A Wish for the Fish (One Sixty-Two: Day 11)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day Eleven: Hanley Ramirez, Florida Marlins

Hanley Ramirez doesn’t fish for a living; he plays baseball, and he does so quite well. But every day, Ramirez walks onto the field with the likeness of a marlin stitched onto his cap and left shoulder. His team’s nickname celebrates the rich marine life of southern Florida. As one of his sport’s elite players, Ramirez carries that nickname and logo with him to All-Star games as well. More than 110 miles south of Ramirez’s home stadium in Miami, artists from Ernest Hemingway to Jimmy Buffett to Tennessee Williams have reveled in the culture, beauty and fishing of Key West, where sport fishermen here and throughout the Florida Keys head out each day to try and catch and release a marlin.

There are times when a crisis strikes our world, country or region with such force that everything else appears secondary in comparison. The massive oil spill now spreading throughout the Gulf of Mexico is quickly becoming one such crisis. As oil continues to gush through the ocean floor southeast of New Orleans and spread eastward, the future of critical American wetlands hangs in the balance. How far will the oil travel, and how much destruction will it cause? From Louisiana to Mississippi to Alabama to Florida, there is tremendous trepidation. And yes, they are bracing for the worst in the Keys, too.

Most of us aren’t capable of taking any direct action to help this situation. Of course, we can continue to educate ourselves as much as possible on energy use, and encourage our elected officials to push for the kind of energy policy we believe is best for the country. In the meantime, we can look at Hanley Ramirez’s cap and hope that the gorgeous animal his team celebrates – the one that fought Santiago so valiantly in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and glides through our waters so freely – can survive this man-made catastrophe and live to swim in a home that is clear, fresh and safe.