9781416592600

Beating Randy Johnson and the Trouble with David

Once upon a Monday night in August, I accidentally got to pitch in the big leagues. I buttoned up a red pin-striped jersey and threw a baseball for the Philadelphia Phillies. I was playing for the Braves Triple-A team at the time, and the Phillies purchased my contract off the waiver wire. I was supposed to be sent to Philadelphia's Triple-A team, but some crazy rule in the wavier process forced Ed Wade, the Phillies' general manager, to send me to the major leagues for at least a day. Because the Atlanta Braves minor league system had seen enough of my act the previous two years, they peacefully let me go with a handshake.

I will never forget that call.

After a few days of hanging out in limbo and holding hands with my overly calm wife in our cozy Richmond, Virginia, apartment, Mr. Wade called and said, "One of our pitchers got hurt yesterday. Congratulations, you're going to the big leagues." Then he chuckled and followed with, "You're going to get one start on Monday night against the Houston Astros and Randy Johnson. After that we have no idea what's going to happen."

I was in shock. My wife, Kym, was in shock. And as my two toddling boys, Grayson and Colby, pulled at my blue-jeaned pant legs, I realized that I had just gotten called up to the big leagues by some cosmic mishap -- and in three days I was going to have a gun-slinging showdown with one of the greatest pitchers of all time. Confusion, joy, fear, thankfulness, anxiety, and all sorts of other claustrophobic emotional nouns seemed to take turns licking my brain senseless. Part of me wanted to compete and immediately grab a ball and hit the catcher's mitt to take down Randy Johnson and the Astros -- and the other side of me wondered if this is what a man on death row feels like days before he's going to be executed.

On Monday, before I arrived at the stadium, Terry Francona, my new manager, asked a few players in the locker room what he should expect from me, but to his disappointment none of the hitters remembered facing some guy named Byrd. Nevertheless, Terry still decided to give me one start for my new team in hopes of seeing what I could do. My entire career was on the line that night and I tried to stay positive. I continued to fight back against the creeping feelings of fear and possible failure. The fact that I had to face Randy Johnson only made me take longer and deeper breaths.

Randy is a giant of a man who over the years has earned the nickname "the Big Unit." He stands about six foot ten with gangly arms and long legs that come flying at the hitter as his pitches sometimes reach the strike zone at around one hundred miles an hour. He is so tall that his body cuts down the distance to home plate giving his pitches the effect of a greater velocity than the simple numbered score of a radar gun. I had never seen a major league hitter literally fear a pitcher until the 1993 All-Star Game when John Kruk, a Phillies hitter, stepped out of the batter's box after one of Randy's pitches went sailing over his head. Kruk smiled a sigh of relief that the pitch didn't hit him and after a few more tense moments was happy to strike out and walk back to the dugout unharmed.

In 1998 the Big Unit began a four-and-a-half-year stretch of total dominance over the National League that the modern era of baseball had never seen before. He crushed and chewed up big-league hitters like a dog inhales treats. I sometimes wonder if he even tasted them. During this time, he amassed 91 wins, 1,533 strikeouts, a minuscule ERA, tons of innings, and a World Championship. Every possible statistical column that had to do with pitching was jaw dropping.

So in 1998, when the Phillies claimed me off waivers and gave me that fateful start in Veterans Stadium, not one single sportswriter gave me a chance to beat Randy Johnson. And they shouldn't have. To be honest, I was just happy that they spelled my last name correctly in the paper and actually mentioned that I would be pitching too.

I told my friend John Deatrick, a Catholic priest from Louisville, that I wanted to throw a shutout and beat him one to nothing. He said that he didn't have enough holy water in the state of Kentucky to make that happen and I should just go out and have fun.

When I did arrive at the stadium, Terry Francona was the first to shake my hand. Then he nodded and told me to "relax and have fun." Greg Jefferies, a new teammate of mine, started laughing when I made my way back to the underground bat room and picked out a smooth Louisville Slugger with someone else's name on it. He said, "I don't like your chances at the dish [home plate] tonight." Then he told me, "Pick a light bat and don't forget to go have some fun."

