AMC has been showing the greatest baseball movie of all time, The Natural, this week and I have been trying to catch it.  Anyway, I am working from my home office today and it just happened to come on while I was on a lunch break so I sat and decided to catch some of it. Actually I decided to listen to the movie instead of my usual auditory bludgeoning of 50% Reggae and 50% Heavy Metal. As I was listening to the movie, I started to think about when I was a kid and saw this movie for the first time. I saw it for the first time while staying with my grandparents one summer vacation. It was one of those kinds of summers you always remember – not in details like how many times you went swimming or how many times you skinned your knee, but details like the way a BBQ grill smells and the hum of a neighbors running lawn mower – things that stay with you. Now 20 years later I am listening to the film with a different set of ears.

I realized that the only two things separating the Redford classic from The Wizard of Oz is a chorus of really small horses and some shiny red shoes. It finally dawned on me that the baseball movie I had loved since I was 10-years-old is a complete fairy tale. 

I used to think that there was a guy out there that was that natural of a baseball talent. A guy that made all the right moves, a guy that performed magic tricks and inspired his teammates to be better people and not just better ball players.

A lefty that swung a magic bat and the magic came form a tree and not an empty syringe. A pro baseball player that carried 12 bucks in his pocket and it was ok. Those times are gone and those players are just a Hollywood fabrication. But within Monday night’s Boston Red Sox against the Cleveland Indians contest is a chance to put all that is bad with baseball today at the back of our minds to celebrate another reason to love this game again.   On Monday night, Boston pitcher Jon Lester takes the hill in a fill-in role for Red Sox starter Julian Tavares. This might seem like an ordinary pitching change, but Lester hasn’t pitched in a major league game since he beat the Los Angeles Angels on August 23 of last year. Last year, Lester had his rookie campaign cut short when he was diagnosed with a treatable form of lymphoma. One year and six chemotherapy treatments later Lester is cancer free.   Lester was treated in the off season and joined the Red Sox at spring training and at the start of the year he was immediately sent to the minors to start his rehab journey back to the bigs. The fictional Roy Hobbs battles through a mysterious ailment to lead the New York Knights to a pennant, Lester just wants to throw. “I don’t think it really has sunken in yet, and I don’t think it will sink in until tomorrow when I get on the mound,” Lester said Sunday.   There are a lot of good things associated with the word “free.” Free kittens and free beer, for example. But none of them have the impact as the two words “cancer” and “free.” So Lester’s negative cancer test is the most positive result anyone could have hoped for and this story is bigger than one man, bigger than just one team. Jon Lester’s story is about baseball and for the love of it. Jon Lester’s story is about the human spirit’s triumph over adversity, probably the most natural thing in all of sports. And no amount of the clear can wash that away.