Be Patient, It’s Still Only The 61st Round Of The Draft

The job hunt can get in your head. Rejection tends to make you feel, well, rejected. The wisdom of the market, Capitalism itself, has judged you and found you wanting. Or, rather, it has found you unwanted. This is what you’re good for, it says, rearranging freight in a Big Box store. This is your value on the open market. This is your worth.

This latest no thank you hit pretty hard and hung like a cloud over my shift last night at the Box. If you want a picture of your future, a voice kept saying, picture a middle-aged man carrying boxes up and down an orange ladder for $10.30 an hour — forever.

I don’t really believe that. No matter how many times the Wisdom of the Market reasserts that this is my value — that this is the most efficient allocation of the resource that is me — I don’t really accept it. I retain enough battered self-confidence to think that the WotM is getting this very wrong. (What’s the best way to allocate the resource of this scrawny, brainy guy who has years of experience honing a useful craft? Let’s employ him as muscle. Brilliant.)

This is also, of course, part of what it means to have faith. I don’t mean a Pollyanna-ish optimism that God Has a Special Plan for me that’s better than this. I mean the assurance that my value does not depend on the Wisdom of the Market and it is not determined by the crude pronouncements of Capitalism. My value comes from creation, incarnation and redemption — from infinite love — not from the algorithms employed by corporate HR departments.

And that’s the basis of your value as well. You may or may not believe what I believe about the God revealed in Jesus Christ, but even if you don’t believe it, I hope you’ll take some encouragement from this reminder that you are fearfully and wonderfully made, and that you are infinitely and boundlessly loved — that you are worthy of infinite love. Even if the WotM has declared that your value is that of a sub-living-wage cog. Whether or not you believe in my Christian notions about your dignity and value, I hope you never, ever, listen to the pronouncements of Capitalism or to the foolish Wisdom of the Market.

I’m deeply grateful to those who are donating to my January fundraiser (the “donate” button is there in the right-hand sidebar, thanks), but I also know that there are many readers of this blog who aren’t in a position to be able to donate to something like that. I know some of you are in a position where a grunt-job at a Big Box store might seem like an improvement.

So let me share a more secular story that’s also providing me with a bit of hope despite yesterday’s bad news, in the hopes that it will maybe do the same for you.

Last week, Ken Griffey Jr. was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He set a new record, in fact, with the highest-ever percentage of the vote on a hall-of-fame ballot. (Perplexingly, three out of 440 Hall of Fame voters apparently didn’t think Junior belongs in Cooperstown. These people, allegedly, write about baseball professionally. So much for the Wisdom of the Market.)

This was an easy and obvious decision for anyone who’d ever seen Ken Griffey Jr. swing a bat. He had the perfect swing. In the future, when humankind fulfills its sci-fi destiny and cracks the secret of faster-than-light travel, I expect the breakthrough will come from scientists analyzing the math, physics and beauty of Ken Griffey Jr.’s swing.

That’s why everybody knew Junior was headed for the Hall of Fame even when he was still in high school. He was just 17 years old when the Mariners selected him as the No. 1 overall pick in baseball’s 1987 draft — the first pick of the first round and the envy of every other team in the league.

Griffey is joined in this year’s Hall-of-Fame class by Mike Piazza, who was drafted one year later. Piazza was the 1,390th pick in the 1988 draft, selected by the Dodgers in the 62nd round.

He went on to be a .308 lifetime hitter with 427 home runs — the greatest hitting catcher of all time (and better than average at defense, despite the throwing thing). I savored many of those 427 home runs, including this one, a game-winner in New York City on September 21, 2001, the first professional sporting event in the city after 9/11: