July 24, 1983 Kansas City, MO

Forty years ago today, I was an eleven year old boy who was obsessed with baseball, and with George Howard Brett – third basemen for my hometown KC Royals. That day as the Royals played the Yankees in the Bronx at Yankee Stadium, I was in my living room on Sycamore Street in Kansas City watching the game on a 13″ black and white TV. The Royals were tied with the Yankees and George Brett came to the plate with two outs to face Goose Gossage. Brett had homered off Gossage in the 1980 ALCS to send the Royals to the World Series that year. I remembered that moment, and as Brett strode to the plate, I said a quick prayer asking God to let George hit another home run off of Gossage. The famously intimidating Gossage threw his fastball and Brett hit a high fly ball, deep to right field and the announcer said, “Uh-oh, uh-oh, that’s gone…” My eleven year old self was absolutely elated…but not for long.

Brett was a well known proponent for using pine tar to make the bat sticky. Billy Martin knew it. The whole North American baseball viewing public knew it. After Brett hit his home run, Martin then asked the umpire to check Brett’s bat for excessive pine tar and to call him out if it was up to far on the bat handle. The umpires after much deliberation eventually called Brett out which nullified the home run, and seemingly ended the game. George Brett went absolutely beserk – seriously, go watch the video if you have never seen it. Meanwhile, eleven year old me was crestfallen and worse than that, I was scared.

Why was I scared? Because the toxic theology I had been taught as a child made me think that I had made God angry because I had prayed for something so trivial and I was going to be punished. My view of God had been tainted by a fundamentalist cemetery plot salesman who told me when I was nine that unless I prayed a special prayer and asked Jesus to save me, I would go to hell if I died that night. On the night in question he was selling burial plots to my grandparents and they had called me into the living room to get saved. I said the prayer, but I did not get saved. What I got was traumatized into thinking God would torture a nine year old for eternity.

That toxic foundation led me to think George Brett was an unwitting pawn in God’s retribution against an eleven year old baseball fan. That toxic view of God stayed with me for a couple of decades. Grace rescued me, but it took a long, long time. Forty years after the pine tar incident, I can look back with a measure of wisdom and compassion for my eleven year old self. I’m thankful for the grace that led to the scales of toxic theology falling from my eyes.

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