The Supreme Court made what critics would describe as some imperfect decisions in the week that New York Yankees pitcher Domingo Germán pitched a perfect game. While the two would seem unrelated, they both tell us a great deal about the unfairness and seeming randomness of life.
The Supremes’ decisions to strike down affirmative action as well as student loan debt forgiveness and allow certain “expressive” businesses hypothetically and preemptively to deny service to “protected classes” of minorities — in this case, gay couples who. planned to marry — will leave many out in the cold. (On the other hand, the court saved us, and our democracy, from the Republican plan to gerrymander federal elections by leaving unfavorable results up to unchecked state legislatures, so we must be grateful for that.)
When it comes to affirmative action, though, I’m of two minds. If you’re going into surgery, you don’t want the best doctor who checks off certain boxes. You just want the best doctor — period. Yet schools need diversity, because when you get out in the workplace, you’re going to have to deal with all kinds of people. In my admissions essay for Sarah Lawrence College, I wrote that I hoped college would help me understand people. Book learning I had and would certainly acquire. But I was also hungry for the social, the experiential, the practical. Sarah Lawrence helped me build on the intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness I had first developed at home.
Which brings me to the crux of affirmative action: We need to ensure that all children, from the moment they shoot out of the womb, have the skills they need to go on to technical and academic schools and succeed in this world as workers and citizens. Look at test scores in this country — and they are just one measure. Children are failing, and we are failing them, in the classroom and at home.
As for Colorado web designer Lorie Smith, I’m going to be kind. No doubt she thinks what she is doing is artistic and that as a Christian, designing a website for a gay couple about to be married would offend her Christian, artistic sensibility — even though no such couple asked her to do so. But I can tell you as a cultural writer and editor for 43 years that art is only about itself. Am artist may or may not sell his work. But that’s not why he creates it. He creates, because he’s compelled to express himself in his medium of choice.
Smith is running a business, and I can guarantee that if the client doesn’t like what she creates, she’s not going to get paid. She’s not Vincent van Gogh painting cypresses. The fact that Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote about the primacy of self-expression in his majority opinion, thinks she’s some sort of an artist tells you a lot about his education — or lack thereof.
Will businesses use the new ruling to deny services to people in certain states? Probably. But corporations are going to go where the money is, and that’s in diversity and inclusion, even if they have to balance those with a more conservative clientele. Either way, somebody’s going to be unhappy.
Which brings me to the Dominican Republic’s Domingo Germán, and his June 28 perfect game against the lowly Oakland Athletics, or A’s, a team that has been gutted as it prepares to move from Oakland, California, to Las Vegas. Germán had been suspended for domestic violence and cheating. He’s a mediocre pitcher on a mediocre Yankee team. So hardly the poster boy for perfection, which in baseball terms is 27 men up and. 27 down. You give up no hits, walks or runs and your teammates make no errors. (Germán threw 99 pitches in nine innings. Generally, perfect games have low-pitch counts as the pitcher tends to get ahead of each batter on the count.)
Needless to say, some people took umbrage that Germán had been anointed by the baseball gods. But baseball perfection is not awarded merely to the immortals. Of the 24 men who have pitched perfect games, only a third are in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Of the three other Yankees who have done it — the team holds the record with four — Don Larsen, the only man to pitch a perfect game in a World Series (against the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1956), was a mediocre pitcher, while the two Davids (Wells and Cone in 1998 and ’99 respectively) were hardly choirboys. (Wells later said he was hungover.)
Along with being pitched by imperfect men, perfect games can come in imperfect moments. Cone pitched his on July 18, 1999, two days after John F. Kennedy Jr. died in a plane he was piloting, along with wife Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette. Germán said he was thinking of the uncle he had recently lost.
Sometimes, though, the perfect game is pitched by one seemingly chosen by the baseball gods. Roy Halladay was the poster boy for pitchers, a dominant player first with the Toronto Blue Jays and then with the Philadelphia Phillies, for whom he pitched a perfect game in 2010. Seven years later, he, too, would be dead in a plane he was piloting, his body laced with drugs.
The black kid who dreams of Harvard, the gay kid who wants to marry one day, the Dominican kid who hopes for the big leagues: Life seems random until it doesn’t as patterns in the universe later emerge and what looked improbable becomes inevitable. We don’t choose the circumstances into which we are born. Rather the circumstances choose us. It’s what we do with those circumstances that matters.
At the end of his beautifully written piece about Germán and the perfect game, The New York Times’ Tyler Kepner quotes Halladay’s widow, Brandy, as her husband was inducted posthumously into the Hall of Fame: “We all struggle. But with hard work, humility and dedication, imperfect people can still have perfect moments.”