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CHRISTIAN MATURITY: IT'S IN THE DETAILS

Ted Williams, who died in 2002 was arguably the best hitter baseball has ever known. He was the last baseball player to hit better than .400 in a season. Upon his death, George Will said in his column "There is no joy in Red Sox Nation, a.k.a. New England, or in any heart where baseball matters."

One of reasons Williams was unique in his ability to hit a baseball was because of how fastidious he was with the bats he used. For instance he used a postal scale to check that humidity had not added an ounce to the weight of his bats. He was once challenged to find from among six bats the one that was half an ounce heavier than the others without the scale...he quickly did. He once returned to the maker a batch of his Louisville Sluggers because he sensed that the handles were not quite right. The handles were off by five-thousandths of an inch.

Some would call him obsessive, but it was hard to argue with the results. Ted Williams knew bats and could detect the smallest discrepancy.

(From a sermon by Kevin Short, Marks of Maturity (part 3), 10/13/2009)

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