Many years ago, a local Chicago sportscaster named Howard Sudberry recounted a curious controversy surrounding a major league baseball game. Late in the contest, the team that would eventually win was up by ten runs. A player for that squad hit a single and then stole second base. The catcher of the trailing team whined after the game that this base-stealer was rubbing it in, essentially being unsportsmanlike. Well, Sudberry was having none of it. He looked into the camera and spoke, as it were, to the catcher himself: “Then throw him out!” He was implying that the base-stealer had done absolutely nothing opposed to the rules of baseball and that, if the catcher didn’t like it, he should try to beat him fair and square within the context of those same rules.

Read the article “Ross Douthat and the Catholic Academy” on wordonfire.org.