I’ve come to accept that Michigan lacks a spring season. As much as I enjoy the perfect climate typically provided by this time of year, I know that I will only see a handful of perfect spring days. Despite this saddening factoid, I wear a smile upon my face when I hear the crack of a bat and smell the finest hot dogs $10 can buy. Baseball season has begun. I have loved the game of baseball since my early days of self-awareness. I even played on a team during high school. However, I remain uncertain and ignorant in the area of baseball statistics. There is a ridiculous amount of data and calculations made in baseball. I will attempt to explain a couple of the more confusing statistics. A pitcher’s earned run average (ERA) is the total number of runs that did not come as a result of errors or passed balls multiplied by 9 and divided by the number of innings pitched. WHIP stands for walks (BB) plus hits divided by innings pitched. I won’t even get in to extrapolated runs.
While statistics are very usual in professional sports, as well as a variety of other areas, they don’t often help our relationships. Imagine if you were assigned a number based on the number of selfless acts you perform on an average day. What if your friends and family wrote down every time you sinned and loved you based strictly on how often you did? One dimension of love that I personally have a difficult time grasping is that love “keeps no record of wrongs” (1 Cor. 13:4-5). We are to fight the urge to blacklist people. No matter what someone has done to you, we should never be unwilling to love our fellow man. By loving others, we know that “God lives in us, and His love is truly in our hearts” (1 John 4:12).
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