Stemming the Flow (One Sixty-Two: Day 44)

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 Forty-Four: Chris Tillman, Baltimore Orioles

When you view it through the box score, it looks like a disaster. He faced 11 batters, and five of them reached via hit. Two more walked. Four runners scored. The line tells you he pitched one and one-third inning, and watched from the mound as the Boston Red Sox belted him around the park. Once the struggles began for Chris Tillman last night, they didn’t stop.

Tillman is one of the Baltimore Orioles’ hot young prospects, and he’ll likely pitch much better his next time around. But last night, after absorbing a Boston pounding, the young man might have struggled to remember it was just a game.

If he did have some trouble letting go of last night’s loss, Tillman needed only to look at a newspaper for perspective. A lost ballgame hurts, but the flow of Red Sox runs means very little compared to the flow of oil beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

Tillman’s poor pitching numbers pale in comparison to the numbers we’re getting out of the Gulf: According to British Petroleum, more than 115 million gallons of oil may already have spilled into the Gulf since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion of April 20. The lineup of animals affected by this disaster is much more frightening than any Red Sox lineup, ranging from pelicans and gulls to dolphins and whales to shrimp and plankton to tuna and turtles. Scientists and reporters are helping us to understand this crisis, and the government and BP are trying to fix it. But the reality is crystal-clear that this never, ever should have happened.

Two of my seniors gave a presentation this week on solar and wind energy. They constructed their own wind turbine using a bicycle wheel, duct tape, an old car jack, a car belt, scrap wood and a ’61 Ford generator. As wind blew on the turbine, the voltmeter displayed energy, created solely by air.

It’s the same air that lifted those hits off of Chris Tillman last night. But it’s clean and crisp and free, and the only thing it does to turtles and pelicans is fill their lungs. We bounce back from disasters by making changes. The sun and the wind are here, ready to provide for us. It’s time to change our approach to energy, because this kind of mistake needs a game-changer.