A Little Light Blasphemy

It’s time for Jose Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME.

1. With the death of Rev. Jerry Falwell, Jose has been contemplating God and religion quite a bit lately and thinking about what we can do to make this a more godly country. Rev. Falwell focused his efforts at making America more Christ-like through traditional methods, such as rallying a political constituency for Christianity, identifying particular groups as sinners hateful to God, fighting integration, going on television, and suing Larry Flint, you know the sorts of things Christ himself might have done had be a self-righteous, egomaniacal bigot, rather than the Prince of Peace.

But Jose thinks Falwell’s approach was ineffective. Just look at our society. Conservative Christians are politically ascendant and yet decadence and sin remains. One cannot change the hearts of people simply by claiming political power. The culture itself must change first, and where better to start than with our national pastime—pornography. Wait… sorry… baseball. Baseball is the national pastime. Jose has come up with a few ideas to make the game godlier.

• Starters should work on one day of rest. If God had taken four days of rest before every one day of work, He never would have found time to fake dinosaur bones and bury them all over the place to amuse scientists.
• In the Protestant tradition, players shouldn’t have to rely on umpires, baseball’s priest class to tell them what the rulebook means. Players should be able to interpret baseball’s sacred texts themselves.
• No one should play rounders, the game from which baseball emerged, ever. When baseball emerged, it superseded rounders, making it, and all of its rules and traditions irrelevant.
• What part of the eighth commandment does Julio Lugo not understand? “Thou shall not steal.”
• Since abortions are morally wrong, the Kansas City Royals, must be ended.
• Baseball cards are graven images. Cards should just list the name of a player, his statistics and his favorite Bible verse.
• Why stop at playing God Bless America in the seventh inning stretch? We should have a hymn for each inning? Who wouldn’t want to hear “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” rather than “YMCA?”
• Be frank about the fact that the wave is a ritual designed to commemorate the parting of the Red Sea.
• Make Carl Everett commissioner.

2. In the first game of this afternoon’s double header, Julienned Tavarez goes up against Zach Miner. As the Red Sox try to solve the sophomore pitcher, Jose has some important scouting data that he needs to share with the team.

Based on Jose’s careful analysis, miner is an “8”, which mean’s he is vulnerable to any player whose number is 7 or lower. These include Sergeants, Lieutenants, Captains, Majors, Colonels, Generals and Marshalls. (Note: What’s Mike Marshall up to these days? Could we sign him for one game?) However, Miner absolutely destroys scouts, who number 9, which is why there is so little good data on him.

Another important note for the Red Sox is to focus on hitting, singles, doubles and triples tonight, because while Miner has many vulnerabilities, he is the only pitcher on the Detroit staff who automatically defuses bombs.

(Note: This KEY sponsored by the Stratego Society of America.)

3. Jose would like to apologize to anyone who had planned to attend last night’s cancelled game and is unable to attend today’s afternoon makeup. Jose did not get around to writing KEYS yesterday due to a combination of busyness, crankiness, and a general unwillingness to spent the day trying to come up with snarky yet safe jokes about the impact a finger injury will have on St. Josh a Beckett’s sex life.

What he forgot is that they can’t start a weekday game without KEYS any more than one can start a car without KEYS. Sure, Jose’s supposes they could have hot wired the game, to get it started, but then the steering column ends up being an unsightly mess of holes, and live wires, not unlikely the New York Yankees.

As a result, Jose is forcing himself to write KEYS today, even though he has nothing better to go on today than comparisons of baseball to popular board games and mild blasphemy. Well tough, if you want a game, this is what you’re stuck with.

I’m Jose Melendez, and those are my KEYS TO THE GAME.