About the Bluffton Baseball Team Crash in Atlanta....

self | 3/7/07 | The Drowning Witch

[The Drowning Witch]

It is wrong when anyone dies. It is WRONG when anyone dies because it is not their time, however we might measure such a thing. It is wrong when good young men die in any war, it is wrong when my wife's parents die in a twisted pile of metal at the hands of a drunken piece of **** on a God-forsaken stretch of NJ turnpike when she was 12.

But as wrong as it is when Mr. Death reaches out his bony fingers to put us in his cold,cold pocketses, sophomore infielder David Betts of Bryan, Ohio; freshman third and first baseman Scott Harmon of Lima, Ohio; freshman pitcher Cody Holp of Arcanum, Ohio; and sophomore outfielder Tyler Williams, also of Lima.....they didn't deserve to be taken from this world so soon. They might just possibly have had another 100,000 innings between them. How many times that they could have grabbed their gloves and stepped upon that top step of the dugout, and ran out between those white lines, onto that verdant sea of green?????

They had the Eternity that belongs only to the Young of Life before them, and a limitless vista of possibilities.

And because of a simple misjudgement.....They are No More.

We are frail things. We are tossed and adrift upon the ripples of Fate and Chance. We are at the mercy of an uncaring, unrepentant, brutal and vicious whim of an open-ended equation that is being inexorably solved upon a blackboard just out of our line of sight.

I would have liked to maybe see Cody Holp on TV one crisp night in October.

I would have liked that a lot. There might be 10,000 other young men who will pass in and out of The Game, but I wonder about those who never got their Chance. The World is far too cruel a place for those lads.

If there's a Heaven, I think they'll get their chance everyday.