Wes Dreamed of Being a Baseball Goalie

Let's talk about baseball!

A lot of people think I don't care about baseball, just because I don't like to play it or watch anybody else play it, or hear about baseball games and scores, or know when the season begins and ends, or know how to play baseball.

But how wrong they are. I care, every bit as much as I care about all the other great joys of life. E.g., the daisies of the meadows, the smiles of little boys catching and gutting their first fishes, fishes in general. Oh, I don't know, kites are good, mom, apple pie, rhubarb roasting on an open fire, whatever. Baseball is like one of those kinds of things to me. I actually think about baseball a lot, even when it's not happening, like now.

Parts of baseball I especially like to think about are the bat parts and the running parts. I don't like to think about the catching parts because of a certain traumatic experience that occurred to me as a kid. My grade school had my gym class play baseball and it so happens I am a myopically challenged person who requires glasses (the technical term in baseball jargon is "four-eyes.") The teacher disallowed my glasses on the playing field for the very reasonable reason that if I were hit with a baseball it could shatter them and sends shards of glass through my eyes and on into my brain leaving me a vegetable.

So I was put out to one of the "fields" (I think it was the "right" one) to look for and catch fly balls, without my glasses. But I couldn't see this one fly ball that came at me so instead of catching it, it caught me, right in the head. Good thing I wasn't wearing my glasses at the time or it would have been just like I just told you, with me being a vegetable and all, and the shards! But it still left an emotional scar for life. Ouch!

In spite of that trauma I still want to talk about baseball. I want to share my excitement about the recent ruling by Seattle Municipal Court Judge Jean Rietschel that dismissed charges against some men for scalping Mariners tickets on the streets, on the grounds they were the victims of selective enforcement of Seattle's anti-scalping law.

Now I don't understand anything about Seattle's anti-scalping law. What I especially don't understand about Seattle's anti-scalping law is, how is scalping wrong if capitalism is right? I mean, there are crimes occasionally associated with scalping like theft and counterfeiting and fraud, but we have laws against those things already. Why do we have to throw a net out broadly for scalpers? Isn't that like arresting people who drive in order to put a stop to hit and runs?

I have lots of questions like that. Why doesn't the Ninth Amendment to the US Constitution ever get a nod in courts? That's the one that says a right of the people doesn't have to be on the list to count. I think we need an Amendment Nine and a Half that says, "We really meant Amendment Nine."

According to a Seattle Times story, Judge Rietschel based her ruling in part on her opinion that the scalping arrests would not have occurred had the Mariners themselves not pursued them by hiring off-duty Seattle police to look for scalpers. Also she pointed out the Mariners allow scalping on their own website by letting sellers use fake out-of-city addresses to get around the city ordinance. I guess that's OK to the Mariners because they get a cut of the on-line sales.

Here's what I'm really excited about: It can be done, people! It's possible to win a case of selective enforcement in Seattle! There's hope for the rest of us yet, that the courts might protect us from the selective enforcement of city and state ordinances by police in the hire of businesses.

There shouldn't be ANY police in the pay of businesses. When an off-duty police officer uses his power to arrest while in the pay of anyone but the taxpayers proper accountability is skirted and government authority is subverted. The power to arrest belongs only in public hands under public direction.

Hooray for small steps toward sanity.