As I grabbed a smaller bat, I remembered Goliath, the giant Philistine champion from Gath, who stood over nine feet tall and walked in front of the armies of Israel chanting and screaming at them to send him one man to fight for their freedom. For forty days he strutted across a ridge with heavy armor and yelled, "I defy the armies of Israel today! Send me a man who will fight me!" Similar to my upcoming battle with Randy Johnson, where I had only one chance to prove myself, a great deal of me felt like the deeply shaken Israelites.

I smiled a rich grin when I thought of the words of David, the little brash red-haired shepherd boy who stood up for God, as I walked over to my new locker and read the story again. One of my favorite lines of the entire Bible comes from David who as a young boy says with regard to Goliath, "Who is this uncircumcised Philistine who dares to defy the armies of the Living God?"

When all the toughest men of Israel didn't want to get in the batter's box with Goliath, David did. He wanted to walk up to the dish.

David, in his youth, told King Saul, "Let no one lose heart on account of this Philistine; I am your servant and I will go and fight him."

The king of Israel responded, "You are not able to go out and fight this giant Philistine; you are only a boy, and he is a warrior who has been fighting from his youth."

Again, the boy replied, "When I tended the flocks of sheep on the hillside and a lion or a bear came and carried one off, I took my sling and went after it. Then I struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth. When the lion turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it and killed it. Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, because he has defied the armies of the Living God. The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine."

Saul said to David, "Go, and the Lord be with you."

The giant Philistine Champion approached David on the battlefield and looked him over, seeing that he was only a red-haired little boy with flushed cheeks. Goliath despised David. "Am I a dog, that you come at me with sticks?" And the giant cursed David by his gods. "Come over here," he said to David, "and I'll give your flesh to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field!"

David said back to the Philistine, "You come at me with a sword and spear, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will hand you over to me, and I will strike you down and cut off your head. Today, I will give the dead bodies of the Philistine army to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field, and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel. All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves; for the battle is the Lord's, and he will give all into our hands."

When Goliath moved closer to attack the red-haired boy, David ran quickly to the battle line to meet him. Reaching into his bag, he pulled out a smooth stone and with his sling threw the hard rock perfectly into the forehead of the giant. Goliath fell facedown on the ground and David ran over to him drawing the Philistine's own sword from his scabbard and did what he said he was going to do.

I looked up from my locker and was still. I had no animosity for Randy Johnson; as a matter of fact I admired him. I didn't want to cut his head off, I just wanted to beat him on the hard Veterans Stadium Astroturf and get a chance to continue pitching in a major league uniform. For someone like me who had always been looked at as too short and not very talented, it was a big deal to get a shot at beating a legend in the making.

I usually don't pray to God asking for victories, trying to leave room for his sovereignty by asking him to live his life through me so that I might somehow bring glory to him through competing, but that day I prayed differently. No. Instead, I prayed hard that I would beat him one to nothing without holy water and without a metal sword. I feel I matured right there in front of my locker and grew past mimicking a rehearsed prayer where I said words I thought God wanted to hear. I felt hungry. I wanted a win and I asked him for it.

After strong and focused conversation with God, I pulled up my socks and took the field to do battle and have fun.

God answered my prayer. It was a yes.

I beat Randy Johnson that night four to nothing, throwing a four-hit shutout. The most unusual part of the evening came early in the game when I drove in the game-winning run by getting a hit off the Big Unit. I swung off the mark at what I thought was one of his fastballs but as I extended my barrel of grainy wood across the plate the ball broke sharply toward it and somehow ended up dancing through the air over the shortstop's head. I ran to first base in the midst of what felt like a dream as many cheering fans came to their feet. My first-base coach, Brad Mills, took my batting gloves from me with a smile.

"His fastball is unbelievable! I can't believe I hit it. It moves so much," I said between heavy breaths. I learned the next day that I had actually hit a hanging slider.

I walked to the plate in the eighth inning to a standing ovation while the theme song from the movie Rocky blared from the speakers. I laughed.

