"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Thursday, September 27, 2012

Renaissance Man.
Posted by Jill | 9:00 PM
(Originally posted May 30, 2012. Reposted 9/27/12 in honor of R.A. Dickey's 20th win in an otherwise dismal Mets second half)

It's sometimes difficult to get emotionally involved with baseball these days. This most poetic of games has become, like everything else in our society, a simple matter of dollars and cents. New ballparks that charge sky-high ticket prices. Players chasing ever-more-obscene contracts. Owners tainted by association with scam artists.

Last weekend I had the rare pleasure of being able to actually sit and watch a movie, and that movie was Moneyball, last year's Academy Award-nominated film based on Oakland A's GM Billy Beane's book of the same name. For all that there's something formula about it, there's also a hint of melancholy that hovers over the movie, which doesn't have the Big Dramatic Happy Ending that we expect from baseball movies. In baseball movies, the GM who failed as a player is supposed to win the World Series with his ragtag team of cast-offs and never-wases. The star manqué who after mysteriously vanishing, refuses to take the dive and hits a home run right into the lights, causing a shower of sparks to appear on the field. The lunatic who builds a baseball field in his farm succeeds in reuniting with his long-dead ballplayer father. A good baseball movie is supposed to leave you blubbering, because baseball is about nostalgia, but it's also about timelessness. It's a game that despite better bats and nutrition and workout equipment and performance-enhancing drugs and the multimillion dollars is still, as Trey Wilson's baseball manager in Bull Durham says, "...a simple game. You throw the ball...you hit the ball...you catch the ball." It's the same game that Honus Wagner played, and that Babe Ruth played, and that Jackie Robinson played, and that Reggie Jackson played, and that Gary Carter played.

And occasionally there's a Story. It's about Jim Morris, the A-ball dropoout who promised the high school baseball team he coached that he'd try out for the big leagues if his team won the district championship. Miraculously, at the age of 35 and after a number of surgeries, Morris had somehow developed a 98 mph fastball. He made it to the big leagues, even if only for a short time. With a Story like that, you get portrayed by Dennis Quaid in the movie. Or it's a story about Jim Abbott, who was born without a right hand and not only made it to the majors, but threw a no-hitter for the Yankees. The movie practically writes itself, and it's surprising that no one's made a movie about him yet.

And then there's this guy. Meet R.A. Dickey:



Two years ago, knuckleballer Dickey was cast off by the Seattle Mariners after rattling around the majors since 2001 and signed to a minor league contract by the Mets in 2010. This year, on a team that was supposed to find itself in a no-return spot in the basement of the NL East by now, Robert Alan Dickey is 7-1, with a 3.06 ERA. The story of a 37-year-old knuckleballer coming out of nowhere to became a near-ace (and "near" only because Johan Santana has come back as if he'd never left) is already enough to make a movie, or it will be if the Mets somehow manage to emerge from the shadow of Bernie Madoff and make it to the post season. This prospect is not as ridiculous as it sounds, because as of this morning, the Amazins were six games over .500, a game and a half out of first place -- a third of the way through the season. And Dickey was just named the National League's Player of the Week. This in a league that boasts the likes of Philadelphia's Cole Hamels and Washington's phenom Stephen Strasburg.

If Dickey were just a story of yet another guy who was on the verge of giving up baseball, only to finally get his Big Break in the Bigs, no one would buy it, because Abbott has a more compelling story and Jim Morris has already been done. But Dickey may be baseball's first true Renaissance Man.

This is a guy who studied existentialism and modern American literature at the Christian college he attended. This is a baseball player who is currently reading “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories,” by Haruki Murakami, likes sushi, is partial to Chopin's Nocturnes, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro last January, and wrote a book in which he revealed that he was sexually abused as a child -- hardly the sort of stuff professional athletes want to admit. He's accessible to the fans, he's worked with a charity that rescues girls from sex traffickers, and he's a born-again Christian. He's what people THINK Tim Tebow is.

Here's Dickey playing pick-up wiffleball in Tompkins Square Park:



And here's his speech after being inducted into the Tennessee Baseball Hall of Fame:



The wonderful thing about R.A. Dickey, what makes him a true role model, is not that he can throw a knuckleball for strikes, or because you can say that those six games over .500 that the Mets are can be attributed to R.A. Dickey's knuckleball. It's because this is the best of what an American Christian man can be. He's pious without being self-righteous, his faith is humble, he recognizes that there is no incompatibility between the life of the spirit and the inquisitive mind's quest for knowledge. No matter what your spiritual path, no matter whether you follow baseball, there's no disputing one hard and fast fact: R.A. Dickey is a mensch.

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Thursday, March 22, 2012

Tim Tebow is NOT Jeremy Lin
Posted by Jill | 6:24 AM
It's so breathtakingly stupid, so, well, WILPONIAN, that you almost have to wonder how a long-standing Mets fan like me can still be gut-punched by anything a sports organization does. You'd think that after nearly fifty years of watching that baseball team in Flushing make so many dumb moves, I'd be immune to sports organizational stupidity.

