At 10:05 a.m. tomorrow morning, the dulcet tones of Vin Scully will emanate over KABC in Los Angeles from Dodgertown, signaling the opening of Spring Training games. Two hours later in Scottsdale, Arizona, Jon Miller and Dave Flemming will be at the mic of the 50,000 watt flamethrower, KNBR, to broadcast the Giants/Cubs game.
An off-season of allegations and questionable integrity will fade in the rear view mirror as the game returns.
So, before moving on, one final trivia question for the winter shenanigans: What Major League Baseball team had the most players implicated in the Mitchell Report?
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Cal Thomas has become one of my favorite writers in the newspaper's Op-Ed section. In yesterday's edition of the Fresno Bee, in a piece entitled "It isn't the economy that's bad -- it's us," Thomas offered the following penetrating insight:
"Much of this 'economic pain' is self-inflicted...Some of the lust for bigger and better is human nature, but a lot is the result of consumerism. The Timex watch is not longer enough. We now must have a Rolex, though both accurately tell time. The adequate low-end automobile is insufficient. We must trade up to a luxury car with numbers and letters on the rear that mean nothing, but convey status. And the house we are living in, which would have been more than adequate for our parents and certainly our grandparents, must be upgraded to larger digs in order to impress, if not growing families, then enlarged egos."
The simple life -- buying things for their utility rather than their status -- is a tough remedy in a consumer-driven culture. And yet, the witness of Scripture in places like Ecclesiastes 5.10-11 and Matthew 6.19-21, 24 is clear and unapologetic.
