The Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth

On May 2, 2018 I was standing in the third base coaching box in the bottom of the 7th inning of the Legacy Charter High vs. Masters Academy playoff game.

We were losing 8-0 and were a couple of outs away from a likely season-ending loss.

My oldest son, and Legacy's captain, Gehrig Chambless was in the batters box getting ready to come to the plate for the last time in his high school career and the last time he and I would be on the field together as father and son.

I had been his coach for virtually every season since 2006 from the TFA Royals, through Winter Garden Little League and Legacy High School.

I remember how excited Gehrig was to get his first uniform - #14  - when he was 7 years old.  He loved being on a team and having official games.  his first game ever he stood out in right field and practiced his swing.

Before he took his last swing in 2018 I noticed that he was wiping his eyes and had his head down.

Slowly, he turned and began walking all the way out to where I was standing.

When he got to me it was clear he was shedding tears.   He looked at me and said, "Thanks for coaching me all these years...." and then he gave his dad and coach an unforgettable hug.

On April 19, 2020 I retired from coaching baseball.  That night Gehrig and I, along with his mom and brother, watched 'Field of Dreams' for probably the 15th time.   

It was the last movie Gehrig and ever watched together and one that is especially meaningful to me now.

Every time the ending of this movie plays out, I weep like I am seeing it for the first time.   When Kevin Costner says, "Dad....you wanna have a  catch?"   I always - like any other American son - pictured that being me and my dad.

The last time Gehrig and I played catch as father and son was in 2019.  Strangely, we got to be all by ourselves on his high school field and we played catch for a longer period of time than we ever had.  I did not want that evening to end.  I knew that would most likely be our last time together on a baseball field.  As we walked off together I hope he felt how special that time was to me.  I hope it was to him.  

Gehrig died on April 26, 2020.   Bizarrely, I new see myself in the Kevin Costner role but instead of seeing my dad slowly turn and realizing it is him it is actually, in my mind, my son.  I can picture in my mind the image of him in his catcher's gear, youthful, strong and free of the troubles that come as we get older.

Lou Gehrig once said - even as he was facing his own early death - that he felt like "the luckiest man on the face of the Earth."

I feel like I was the luckiest dad and coach on the face of the earth to have Gehrig Chambless as my son and player.

And wish I could see him on Earth one more time, in his catcher's gear and say to him, "Gehrig, would you like to play catch?"  

I think he would love to.....

 

Little Bighorn - a poem by Gehrig William Chambless

 

LITTLE BIGHORN

                                                                                                         

 

The gentle breeze blowing soft

Upon the silent plains

The amber glow of summer sun

Last light of the day

The howling wolf from mountains far

The graceful eagle soars

The night before the fiery hell

The peace at Little Bighorn

 

The rifle rounds are stored and stashed

Within an easy reach

They check the lines, shouting names

Searching for a breach

Three hundred strong, they march and pray

Asking that their Lord

Guide the General’s heart and mind

The road to Little Bighorn

 

The visions of darkness, moons before

Warned of those to die

“Soldiers falling into camp

Like grasshoppers from the sky”

The words of Sitting Bull, from spirit worlds

The rally of the sworn

To stand and die for their land

The hope of Little Bighorn

 

The forming of the treaty

Lakota and Cheyenne

Drawn by winds and dancing stars

To make another stand

The trails from far to Greasy Grass

The making of a lore

The braves that moved in for the kill

Surrounding Little Bighorn

 

Painted as the dawning sky

Proudly standing tall

They sat astride their mighty steeds

The hammer set to fall

The thousands strong, they dreamed of this

The day that it was born

Upon the myths and legends told

The tale of Little Bighorn

 

The soldiers marched, steadily on

Toward the place that fates

Had chosen for the blood to run

Toward the painted face

The fields of green, their boots would tread

Where ground would soon be torn

And then a man boldly cried

“March to Little Bighorn”

 

