THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I was at Camden Yards last week when Baltimore played Texas, and Josh Hamilton was out signing autographs for kid after kid before any other player on either team retook the field for the game. After seeing that, I’ll give Josh the benefit of the doubt, if there even is any.

It should go without saying that we have to give him the benefit of the doubt.  As we have to give the benefit of the doubt to the lady asking for the autograph.  We presume they are both good people, who normally act like decent human beings almost all the time.  And they both wish they could have done something slightly differently.  Or, in two words: sh!t happens.

I’m bothered by people who must take sides, as this seems to be what people need to do these days.

I was more interested in a hypothetical situation, and putting the reader in a similar though not exact situation.

It is silly to give someone the benefit of the doubt or not, whatever that evan means.

We all do ghastly things and saintly things in our lives, and everthing in between, at one time or another. 

To judge a person on one incident or even 10, makes good press (for some readers) but no sense whatsoever.

I also happen to think that it makes no sense to keep “score” of the good and bad things we do in our lives, as some people like to do and some peple think God does when we expire from this Earth.

We are all the products of our environment and our biology and whatever we do at any given moment may seem like “free will” but in a sense it is not.

That is just my opinion.  I don’t think that Motehr Theresa is any better or worse than the Boston Strangler or Osama Bin Laden.  We all do the best we can in our own ways given the lot we are handed at birth and in life.

I definitely don’t share your opinion.  To me, in baseball-speak, we all have a “true talent level” or a core human value.  The context, the environment, certainly gives you different and sometimes difficult opportunities, where you might have to make a horrible choice.  I’d like to think that there’s no situation that would be so horrible as to say that I would be on an equal footing with the worst people in the world.  So, yes, I am better than Hitler or others.  And I think that Mother Teresa and Gandhi are better people than I am.

As far as our eternal reward, we have all sinned and fallen short of God’s standards, and sin is sin.

Everyone one of us to a varying degree do “bad” things. Most of us strive to do better, and to treat our fellow human’s needs as more important than our own, but unfortunately there are those who only care about themselves, doing anything to that aim, and delight in the pain of others.

So, we regress to the mean, and until we know someone well enough, we assume that they are well intentioned people. Given a large enough sample size, we can tell better if the bad behavior is a true measure of character or just an outlier.

And we are allowed to call evil as evil, it’s whether someone else is going to Heaven or Hell that’s up to God.