Baseball Karma and the Constitution Blues by Ronnie Norpel

Author:Ronnie Norpel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: baseball, baseball curses, baseball romance, baseball novels
Publisher: Ronnie Norpel

The Decision Tree kept leading me back to something which I had never considered—never dreamed of being in a position to have to consider. And yet it seemed somehow the responsible thing to do, to minimize all the potential drama, to maintain my privacy about my thrashed identity, to keep hidden my mistaken belief in Love and Baseball, to make that choice. Decision scientists tell us that people tend to avoid risk when seeking gains, but choose risk to avoid losses.† I decided to risk everything to avoid further damage. Now that I had a reputation.

Being a believer—a Catholic even, as I mulled abortion like never before—I believed I was already forgiven. And I considered that choice, taking that risk, a leap of faith. Though my faith was begotten by religion, I believed my faith now had to stand alone, separate from the Catholic Church on this one. No matter what the Church said, I had been taught that Jesus had died for my sins. It was all one big sin. Major leaguer indeed. And I was already forgiven. In God’s eyes anyway.

Could I possibly conceive of an abortion as a moral choice? See it as a mercy killing?

I feared I would resent the child for the rest of my life if I had it and kept it. Growing up resented is not healthy for a child. The Denver Post won a Pulitzer for a study of missing children: most were either tug-o-warriors involved in custody disputes or runaways. Sounds like loveless resentment and pressured pregnancies. Might those kids not better go missing before even showing up? (Freakonomics said so.)

I considered the larger whys and wherefores of abortion beyond my immediate circumstance. There was that oh, you might be killing the next Jonas Salk, or the one who would cure cancer argument. But the mathematical probability of murdering a genius is 1 in 500 trillion,† which means the odds are just as great or small of aborting the next Voldemort. We perchance take the good and the bad. Statistics aside, what is taken by abortion is a sole chance: the distinct entwirling of the genetic codes carried by that one sperm to those contained in that particular egg only happens once.

* * *

Blaise Pascal chose to believe in God to avoid the consequence of his being wrong were he to choose otherwise. I had to believe I was pre-forgiven in the Cross because I couldn’t bear to measure the consequence of being wrong otherwise. There is a certain irony to the Cruxifiction in the face of Thou Shalt Not Kill: Jesus’s death on the Cross is the literal crux of Christianity, yet it itself is the Big Kill. (And he had already been alive for 33 years.)

In a way it wasn’t even a choice, so much as an algebraic equation with a few big, unsolvable unknowns, to which I assigned risk factors, Degrees of Difficulty—like the scoring for diving. And I was pacing atop a tall cliff, with imaginary bookiemen laying money on my belly-flop.

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