The soldiers heart, with all its care

For those he’d left behind

Was pierced for sins of greater men

Who ordered him to ride

The proud old man, with yellow hair

Too proud to sheath his sword

Spurred his mount, and dared to ride

To the jaws of Little Bighorn

 

One by one, they fell around

The braves still seemed to come

But the proud old man, with yellow hair

Wouldn’t drop his gun

And the fury of men betrayed by those

Whose honor wasn’t more

Than that which drifts with the wind

The scourge of Little Bighorn

 

The arrows flew and crimson streams

Flowed from those who passed

As they dropped to the ground

Upon the broken Greasy Grass

The widows of men who fell that day

And all their woeful mourns

Could be heard across the plains

The fall of Little Bighorn

 

The proud old man, with yellow hair

Too proud to raise the white

Rallied again, and called to arms

Those to stand and fight

The soldiers crawled to the proud old man

The weary, tired, and worn

They could feel the hand of death

Choking Little Bighorn

 

Battle cries joined the wind

Melting strongest minds

Of the men that fought to live

Trying to survive

The smell of powder filled the air

And the sun upon the corpse

Of the first to fight and die

Losing Little Bighorn

 

And the proud old man, with yellow hair

Stood up one last time

He raised his sword in prideful dare

Beneath the stars and stripes

And a thousand arrows pierced his heart

Just as was forewarned

And the proud old man, with yellow hair

Died at Little Bighorn

Biden’s Irrational Approach to Regulations will Cost all of Us

Like many other folks who work in my chosen field, the 2020 election was not a contest involving the lesser of two evils but more like choosing between the evil of two lessers.    

Free market economists spent four exhausting years trying to explain to our students and anyone who would listen why Donald Trump’s anti-immigration and nationalistic trade policies were damaging to the American economy.     At the same time, we were wary of the litany of tax and regulatory proposals coming out of the Biden camp.  When someone runs for president during a recession and calls for even more punitive capital gains and income taxes, along anti-business, and anti-employment rules, it makes you wonder about their economic literacy. 

So, like other pro-capitalism economists, I joined roughly 1% of the rest of the country and threw my vote away on the Libertarian candidate. 

On January 20th I was happy to see Trump leave office but immediately missed one good aspect of his presidency. 

On the day he took office, President Joe Biden issued a presidential memo entitled, “Modernizing Regulatory Review”.  The memo was intended to ensure that every review process would reflect the latest in economic and scientific research and would fully account “for regulatory benefits that are difficult or impossible to quantify.” Furthermore, the memo insisted that these regulatory reviews not have any harmful anti-regulatory or deregulatory effects. 

At the risk of insulting the intelligence of some of you who instantly know what this means, let me explain what this memo does. 

Students of economics learn that rational behavior exists when the benefits of some action equal or exceed the direct plus opportunity cost.   President Biden’s memo instructs regulatory authorities to consider proven benefits that the scientific and/or economics community has established, THEN search for benefits that cannot be measured easily, or at all.   While this is taking place, the reviewers are instructed to ignore the opportunity costs of pursuing any efforts that would lead to less regulation. 

This is akin to you seeing a shirt that you know is worth $20 to you.  You then add to that $20 another $5000 in made up benefits that would come from the shirt helping you land a job as CEO of Google.  If the shirt costs $120 you then ignore the second-best choice for how to use that $120 and buy the shirt anyway because the known benefit ($20) plus the impossible to measure benefit (the odds of landing the job) are greater than $120. 

The Biden memo charts a new course towards greater,  arguably irrational, but inarguably expensive, new regulations. 

What everyone should understand is that economics policy does not take place in a vacuum.  Every regulatory decision handed down by executive order or Congressional action is a new cost imposed on business firms and individuals.  Those costs have measurable effects on job creation, entrepreneurship, prices and more. 

By ignoring the basic facts of proper cost-benefit analysis, the Biden Administration is charting a course that makes economic recovery more difficult in the short run and economic prosperity less likely in the long run.