It was a magical night in the City of Brotherly Love, and I felt the realness of God and his work in our present-day lives among the so-called ordinary people who walk up against modern-day giants. It was a night that proved to be Randy Johnson's only loss in the National League that year and it came at the hands of a man with a big forehead whom no one gave a chance.

After the game, when the reporters asked me how I managed to pull something off that was so improbable, I responded by telling them about my prayer and the story of David. USA Today printed my words and I felt alive the next morning as I read them without getting one wink of sleep.

The truth is I have always related to David and stories about underdogs who face their giants. Although I have never desired to kill an agnostic for making fun of my Lord, I do feel a deep passion for God. And when I walk out onto the pitching mound and look at my surgically repaired arm, I feel like I am carrying some rigged-up slingshot that has to throw a perfectly placed pitch or I'll be the one who loses my head. Even off the field, I believe God will do great things through me, but when I look in a mirror or check my spiritual stats, I feel inadequate. I look somewhat short. Stupidly, I compare myself to amazing men like Billy Graham, Tony Evans, or Rick Warren and I feel weak. I seem to forget that God doesn't want another one of those men or they would have twin brothers and he is happy with me the way I am and with what I bring to the table, even if it's not very attractive.

I pause.

You know, God loves you and me the way we are, even with all of our sinful baggage and apparent incompetence. As I get older, the more I truly believe that it is when we are weak and vulnerable that God begins to work through us and sustain us with his grace. It's almost like he is showing himself off through a broken red pot to let other people know he can work through a mess and shine through anybody who is willing to rely on him. It is in these moments that we must smile and thank God for the various scars on our arms and in our lives that have shown us to be imperfect. We have to understand that there might be times when we will fall down spiritually or misrepresent God. And like the boy who fought Goliath, we must respond, get up, and wipe our snotty noses while saying, "Who is this uncircumcised Philistine?" We must do this even if the giant that seems to threaten our relationship with God feels like he lives within our very selves. We must face our adequacy in him. As it is written, "Even though a righteous man falls seven times, he rises again, but the evil are brought down by calamity." I think we should get up, regardless of who or what trips us.

The following afternoon, I walked into the Philadelphia clubhouse feeling like a hero. I walked over to my locker and found a large manila envelope sitting on my chair. It was thick, and I wondered if it was full of cheese steak certificates or something nice since I had pitched so well. It wasn't. To my amazement it was filled with Xerox copies of numerous articles that showed many older biblical characters and present-day Christians who had done horrible and atrocious things over the years.

David's slipup with Bathsheba was at the top of the list.

I looked at the cover of the envelope to discover that there was no return address or name on the outside and since it didn't have time to go through the post office, I knew it was an inside job, sort of a paper hit-and-run.

I found only a note among all of the pages with a few words saying, "Paul, I just want you to know the real character of the God you serve. He confuses people's language and causes them to fight and war against each other. He approves of innocent children being slaughtered as you can see from the Passover. He has let men over the years take hundreds of wives while the women had to be devoted to only one husband. He has sent fire down from heaven to destroy complete cities and turned people into salt for simply looking back in response to a few desperate noises. He even approved of the slaughtering of his own Son, who died on the cross. And now you come in here and brag on God's character as if he is someone that we should all become attracted to. You haven't the faintest idea what you are talking about. You are a fool. Sleep well my friend."

Although I wanted to send the skeptical masterpiece off for handwriting analysis, I stuffed my urge and just chewed on the words of this cynical detective. I knew I had quickly established myself as a Jesus Freak and I would have to answer questions such as these if I was going to be dropping pickup lines for God among my postgame comments. I prayed to understand the flaws of people who loved God and to make sense of these troubling observations.

A few years back, I had an ongoing written debate with an atheist who was a teammate and remains a friend to this day. It lasted about eight months. We passed our points of view back and forth, communicating our thoughts on a notebook. He demanded that I give him proof that God existed so I gave it to him.

I made a few masterful points and told him how penguins can jump six feet in the air and how sneezes zoom out of our mouths at speeds over six hundreds miles an hour, but these cold hard facts didn't really impress him very much. I was shocked. Therefore, I took a different route.

I told him, "Faith, the gift of believing that which is not seen, does not require us to coat check our brains at the door."

