Daydreams turning to spring and ... baseball

Well my friends, we are deep into winter now, and a boy's thoughts turn to ... baseball.

I should have posted this awhile back: my commentary for The Sacramento Bee, my former journalistic home, on the San Francisco Giants season just past. That would be the World Series Championship season. So with daydreams turning to spring, here is my piece...

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Giants fan fulfills bucket list baseball season

BY JAMES RICHARDSON

SPECIAL TO THE BEE

11/01/2014 4:00 PM 

 11/03/2014 9:07 AM

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/california-forum/article3497613.html#storylink=cpy

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My father took me to my first baseball game at Candlestick Park in 1962. The Giants played the St. Louis Cardinals, and Willie Mays won the game in the 10th inning with a home run. I was 9 years old. I was hooked on Giants baseball for life.

This season I did something that has always been on my bucket list: follow the Giants season game by game, and not just occasionally. This season, I would follow every game. That’s 162 regular season games and, as it turned out, 17 postseason games.

I started by watching the televised spring training games on MLB.TV. By the end of the season, I had watched, or listened to, 105 regular season games, including 10 playoffs and seven World Series games. If I didn’t watch or listen, I read the wrap the next morning in the Northern California newspapers.

My wife, Lori, was a saint for putting up with what became my obsession. She watched many games, and we went to a few. At a family wedding in Wisconsin, I had a game playing on my smartphone. 

In an odd way, it helped that we no longer live in California. We live in Virginia, which, as it happens, is the market territory of the Washington Nationals. There were no blackouts for Giants games here except when the Giants played the Nats, in which case the tickets were about one-third the price of a seat in San Francisco.

At our first Nats game, we found ourselves sitting in a sea of orange and black that stretched from home plate into the left field stands. It seemed we were seated with thousands of diaspora Californians rooting for our ancestral team. Pitcher Jake Peavy signed a baseball for me.

For most games, I could webstream Bay Area TV coverage. But for some games, I listened to the KNBR radio webstream, and that took me back to my boyhood when that is how we “saw” most Giants games. 

Hearing it on the radio tapped my imagination in ways I’ve not experienced in years. No slow motion, no replays – just the artistry of a voice in a booth finding just the right words to describe an enormously complex series of movements on a field. My favorite line, as Marco Scutarowas plodding around third base: “He’s leaking oil.” 

I learned a lot about baseball, how grueling it is and how Bruce Bochy had to manage through slumps, injuries and “buzzard’s luck” as he calls it. We saw new players emerge, in particular Joe Panik, but also saw many veteran players struggle with season-ending injuries – Matt Cain, Angel Pagan, Hector Sanchez, Scutaro. I grew to understand that the baseball season is as much about stamina as it is skill. So is watching.

We saw Tim Lincecum pitch a no-hitter, and then fall into the doldrums. We suffered through the Dan Uggla experiment at second base (batting average with the Giants: .000) and admired Brandon Belt as he came back twice from injuries. 

We were awestruck by Hunter Pence at full throttle every single game he played. My favorite Pence sign, appropriately at a Nationals game, was “Hunter Pence wrote the Declaration of Independence.” I suppose that only in Washington, D.C., would that be meant as an insult. 

And, yes, Madison Bumgarner is an extraordinary pitcher – and an extraordinary hitter with four home runs, two of them grand slams. Yet this team was not about a superhero, but about a bunch of guys who did things very well when it counted. 

But it was more than just about pitching, hitting and scores. Baseball is also about relentless hype and promotion, and endless prognostication by baseball “experts.” Like political writers (of which I once was one), getting it wrong doesn’t stop the experts from churning out more authoritative opinions, usually discarded a few days later.

Mostly, I learned how a bunch of basically humble guys figured out how to play together under enormous pressure and win when by all the odds they should have lost. They looked like they were having fun. Many of the teams they played did not (read Dodgers). Sometimes the Giants lost, and lost badly. Other games they just barely won (like that last game of the World Series). If there is any sport that mirrors daily life, this is it.

To have this season conclude in a 3-2 nail-biter in the seventh game of the World Series is nothing I remotely could have predicted when I started this adventure in March.

Ski season approaches. The television will be off most of the time in my house. If the 49ers make it to the Super Bowl, I’ll check it out. Mostly, I will be awaiting the words: “Pitchers and catchers report.”

James Richardson, a former senior 

writer with The Bee, is an Episcopal priest and the rector of St. Paul’s 

Memorial Church in Charlottesville, Va.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/california-forum/article3497613.html#storylink=cpy

Taking this life on faith

As many of you know, I once earned my living working for newspapers. The one where I worked the longest, The Sacramento Bee, asked me to write an essay about faith for Easter, appearing in today's Sunday Forum:

Taking this life on faith, with faith, can fulfill our yearning for connection

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Buzz up!