Maybe it's true that we in the New York area just don't understand religious people. But the only explanation for why the Jets organization decided it was a great idea to bring Tim Tebow and his thanking Jesus every time the ball leaves his hands to New York is that they looked at Madison Square Garden and saw the Knicks go on a tear the minute Jeremy Lin took to the court for the first time and either started believing that God really does micromanage sports games, or more likely, decided that wresting the back page of the Daily News every Sunday frm the classy Giants organization was worth any downside to bringing Jesus of the Rockies to the most heathen place in America.

But Linsanity was never about Jeremy Lin's faith. God didn't become a Knicks fan just because a devout Christina joined the team. Linsanity occurred because Jeremy Lin was a better player than anyone expected and because no one knew how to play against him yet. Add to that the mystique of Harvard and how there's still a fair amount of cognitive dissonance around the idea of an Asian basketball player (Yao Ming notwithstanding), and you have enough to satisfy the maw of the New York sports press. Yes, Jeremy Lin is devout, but he hasn't made it part of his public persona. He's a Book of Matthew Christian:

6:5
And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

6:6
But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

No one hates Tebow because of his faith. If they did, Jeremy Lin would be just as reviled, and he's not. Lin's faith appears to inform his life, not define it to the near-exclusion of all else. With Tebow, you get the sense that the show -- the dropping to the knee, the praising of Jesus in every post-game interview -- is less about his faith than about creating a public persona. That may not be the case, but it certainly appears that way.

Linsanity has died down now that teams have learned how to play against Jeremy Lin. He's still a fine player, but no one's treating him like a god anymore. Tim Tebow led the Broncos to winning six games, in Denver, against crummy teams, and he became a god. The difference is that in buying into the media hype and allowing himself to become Tebow®!!!, he betrayed his own savior's words -- something Jeremy Lin has never done.

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Thursday, February 16, 2012

A Good Christian Man
Posted by Jill | 7:25 PM

"Ray, people will come Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won't mind if you look around, you'll say. It's only $20 per person. They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they'll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come." – Terence Mann (James Earl Jones), Field of Dreams, 1989

And so they did. They came to Olympic Stadium in Montreal and they came to Shea Stadium in Flushing. They came to see the grown man with the curly mop of hair and the broad grin, the grown man already with crows feet around the eyes by the time he came to the Mets, the man they called "Kid."

I don't think Mr. Brilliant has had a happier day in his life than the day he came home from work singing an ode to hope that consisted of nothing but a repetition of "We got Gary Carter!". That 1985 season was arguably more fun than the World Series-winning season that would follow. It started with Carter hitting a walk-off home run to win against the Cardinals on April 9, 1985, and as the season went on, we saw the promise of the juggernaut that was to come the following year to steamroller its way over the entire National League.

Gary Carter was one of those guys that you couldn't help but grin when you saw him play. His joie de vivre was palpable on a TV screen or in the upper deck boxes. Every now and then in professional sports you see someone like this -- a player who just exudes joy in the game. Carter was one. José Reyes was another and may still be. In football, the Giants' Victor Cruz is another. So is the Knicks' new sensation Jeremy Lin. These guys love their game and invite you to love it too.

Gary Carter was something else, though we didn't really know the extent of it when he was playing. He was a devout Christian and cited his born-again experience as being in 1973, long before he became a hero in Flushing. As Darryl Strawberry said to Mike Francesa on WFAN tonight, Carter's faith informed every part of his life, but he never forced anything on anyone. I have no doubt that Carter thanked his savior after every win, but his relationship with his God was a personal one. I never once heard Carter invoke Jesus in a post-game interview. He never felt the need to ostentatiously kneel after every home run or thrown-out batter at second. He was just Kid...just a great ballplayer who seemed like, and apparently was, a Really Good Guy; devoted to his family, his teammates, and very quietly, his God.

I'm glad he had this, as the cancer that took his life today bulldozed it's way through his brain. I saw a photograph of him from just a few weeks ago, his face almost unrecognizably swollen from the steroids he was on to keep him comfortable, as he attended opening day for the college baseball team he coached. It was a terrible sight, but burning through were the eyes of The Kid, the genuinely happy man who had walked the walk without needing to constantly talk the talk.

As I write this, we are watching that April 9, 1985 game on SNY. It was nearly twenty-six years ago, Dwight Gooden vs. Joaquin Andujar. Those players are all middle-aged men now but on TV they are forever young, forever at the top of their game. And there is Kid, shaking off a fastball hit on the elbow. For all that I don't believe in the Christian notion of heaven, I hope there is one for Gary Carter, one where he can see the parents he missed so much on that day in 2003 when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. And I hope there is a Field of Dreams there, where he can once again flash that grin and hit home runs and be young and healthy.

Yes, for half a decade, we had Gary Carter. And now he is gone. Thanks for the memories, Kid. Rest well.

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