I continued by explaining the mathematical probabilities of fulfilled prophecies that present themselves in both the Old and New Testaments, which is something that has always amazed me. Then I followed with a lob shot and mentioned the minute percentage of literary variations in the manuscripts of today's scriptures and the Dead Sea Scrolls, concentrating on the fragment from Isaiah that was dated two hundred years before the time of Christ. As I suspected, consistent textual accuracy was important for him. I brought up the argument of intelligent design and tried to open his eyes to the ridges of God's fingerprints that are all over both the visible creation and invisible things as well.

Stubbornly, he rebutted.

I made a couple of more masterful points. Followed by some weak arguments from him. Then I gave an incredible speech on paper that Einstein couldn't refute. Then more nonsense from him.

I write these words with a smile.

I think the greatest thing that we both appreciated about our talks and paper discussion was the fact that we listened to each other.

Nevertheless, one day while volleying our thoughts back and forth with a pen, I learned that my friend wasn't really looking for proof of God and his existence. Instead, like my anonymous hit-and-run friend from Philadelphia, he was looking for evidence that God was good.

I found this out one day when he too brought up the trouble with David.

"And if I did believe in a god, which I don't, I sure wouldn't pick the one in the Bible. I mean look at David. He had sex with his friend's wife, got her pregnant, and then killed her husband. And what was your God's response to that? He called David a man after his own heart!"

Atheist John Doe had made a point to think about. It was one I had to consider.

Our discussions became even better after that exchange and I learned that at one time my atheist friend believed he was a Christian. Like most of us, my friend had deep struggles and embarrassing pain. And he prayed hard for God to change his troubling desires and take them away. When no one answered him, he decided that his Creator wasn't for him. My friend then chose to pretend as if God had never been real in the first place. He promptly got involved in a skeptics club and began to arm himself with arguments that set themselves up against the knowledge of God. He had joined the dark side of disbelief and rejected the goodness of the Almighty.

I really hope my friend has some type of Darth Vader last-minute conversion experience where he changes his mind. I hope one day soon his young son will help him take off that heavy black mask.

I once walked into a typical big building American church to speak on the love of God. It was the church's twenty-fifth anniversary so they had rented out a large auditorium for the event. It was ginormous. A large number of people attended, and I was a little intimidated being half the age of many people in the crowd. I felt as if the older faces knew it all and I didn't. What could I bring to the table in my youth? I hoped they wouldn't roll their eyes at me when I took the stage. I don't like it when eyes make circles.

The main reason I was the featured speaker was due to the fact that I was a current major league ballplayer with the Philadelphia Phillies. When the pastor introduced me, he talked of my character or at least my reputation in major league baseball and the community. He also talked of my family. Since he didn't have access to the entire closet of my life like God does, the introduction the pastor was giving to the crowd was very flattering. I sat there thinking and getting a little full of myself. Arrogance is always dangerous, especially when it starts to grab a hold of you just before you speak. If you don't recognize it, you might get up there and start preaching about yourself. And apart from him, we are all very boring and lifeless.

But then I thought of something. What if the pastor introduced me by saying that I was a great man of God and had done wonderful things for Jesus in the past but recently I had fallen into some trouble? Then he continued by stating that I had started an affair with one of my teammates wives. I had initiated having sex with her and gotten her pregnant. And since I was the chapel leader of my team and had a solid reputation, I needed to cover it up. So in an effort to do that, I called a friend of mine that was a hit man and had my teammate murdered.

What if the pastor then continued his introduction of me by further explaining that I had no control of my family? My son had slept with my daughter along with one of my wives and was now trying to kill me, his father. The video of my son lying intimately with my wife was now circulating the Internet and was available for anyone to see with just a few simple clicks of a computer mouse. I wondered if the crowd would listen to me intently after that kind of an introduction, or instead, would call the police.

Of course, I'm giving you a modern-day example of some of the sad mistakes and ending events of David's life. I have to confess now that I am thankful for people in the Bible like David. I think the Bible sends us messages that we can still love God even after we make crucial and horrible mistakes and it also lets us know that he can still speak through us despite our sins.

