Babe Ruth is not a girl. or How your life is affected by sports, even if unknowingly.

In the movie “The Sandlot,” Scotty Smalls sneaks a Babe Ruth autographed baseball out of his house so that he and his friends can play some back yard ball. When they lose the ball, Smalls informs his friends that it was autographed by some Babe Ruth person, even asking, “Who is she?”

Well, if you know the clip, you know his buddies respond that he is:
“The Sultan of Swat”

“The King of Crash”

“The Colossus of Clout”

“The Colossus of Clout”

“THE GREAT BAMBINO!”

Now, maybe you aren’t as clueless as Smalls and you know who Babe Ruth is. But the humor here plays off the fact that everyone knows who Babe Ruth is.

I’d like to claim that sports and sports figures play a similar, yet even larger role in our current culture. In the same way that you can’t enter a shopping goods store without there being a holiday you just need to buy something for (I’m looking at you Wal-Mart and yourChristmas supplies that came out with Halloween decorations), we also can’t go a week now without a major sporting event or sports newsmaker impacting us in some way or another. A few examples from recent sports culture:

Tiger Woods: famous for golf, infamous for adultery.

Lance Armstrong: famous for being cycling’s Babe Ruth and being the backbone to Livestrong, infamous for cheating, lying, and bullying.

And now Ryan Braun, a young perennial MVP candidate who beat the system... once. But now is suspended for the remainder of this season for using performance enhancing drugs and lying about it.

So what? A bunch of millionaires are getting themselves in trouble? How does that affect me?

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When I was finishing 11th grade I was fortunate enough to play on a State Championship baseball team. I didn’t start, but I stole a ton of bases and scored a bunch of runs. Either way, I received the same gold medal that our soon-to-be-minor-league-shortstop had hung around his neck that day. We got paraded around the town on top of a fire truck. Seven year olds and seventy year olds not only knew my name, they knew my stats as I autographed their t-shirts and hats. It’s hands down one of the highlights of my entire life. We put tiny Palmyra, Pennsylvania on the map. And apparently gained Coca Cola’s attention.

When we got back to school that fall, we now had Coca Cola vending machines, a Coca Cola sponsored banner congratulating us hanging in our cafeteria, and congruent advertisements around the school and the ball fields.

And money.

Suddenly our sports fields became nicer. We had a new paint job on our school walls. Our sporting events became more attended.

And as I look back over the years, the whole of our school systems are now more than ever sports-and-money-oriented.

Even though there are studies out there proving that elementary aged kids are better suited for school times of 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., and secondary school aged youth being better learners with a 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. timeslot, those time assignments are swapped. Why? So we can use buses for both primary and secondary schools without having to purchase more of them. But more so that sports teams can play their games in the sunlight, so they have time to travel, and because school’s make money off of sporting events. Plain and simple.

Now, I’m not complaining about this. But at the same time, when it is a known fact that teenagers don’t fare as well academically in the morning compared to kids (trust me, I work with college students) we blatantly sacrifice academic success for sports.

Do you see now how this all relates? As sports stars make millions, as scholarships are doled out to the athletic bourgeoisie, and schools profit off of touchdowns, everyone from individual students to parents to entire school systems (see Penn St. and the whole Jerry Sandusky ordeal) are being whirled around the gravitational pull of sports.

In the posts to come I hope to help you both navigate and weigh carefully the role that sports play in our lives, our faith, our neighborhoods and our future.

Even if you think Babe Ruth is a girl, I’m here to help you make sense of the influence that sports has in your life.