so I’m not too broken up about it. I won’t miss more than that though. After two consistent weeks of sleeping late, the gains you’ve made from weights and cardio start to fall off precipitously. At least it’s what I’ve been told.

A week is like a vacation, 2 weeks is a slide back to laziness. I can’t have that. Even it hurts to get up and jog I’m going to muscle up and make it happen.

Texas Trip

After going to Texas last week I picked up a cold from my brother. He was hacking and wheezing all weekend. In addition to the back pain, I’m congested and coughing. I Demand Your Pity!!! All things considered it’s not the worst cold I’ve ever had. Still, being even a little sick makes you appreciate health and fitness all the more. Maybe it takes getting older and realizing that your body isn’t going to recover like it did when you were 25. As Americans we’re more educated than ever about the food and weight loss and healthy living. But it still takes doing the unsexy thing and beefing up nutrition and some exercise.

But even the term “healthy eating” elicits groans and mental images of inedible plant food. Or maybe you imagine that ‘crunchy’ neighbor who shakes their head, disparagingly, when you fire up the grill. No one wants to be lectured about eating, or anything else. 

There has never been a country with such an amazing variety of food and drink. Prosperity is why. That’s not a criticism either, but it must be countered with personal restraint. What’s tough is not having a short cut to weight loss. I know about Ozempic and other weight loss drugs, but it’s likely that some awful side-effects are in store for long term users. If we learned nothing else about drug companies during Covid, we should’ve learned that they have no problem lying to the public about their studies.  

Garden of Eden Trip

This beautiful earth we live in is both life giving and life taking. Created by God for humans, turned over to Satan by the same humans. We have been given back authority because of the sacrificial death and resurrection of Christ. It means that sickness and disease are cursed from our bodies (Isaiah 53:5-6). We still have to contend with illness. The time of Satan’s reign is not yet up, but his power was taken away in the resurrection (Colossians 2:15).

For followers of Christ, it’s up to us to understand and reclaim our authority under the New Covenant. That means cursing illness and avoiding behavior that makes illness likely. There are countless diseases that have nothing to do with poor eating or a risky lifestyle of course. There are too many to list. But it’s within our ability to develop healthy habits and avoid much of the excesses of a prosperous society.   

 Part of life is trusting in God’s promise of healing and restoration. We must remember too that faith is built when we hear the Scripture (Romans 10:17). In the same way that Adam and Eve had responsibility for the Garden of Eden, we have a similar responsibility for our bodies. It’s important to understand that God’s will is perfect healthy bodies and sound minds for His children. But the fight to see God’s will come to pass takes faith. This is the First Principles part of Christianity and the New Covenant.

Conclusion

When you understand the nature of God of and His free gifts, you won’t blame Him for your troubles. This took years for me to understand. But “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding” (Proverbs 9:10). And so it is with healing, we learn and grow.