It's almost like God has the ability to make light shine out of darkness.

I think we sometimes judge maturity by looking at the number of visible sins in a person's life. But I think God is different from us when he says he looks at a person's heart. He judges a little more accurately than we do. And I have learned in life and through numerous scriptures that a person with a clean heart can do some pretty bad things. I think this is one of the reasons that there are no cover-ups in scripture. Outrageous behavior by people throughout the Bible is recorded and not compromised or deleted. The mistakes communicate to me that God will still take anyone who loves him or calls out his name.

Recently I picked up a book by Peter Kreeft called Christianity for Modern Pagans. It is basically a dissection of Blaise Pascal and his Pensées. The great French mathematical genius explained the importance of intellect and reason when coming to Christ but also warned us not to forget about the heart.

I learned that each of our lives is like a ship on open waters. We look at the stars and try to chart a course but God controls the waves. We reason with ourselves and scratch our heads trying to make sense of our journeys, wondering how the tides have brought us to the decision between heaven and hell. It is then that an honest man knows that the captain of the ship is his heart. And he has a choice to believe in God's way or his own, a choice to turn the rudder and aim for a heavenly city or a fading familiar world.

Kreeft picks up on Pascal by saying, "It is with our heart that we make the fateful choices of our God, our mate and our career...Therefore, our eternal destiny depends, not on our intelligence, which we largely inherited, but on our heart and will and love, which are freely chosen and for which we are justly responsible forever."

I guess our hearts really do matter more than our heads, and even though we hunger for our actions to match our love for God and other people, I would be lying to say that it always turns out this way. Sometimes we are like children and yell at our stuffed animals instead of hugging them. Sometimes we take out our frustrations on the person we are the closest to and love the most. There is much in this world that makes me sad.

There was a time early in my walk when I misunderstood the Bible. I studied the Bible with my head, kind of like a textbook. I pored over the Psalms, studying them to take a final that wasn't scheduled. After a while, I got it. What I got was that I wasn't supposed to be doing that. I think the main reason all biblical books are written is to lead us into a relationship with the author.

Let me try to say it in another way. Instead of studying the Psalms with our heads, we should be writing them with our hearts. Penning our own. I'm not saying that we should never read the poems of the Bible or study helps; we should. I'm just saying that after a few good reads we should get the feel of what pleases God. We should look at how David interacted with God. It obviously pleased our Father. Was David honest? Did he follow a popular paperback of his day entitled, The Ten Perfect Steps to Prayer? Did he dance? Were his eyes closed while he was yelling at God? Did David bathe before he danced? Could it be that none of these things mattered and God just simply enjoyed being the top priority on David's heart list?

John Eldredge, the author of Wild at Heart, joked around one time at a retreat in Colorado saying that David might have had a multiple-personality disorder. He said this because David changes his tone and way of thinking so much throughout his writing.

I just thought David might have been a little bipolar and unable to run down the street to a doctor or local drugstore.

Listen to him in the Psalms.

"I am not afraid of the multitude of people who attack me from all directions. Rise up, Lord! Deliver me, my God! Yes, you will strike all my enemies on the jaw" (Psalm 3:6-7 NET).

And, "I will lie down and sleep peacefully, for you, Lord, make me safe and secure" (Psalm 4:8 NET).

And, "Listen to what I say, Lord! Carefully consider my complaint! Pay attention to my cry for help, my king and my God, for I am praying to you!" (Psalm 5:2 NET).

And here, I sometimes wonder if David is yelling at God or he doesn't understand how to use an exclamation point properly. The long sticks that stand over dots are all over the place. David writes, "I will thank the Lord with all my heart! I will tell about all your amazing deeds! I will be happy and rejoice in you! I will sing praises to you, O sovereign One!" (Psalm 9:1 NET).

In another psalm: "Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you pay no attention during times of trouble? The wicked arrogantly chase the oppressed; the oppressed are trapped by the schemes the wicked have dreamed up. Yes the wicked man boasts because he gets what he wants; the one who robs others curses and rejects the Lord. The wicked man is so arrogant he always thinks, 'God won't hold me accountable; he doesn't care.' He is secure at all times....Break the arm of the wicked and evil man!" (Psalm 10:1-4, 15 NET).

