Church, religion, and a whipping Post

I’ve got a brief philosophical foray to spin out of a sports/religion story, so bear with me if you will. (Or you could just click away somewhere else — after all, it’s not like I’ll know.)

Washington Nationals OF Ryan Church has gotten into hot water following a remark quoted in a Washington Post story Sunday on the role of chaplains in Major League Baseball. Nats chaplain Jon Moeller (who himself has been suspended from his part-time duties) is quoted secondhand by Church as stating that non-Christians will go to hell, with Church expressing his shock that, according to Moeller, his Jewish ex-girlfriend would be heading south after death.

To get the theology out of the way: yes, Jesus said that he is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and that no man would go to the Father but by him (John 14:5-6). This can be read to support Moeller. I hesitate to make statements like Moeller’s, though, because we as sinners are not supposed to judge lest we also be judged (Matthew 7:1). Using the first citation to state conclusively that someone is going to hell reads as judgment of that someone to me. Yes, that’s a fine distinction; that’s why theologians have been in business for two thousand years. (And we haven’t even discussed where God’s continuing covenant with the Jewish people plays into this.)

Randoms On My Mind

Virginia Tech ripped us off on football ticket shipping this year. For the past two seasons, tickets had been delivered FedEx 2-Day Air: quick to arrive, and easy to pick up after hours for those of us with jobs. This year, they charged us the same $15 for shipping, but chose UPS Ground instead and took a profit on the remainder of the money we paid. Result: tickets arrive 4 days later, and after their driver misses you at 11 AM, you have to throw a small tantrum over the phone to get them to take it off the truck at the depot so you can pick it up that night. If you think I’ve got experience with this, you’re right!

Disappointing news of the day: [Daryl][http://d103.com/] is calling it quits at D103.com as of the end of this month. I understand completely his not having the time to make it as good as he wants it to, as I’ve felt that way about BTN several times in the past year. A big complication for him is that, as a professional writer, a half-heartedly written blog could damage his professional reputation. For me, it’s simply a reflection of my priorities moving elsewhere; unless I do something deliberately stupid to poison my name on a Google search or start talking about work, the embarrassment of a poor effort is confined to the five or six of you that read regularly despite my slacking.

Speaking of other priorities, of the ten Nationals games I’ve attended since the beginning of June, the mediocre-at-best Tony Armas Jr. started 5 of them, including four in a row. Guess who’s starting tomorrow night?

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Mid-July Roundup

At this point, I think we can conclusively say that getting engaged and buying regular tickets for a major league baseball team is bad news for a blog. Tough luck, but the blog’s just going to have to deal — or, as I said in a comment on this site a few months ago, “Priorities, m’boy, priorities.”

But let’s do a quick tour, just to see what interesting stuff has gone on while I laid down on the job.

• Several of my co-workers are native Chinese speakers, and their cube-to-cube chatter exhibits a fascinating linguistic phenomenon called code switching. A conversation that starts in Chinese might shift into English for a sentence or two, then (apparently) seamlessly back and forth again several times in the span of 90 seconds.
  I could tell more if I understood Chinese, but even with my complete lack of knowledge in that arena, it seems to me that work-related segments — and not just technical terms, but talk about work hours, time off etc. — come out in English, while parts that I would expect to be personal (just by contextual positioning, tone of voice etc.) are usually in Chinese. It’s quite interesting to listen to as an amateur linguist.
• Bret is on a roll these days (though it’s said so for a while on the hot dog cart). He’s blogging up a storm during his last summer of freedom before he joins the Metro-riding masses. Pay him a visit, read the comments, and check out his Flickr photostream as well.
• Amy has also been in high gear recently, despite (or perhaps because of) her pregnancy and move from Paris to Arizona by way of the East Coast. I’m still weighing my bets for the baby birth stats pool.
• A few weeks ago, Eric at Off Wing and Ryan at Distinguished Senators took note of the Nats’ high no-show rate — people buy tickets and then fail to show up for the game. I’ve contributed to this problem several times myself, and I suspect the size and inflexibility of the Nats’ ticket packages are the main causes. Almost all MLB teams offer fixed packages down to as few as 7 or 8 games, while this season the Nats only offered one set of 41 games or two different sets of 20 games. In addition, several other teams offer “make-your-own” packages — essentially bulk tickets, where you could buy ten at a particular price level and use them any way you like, whether it be ten seats at one game or a single seat for ten games. The Nats offered nothing of the sort. Hopefully, this can be attributed to the rushed nature of the move from Montreal, rather than a deliberate attempt to force buy-up; if so, next year should offer more options (and I’ll be more likely to purchase a package again). My fondest wish? Trade-in, where if I knew in advance that I’d miss a game, I could trade my tickets in for equal value on a game I could attend. With lower-deck patrons taking advantage as well as upper-deck customers like me, the Nats would then have the opportunity to resell expensive seats to walk-up fans, who right now must buy seats at my level or cheaper due to the full-season lower-deck sellout. Win-win, right?
• While I still don’t drink coffee or any of its derivatives, I’ll second Monday’s D103.com endorsement of the Starbucks Mint Mocha Chip Frappucino by adding a BTN endorsement of its coffeeless counterpart, the Mint Chocolate Chip creme-based Frappucino. Like Daryl, I have trouble with Starbucks’ pretentious sizing scheme. But now that I rattle off a fourteen-syllable drink order (at 29 cents per syllable!) without blinking, it seems that emphasizing “medium” over “grande” crosses the line between principled and passive-aggressive.
• Karl Rove / Valerie Plame / Joe Wilson: yawn. Lileks is right on this one — even I can’t make myself care, and I both follow politics and work inside the Beltway.

I’d promise more content soon, but you wouldn’t believe it if I did. So you’ll have to be satisfied that photos from Lake J and Baltimore are coming… sometime. Hopefully “sometime” will be before next month, when Cleveland/Cedar Point, Roanoke and western Maryland will join the photo queue in successive weekends.

Opening Day in Washington

Flooding out of Metro
Originally uploaded by behindthenet.

I tried something a little different with my Opening Day photos: instead of simply exporting from iPhoto to static pages on BTN, I’ve opened an account at Flickr. So clicky to check them out; you can wander through individually or even view as a slideshow.

The event itself was pretty good — no major disturbances, nothing particularly unusual. The president was mostly cheered, though there were some boos that made the people cheering get louder. Photographically, the lesson of the evening was that 4x digital zoom is simply not enough from all the way down the left field line; fortunately, my usual seats are above first base. Metro was indeed a madhouse, particularly postgame, but driving would have been far worse.

The nice part is that I have tickets for 20 more regular-season games.

They're Here

My time is tracked, my computer is locked, and it’s time for something new and different…

[](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51431-2005Apr13.html)

I’m just minutes from Dunn Loring Metro, the Orange Line and RFK — pictures and full report postgame. GO NATS!