By James Richardson
Special to The Bee

Published: Sunday, Apr. 4, 2010 - 12:00 am | Page 1E

In my line of work, I am accustomed to hearing people say: "I am spiritual, but I don't believe in organized religion."

At times I am tempted to flippantly reply, "The only religion I know is disorganized; when you find one that is organized, let me know. I'd like to join."

This Easter Sunday an increasingly large segment of the American public will register its dismay, or disgust, or pure boredom with organized religion by staying home.

Anyone who follows the news can list the reasons for this alienation, including but not limited to the continuing pedophile scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. The slow and inept reaction from the Vatican hierarchy should concern not just Catholics, but the leaders of every faith, because it paints all religious institutions with the brush of indifference.

Just as corrosive to a life of faith are stupefying religious practices that make little sense, except to insiders, and lack a connection to the lives of people where they dwell spiritually, emotionally and physically.

Yet religious leaders, and their critics, would be mistaken if they view alienation from human religious institutions as alienation from God. There is a deep yearning across our land for a connection – a relationship – with God. Religious institutions fail when those who lead them fail to recognize the authenticity of that yearning.

You can read the full piece by clicking HERE.

The Newseum: Celebrating journalists and Freedom of the Press

I have not posted in a few days because Lori and I were "off the grid" celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary. Thanks to all who sent us by email, Facebook and other means your wonderful good wishes and blessings!

So what did we do for our 20th? What any two news junkies would do if they were in Washington DC: We went to The Newseum. 

This amazing museum is entirely devoted to celebrating The First Amendment and highlighting the role of journalism in a free society. I highly recommend going if you are in our nation's capital. We spent most of the day there -- and while we were there we caught a glimpse from the museum balcony of President Obama in a motorcade speeding down Pennsylvania Avenue on his way to a speech at the National Archives. Yep, we are definitely news junkies.

As many of you know, Lori and I both spent most of our adult lives working for newspapers; I as a reporter and Lori an editor. We met at The Sacramento Bee during its glory years. So our visit to The Newseum was like rummaging around in the family attic. 

We saw newspapers with bylines by friends, and I was moved close to tears by the Pulitzer Prize photojournalism exhibit featuring photography from colleagues with whom we worked, like Don Bartletti of the Los Angeles Times and his series on the "immigration train" in Mexico (one of his photos is featured here). 

Years ago when Don and I worked together at The San Diego Union, we did a series documenting life in the shanty towns along the Tijuana River in Mexico. Don moved onto the LA Times and has continued to document life on The Border, and he won the Pulitzer in 2003 for which he richly deserved.

Also in the photojournalism display are photos from the 1984 Olympics which won the Pulitzer Prize for the Orange County Register. Lori was among the editors on that project, and she shares in the Pulitzer Prize. 

The museum has displays on stories I covered and that was fun to see. The first "big story" I was involved in was in 1976 when I was a stringer for NBC news. I worked primarily for Carl Stern on his series on COINTELPRO, the FBI effort in the 1960s to infiltrate and disrupt anti-war protest groups. There is a great display on that. 

Also featured in the museum are items from presidential campaigns, including 1992 and Bill Clinton. There was even a display of antiquated journalistic hardware, like the Tandy 120, the first generation of true laptop computers we used on the campaign trail that year (actually, the first was the Tandy 80, which we nicknamed "The Trash 80"). The computer memory could hold two 20 inch stories, so you had to erase one story before you could write another.

Elsewhere, the museum has the Unabomber's Idaho cabin in which he made his bombs. I have never seen the tiny plywood cabin until now. In 1996, Cynthia Hubert and I reported on the Unabomber case day after day for The Sacramento Bee, and we scooped the Washington Post and The New York Times for a solid two months running. Alas, none of our clips were on display (those on display were only from the aforementioned newspapers, which I think is major oversight, but what would you expect me to say?). Seeing the cabin was fascinating.

I could go on and on with journalism stories, but I won't. This I do want to impart: it struck home again with me that journalism is a calling. That fact was driven home to me by seeing on display the car driven by Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles on the June day in 1976 when he went to meet a source on Mafia corruption in Arizona. He was murdered by a car bomb planted by his source. Bolles' murder brought about the creation of Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc., in which I was active for two decades. His murderer went to prison.

