Drawing the Line II

Ted Williams was the last man in major-league baseball to bat over .400. He credited his hitting ability to his visual acuity, which tested at 20/10 when he entered the Navy in 1942. Williams claimed that he could see the spin of the ball's stitches from the moment it left the pitcher's hand, which told him the ball's future motion and placement when it reached home-plate.

An interviewer asked Williams about his legendary batting skills. It was simple, Williams said: he didn't swing at any ball except those which touched the strike-zone.

"But with your eyesight," said the interviewer, "surely you could have hit pitches that were only a sixteenth of an inch outside, or an eighth of an inch. Couldn't you have gotten even more hits that way ?"

"NO !" Williams said. "If I did that, where would I draw the line ?"

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I cited this anecdote in a previous blog-post, that American Christians also need to draw the line: in our case, against the creeping worldliness that has led us far astray. It came back to mind today in a different connection: who draws the line ?

Ted Williams understood the strike-zone was built into the rules of the game. He simply determined to observe those rules.

So who draws the line ?

When I started work for the Post Office in the late '70s, they were still talking about a recent employee who'd been convicted of murdering her boyfriend. The testimony was that she'd shot and killed him after an argument one hot afternoon. Her defense ?: "I told him not to move that fan."

If "every man does what is right in his own eyes," who can say I'm wrong to kill anyone who displeases me ? I draw my own line, for my own reasons: and don't you dare move that fan.

Or if the armed anarchistic autonomy some clamor for today is not to our taste, are the brawling tribes of the earth better able to draw the line ? Don't we have the example of all history, that they will do as they have always done in their national moral autonomy, and find it laudable to murder in defence of "national interests" ?

We who believe that God Alone Fathers life, Creates "the game" and its rules: is He not Alone the Only righteous Judge fit to rule when the life He has given should be forfeit ?