I got my love for baseball, and for the Red Sox, while spending many days growing up on my grandparents’ farm. This was back when Boston was a perennially horrible team, and yet I’d often come inside on a summer afternoon and find my grandmother faithfully listening to Curt Gowdy’s broadcast on the radio while going through a pile of ironing. There was something mesmerizing about listening to a game unfold on the radio, imagining being there, imagining the crowd, imagining making the game-saving play.
Baseball wound up being about the only sport I was halfway decent at—an adequate second baseman who hit line drives and just loved the smell of the cut grass and glove leather, and the sting of the bat as the ball made contact. Many of those years, like in the photo above, were spent after school watching my high school heroes. The hitters were fun to watch, but I was especially fascinated by the pitchers, like “Rad” Carlson and Alan Buxton and Steve Hartwell. How did they do it, pitch after pitch? The focus. The resilience. The determination. The mind over matter battles.
In some strange, unexplainable way, I wanted to be like them.
Since that day, I have been amazed by pitchers’ ability to stand tall on the mound and overcome the previous inning’s three-run double or even shake off the previous game’s embarrassingly bad outing. But one day about a dozen years ago, that amazement went to an entirely different level…
Gil Meche, who at the time was a 32-year-old pitcher for the Kansas City Royals, decided to retire due to a string of injuries that he felt made him ineffective in helping his team. But that’s not the real story. Meche was under contract, and could have gotten paid handsomely even if he chose to ride the bench or tried to contribute here and there (and probably not very well) with a wounded wing. Or, he could have had surgery and sat at home the rest of the year doing whatever he wanted, collecting the $12.4 million of what was “guaranteed” to him as part of an $11 million-a-year for five years contract. He could have said, as many of us might be tempted to think: “Hey, I’ve got it coming to me, so I’m taking it.”
Instead, Gil Meche determined that his injured body was no longer of any value to the team, so he walked off the mound and away from baseball, and left the money on the table. All $12.4 million of it. Sports journalist Joe Posnanski put Meche’s actions in its proper light: “I’ve seen a few pieces on the Internet lauding his integrity for walking away from that money…but frankly, I’m stunned at the rather passive way in which most of the people are lauding him. The man walked away from $12.4 million dollars. If that has ever happened before in the history of professional sports, I have never heard about it.”
And I remember thinking afterwards: This isn’t just a baseball story, pay attention—this is a type and shadow of what this Walk is supposed to look like. And a strange but strong hard-to-explain current within me rushed from toe to head:
I want to be like Gil Meche.
To live on a mound of integrity rooted in humility—or, as the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe has described integrity, a “blunt refusal to be compromised.”
Integrity knows what is the right thing to do and chooses to walk in it even though the temptation may be strong to play it safe, and comfortably, and with the approval of others. Integrity cuts through the gale-force wind of selfish desires, is willing to swim upstream counter to the flow of popular opinion and well-meaning advice, and most of all knows what is the right thing to do or believe, and why—and then sticks to it.
More than some heroic aspiration or inspiring baseball story, integrity is a theme that keeps showing up in both the Old Testament and the New. Integrity, in fact, is the opening anthem of the songbook known as Psalms:
"God’s blessings follow you and await you at every turn:
when you don’t follow the advice of those who delight in wicked schemes,
When you avoid sin’s highway,
when judgment and sarcasm beckon you, but you refuse.
For you, the Eternal’s Word is your happiness.
It is your focus—from dusk to dawn."—Psalm 1:1-2, The Voice
And that’s exactly what Jesus modeled: “For Jesus is not some high priest who has no sympathy for our weaknesses and flaws. He has already been tested in every way that we are tested; but He emerged victorious, without failing God.”—Hebrews 4:15, The Voice
And this is what Jesus impressed upon Paul, who passed it along to Titus, who passes it along to us more than 2,000 years later:
“And here you yourself must be an example to them of good deeds of every kind. Let everything you do reflect your love of the Truth and the fact that you are in dead earnest about it.”—Titus 2:7, Living
The God who loves us will use any everyday interest, even baseball, to speak to us. And the message that began with my grandmother at the ironing board and peaked at Gil Meche's story might be this: The greatest threat to the depth and integrity of a Believer’s Walk is not lack of prayer, fellowship with the saints, or time in the Word. It is rationalization—when we catch ourselves compromising and making excuses for our careless words, attitudes, and actions. Like…
- When you’re surrounded all day by an unbelieving world and scary headlines, how do you stand? Where is your hope?
- Who or what is more of an influence and more appealing than God? What really drives you and orders your steps? (Be careful before you answer.)
- When there’s no church gathering or fellowship going on, how do you live, and move, and speak, and think?
- And does what you know and think about God show itself in a tangible way in your daily actions?
All these years later, I still want to be more and more like Gil Meche. I want to stand tall on the mound of integrity every day, and walk away from all temptations to compromise. But how? “And here’s the wind-up, and the pitch…”
“Let us exercise Godly jealousy over thoughts, words, and actions, over motives, manners, and walk. Never, never let us think we can watch too much. None of us is more than half awake.”—J.C. Ryle
Or, put it another way:
“Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.”—Will Rogers
Selah.
