Baseball on my Blog

It's come to my attention that the baseball season is a quarter over and I've yet to mention it on my blog. If you visited this space with any regularity last Spring and Summer you know of my little sermonettes about how Ascension Church had a similar dream as the New York Mets... to build a winning team in Queens. I can only carry that kind of metaphor just so far.

If I want to get baseball on my blog, I need to find other illustrative pontifications a bit beyond the basics. Here's my attempt.

In the late 1950s National League Baseball left New York City for the West Coast. The Dodgers left Brooklyn for Los Angeles, while the Giants left East Harlem for San Francisco. For a few years there was but one team in New York, and a large fan-base that wanted nothing to do with the Bombers in the Bronx.

Enter the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club, the Mets. The concept was born from tradition and the major contributions of a Lawyer named William Shea. In the earliest days of professional baseball, one of the first teams was the New York Metropolitan Nine from which this team would derive. Team colors were a combination of Giants and Dodger elements. The orange color and NY insignia were pulled fromthe old Giants (team colors were black and orange), while the royal blue was taken from the Brooklyn Bums (Dodgers to the non locals). In short order a stadium was planned for Flushing Meadows Park in Queens to coinside with the World's Fair.

Building its future on a strong sense of the past, the Metropolitans (as one local Sportscaster prefers to call them) were born. From the beginning, the Mets built their existance on the past.

That continues with the current construction of Citi Field, a ballpark modeled after Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, the former home of the Dodgers (and frequent Summer hang out of my Father when he was a kid).

As Christians, we understand the Gospel as not siting outside of a historical context. Our faith is supported by the facts and our hope for the future is strongly rooted in the past. Ascension Church endeavors to communicate that appropriate juxtoposition of the ancient and modern that not only defines our everyday lives, but forms our hope for the future.

Did this baseball illustration work. If not, I'll find other ways to get my beloved Amazin's into my blog this season. Turdt me on this one.