Community
7th Inning Apocalypse - Savin' Souls with Reverend Doc
By Reverend Doc Fish
Oct 12, 2003, 11:32

These are busy days here at the Holy Compound of the First Church of The Holy Fish. The hurricane season in South Florida is nearly over, and we’ve got several dozen emergency boxes of Little Debbie’s Oatmeal Pies to consume, although technically their expiration date is somewhere around the 23rd century. But most of the resident faithful here are consuming treats of the audio/visual type: fall sports.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game - Yankee's Don Zimmer enjoys a comfortable limo ride from the ballpark.

Fall means evenings with temperatures dipping into the upper seventies, about a billion mothers wielding oversized SUV’s as they drive their kids to school, and the bombardment of All Things Sport on both local and national TV. The Holy Herd here at the compound may be getting on in years, but they follow big-time sports with a fanaticism that would make Jim Jones envious. About 75% an have inexplicable loyalty to college teams in northern climes, still raving about the talents of “that Jim Brown kid” and the subtle delights of the Polo Grounds, and the other 25%, while lacking loyalty to any team, are nonetheless equally passionate. They’re the ones that, as they define it, like to “invest in the outcome of sporting events”.

The majority of the investors spend their efforts and AT&T residuals on football events, where the Investment Agent, just to make things fair, giveth and taketh away points for teams, based on information from the supreme mountaintop of gambling, Las Vegas. This is, as any croupier will tell you, a sucker bet. If the Great Creator wanted the Saints to start off with an extra eight points at kickoff, he woulda bestowed them with a perfect Hail Mary pass at the start of each game. AND the two point conversion.

Nope, ain’t gonna happen, Superdome or no Superdome. If you wanna get ahead of your neighborhood bookie, you gotta go mano-a-mano with him. And that means laying down some long green on the purest and most spiritual of all sports.

Baseball.

There’s more darned information on a given baseball game, every day, than there’s names in the Tokyo white pages. How a pitcher pitches on Thursdays at eighty-one degrees, with 49% relative humidity and a single cumulus cloud at 7,000 feet, with the second moon of Neptune partially obscured by a weak meteor shower from the Bolinthian Galaxy…it’s all there in your local paper, on the ‘statistics’ page that’s printed in microscopic Helvetica type. There’s an occasional, expensive exception, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred you can pretty much count on Roger Clemens and his Yankee friends to whip the b’Jesus out of the hapless Tampa Bay Devil Rays with Jorge Sosa, carrying a lifetime ERA of 5.01, on the mound.

‘Course, a game like that goes off at something like -240, meaning you gotta lay out $240 to win $100, but it’s all a matter of percentages, and the Devil Rays would be relying more on prayer than inside sliders in that contest.

Famine, Plague, Pestilence & War. Oh, yeah, and Tim McCarver. Repent now.

Things get tighter at World Series time, but I wouldn’t cast any currency at this year’s event, no sir. Because, as horrifying as it is to even contemplate, there’s the possibility of this year’s Series being played by the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse may very well be riding into the ball park with Cubs and BoSox pennants soon. Could be they’re splitting forces; Famine and Plague storming Wrigley Field, Pestilence and War galloping through the turnstiles at Fenway. Feels about right, I think. Heck, the Red Sox are already showing signs of demonic possession, with the normally placid Pedro Martinez slamming 72 year-old Yankee bench coach with a jackknife powerbomb yesterday in Boston.

”The time has come, the day has arrived…” Ezekiel prophesied for something like twenty-two years, and his fortelling of the end can be pretty unsettling. Read him enough and at least you think you know what you’re in for. But the Red Sox and Cubs in the World Series? Barring a natural catastrophe, one of them would actually end up WINNING the thing.

You can bet that old Ezekiel didn’t prepare us for that kind of horror.



Click here to subscribe to Savin' Souls with Rev. Doc

© Copyright 2002-2004 by GlossyNews.com