Reporters like Don Bolles are still on the beat, putting themselves in harm's way all over the globe. The museum has a wall devoted to the memory of journalists killed in the line of duty, and it is moving to see so many familiar faces. Pursuing the news is more than a nine-to-five job. It is a calling to pursue the truth wherever it may lead. We are privileged as a free people to have great journalists still carrying notebooks and cameras, and I am blessed to count many of them as friends.

Global warming, global restoration and journalists

Many years ago, in my journalism career, I wrote extensively on environmental issues, and in the 1980s I was among a group of journalists who established environmental investigative reporting as a distinct discipline within journalism (and in those days we spoke primarily of newspapers as the platform of journalism). My speciality was watersheds and pollution from toxic waste dumping. 

The stories that I and others wrote resulted in the federal "Superfund" to cleanup such sites. I bring this up today to point out a number of global trends that are disturbing and which the faith community has a stake in because the faith community, by definition, is part of the global community.

First, journalism: Newspapers are in a major economic meltdown and are closing or seriously downsizing. That ought to bother you mightily. Newspapers are still the major platform for serious journalism in the world; when you read a story on the internet, chances are a newspaper reporter wrote it and an newspaper editor edited it. The fallout of the economic collapse of car dealers, retailers and real estate marketers is that they have pulled their ads from newspapers, and the newspapers are collapsing. That is the result of an economic model too dependent on those sectors, and not the result of falling circulation or bad journalism (the rise of the internet is a convenient excuse for newspaper executives who made bad business decisions in the last 10 years). All of that is background for where I want to go with this.

Today marks the last day for Chris Bowman at The Sacramento Bee, where Lori worked as an editor for 20 years and I worked for 10 years as a reporter. Chris was among many journalists laid off earlier this month, caught up in the mass of layoffs throughout journalism. Chris is among my oldest friends, he was one of my two "best men" at my wedding (and my other best man, Tony Ramirez, was laid off by the New York Times last year). 

Chris is a leading environmental investigative journalist. He is a former Nieman Fellow from Harvard, which is the most prestigious fellowship in journalism. Chris is a founder of an organization that promotes environmental journalism, and he taught environmental journalism in Zimbabwe back when Western journalists had access to that country. With Chris removed from journalism (and we hope only temporarily), there is one fewer trained set of eyes and ears documenting the threats to our environment. That is an incalculable loss to all of us and to the environment.

Next, to related trends in the politics of the environment: Earlier this week, Lori and I participated in a meeting in Washington DC to hear from Mike Marshall, the new executive director of Restore Hetch Hetchy, a decades-long effort to remove the dam from Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. Mike outlined a long-term political strategy to convince Congress to remove the dam built in the 1920s by San Francisco (this post includes an artist's conception of what the Hetchy Hetchy Valley would look like without the dam). I will say more about this issue in another post. 

Last night, we joined members of St. Paul's who live at Westminster-Canterbury in seeing a film about an appalling proposal to build a strip mine in the Bristol Bay watershed of Alaska, the richest salmon waters in the world (the top photo on this post is from that watershed). The proposed Pebble Mine would include building the world's tallest dam to hold toxic mining sludge, theoretically keeping the sludge poisons out of the rivers. If you are wondering at the reliability of such dams, check out the Iron Mountain sludge dam in California, now a federal EPA superfund site, and earlier this week labeled the "worst water in the world" in the San Francisco Chronicle (another newspaper soon to fold).

I mention all this by way of pointing out the confluence of a number global trends: it takes journalists to investigate and highlight threats to the environment, especially those in places remote from the rest of us, like in Alaska. Journalists are in shorter supply today, and that ought to alarm us.

Related to this is a conversation that needs to happen (and the work of journalists can help us make it happen) around the sometimes competing politics of the environment. The dire need to reverse global warming is now the necessary focal point of the major environmental lobbying organizations, like the Sierra Club. The danger of that focus is that the specific localized threats, like the proposed Pebble Mine, will slide through unexamined by the nation, and remain only feebly opposed by environmentalists who can't be in two places at once.

This is also an issue about world poverty. Worldwide, mining companies are stripping poor countries of their resources with little return to those countries, and that is an issue for the faith community if we take seriously that greed is a sin. There is a report issued today on how mining companies are depriving African countries of much needed tax revenue (click HERE.)

Moreover, restoration of the earth -- symbolized by removing the dam at Hetch Hetchy -- must remain on the environmental agenda because restoration is part of the healing of our planet. This past Monday in Washington DC we heard just how stretched environmental organizations are in working on both global warming and restoration issues. There is much work to be done, and much organizing and conversation that needs to happen around all of this.