Just before I shake my head back and forth to make fun of David for acting like a kid on the playground, God reminds me that my head and heart think in the same way. I just don't tell God like David did. I just scratch the egg-shaped melon that sits atop my shoulders and ask myself, "I wonder why God always takes care of that guy?" And when I pray, I don't get emotional and yell at him to pay attention. I am too respectful for that. But I do raise my voice to my wife demanding that she hear me, and we are very close. Maybe I am the one who is confused. At times, my prayers lack intimacy. They lack passion. They lack exclamation points and question marks. Maybe I need to get more emotional with God like I do with Kym. I am real with my wife, even though I respect her. That's the way I want to approach God -- opening up the depths of my soul to him, just like David did.

I guess the reality of the situation is that David was probably perfectly normal and the only one who was in touch with his true feelings. Either way I don't think that God cared. Or I guess he cared, I just think that God likes to be talked to more than he likes being talked about. And that's what the Psalmist did; he talked to God honestly.

As far as firsthand learning goes, I don't want my second son to study my first child's conversations with me over and over. I want my second son, Colby, to talk directly to me. He is different. I believe that it is the same with God. We are all unique. I want to write about my own personal struggles and victories directly to my Father. Your psalms should be a little different from mine and unlike David's.

And like the biblical King David, we shouldn't be concerned with our enemies hemming us in. When David blessed his children while he lay on his deathbed, he didn't give them the ten steps to live by, he just simply took their hand and said, "Get to know your Father." I think he appreciated the process of learning from the Source.

POWERFUL!

One day recently, while sitting at an airport, I talked to a man who graduated from a top seminary in America. He had studied Hebrew and knew a great deal about the Old Testament. Because slender Bibles fit better in my travel bag, I asked him, "Why do the thinner Bibles have the New Testament combined with the Psalms and Proverbs? Are the Psalms and Proverbs theologically superior to the other Old Testament books?"

I guessed the book of Leviticus would not have been the best choice for an addition. It talks about the spilling of semen and unclean menstrual cycles.

He shuffled around the question, but we had a great discussion on the importance of Scripture. It was obvious that he knew a lot about the various books in the Bible. We talked a lot about the Psalms.

Then I asked him if he had written any poems to God.

"Poems to God?" he said with a question. "Why would I do that? You can't top the Bible."

It was a heartbreaking response. I think he had missed the point.

I know I am still a work in progress, but I think the life of David has really freed me in a way. I have learned that relationship counts to our Creator. It means more to him than the worldly scales most of us use to compare both our good and bad deeds against one another. God called David a man after his own heart before he defeated the arrogant giant named Goliath; before he became king; before his affair with Bathsheba. God said this about David while he was still a youth. All David did was sit by himself as a young boy and watch sheep while talking and singing to his heavenly Father. But then again most people don't do that. To most abandoned children, and that is what many of us feel like at one time or another, God doesn't absorb and consume their thoughts like he did David's. Most people would complain about why their lives were so unpleasant or why they had to sit alone for days on a hillside. Most people don't dance naked before him and write songs and poems of his goodness. Most people keep their clothes on because they care about what other people think and are afraid to get laughed at. I am ashamed to admit that I struggle to take the covering off my heart when I worship.

Excerpted from Free Byrd: The Power of a Liberated Life by Paul Byrd
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Foreword
Beating Randy Johnson and the Trouble with David
Churchill Downs and a Damaged Left Testicle
The Great DiMaggio and the Christian Subculture
Trying to get Life and Acceptance from the Pages of Playboy Magazine
Amazing Grayson!
A Pair of Navy Blue Knee-High Socks
Larry the Legend
The Magnificent Performance of Colby Byrd
Jacob Wrestled God; I Wrestled Eddie Perez
When Bad Things Happen to Good Baseball Players
God is My Pitching Coach
Mike Sweeney and the House of God
Faith and the HGH Scandal
Acknowledgments
Notes
More Online
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

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Free Byrd : The Power of a Liberated Life

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