Paul Random

Opening Day of the 2025 Major League Baseball season kicks off today, a sure sign of spring and a highly anticipated milestone for fans of the game.

Professional baseball in America dates to 1871, though the sport as we know it today can be traced to the early 20^th century. So ubiquitous was the game’s influence beginning in the 1920s, that even someone who didn’t follow the sport knew the name Babe Ruth. When the Yankees’ Joe DiMaggio was in the midst of his historic 56-game hitting streak in 1941, strangers were known to ask one another, “Did he get one today?”

One reason baseball gained such popularity was because it isn’t just a spectator sport. It’d relatable. It’s easy to play. The equipment is simple – a ball, a bat, and a glove. Whether playing in a backyard, schoolyard, on a formal diamond, or even a city street, kids played and played.

Said James Earl Jones in the beloved movie, Field of Dreams,

The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and what could be again.  

Baseball is also a family sport. Most of us are introduced to the game when we’re young, when our whole world revolves around our mother, father, brothers and sisters.

Whether playing with siblings and friends, having a catch in the backyard, or competing in front of parents on the local Little League fields, the camaraderie can help shape and form lifelong friendships and forge memories we’ll never forget.

Baseball is also full of metaphors. Just as in life, if you want to succeed in the game, you need to step up to the plate. You can’t hit if you don’t swing. You might swing for the fences and still strike out. Pitchers throw curveballs, unexpected things come out of left field.

For many of us, though, baseball’s greatest charm revolves around those we’ve played or watched the game with over the years, beginning with our parents.

My father was a Yankees fan, so I became a Yankees fan. In my office here at Focus on the Family, I have his baseball glove. It’s an ANDIA 7803 and still has dust in it from our Long Island yard. Nothing gave me greater joy as a little boy than to throw with my dad in the backyard, under the shade of our towering Sycamore trees. He was legally blind in one eye and always asked me to throw to his good side.

Now, as a father, I love playing ball with our boys.

As a boy, I’d watch games on television in the living room or listen on the radio with my dad. My parents refused to pay for cable, so half of the Yankees games were inaccessible to us. I enjoyed the pace of radio play-by-play, especially on a summer evening out on our side porch.

Going to Yankee Stadium was a rare treat, but we averaged one trip a year to the Bronx. Bob Sheppard, our neighbor, was the team’s legendary public address announcer. We’d visit him in the press box. He always had a big book next to his microphone to read between innings. I remember seeing a huge baseball glove chair in owner George Steinbrenner’s office.

Shortly before my father died, I had the opportunity to invite him, along with our oldest son and father-in-law, to a Yankees game up at Coors Field in Denver. It was a sun-splashed day. My dad used to put me on his shoulders, but now I was pushing him in a wheelchair. We ate hot dogs, talked, laughed, and enjoyed the game.

I can’t remember who won, but it didn’t matter. There we were, three generations together watching baseball. It’s now a golden memory.

The old Yankees’ manager Bob Lemon once said, “The two most important things in life are good friends and a strong bullpen.” He’s missing faith in Jesus Christ, but was right about the importance of friends.

The return of baseball will provide families with an opportunity to enjoy a wholesome outing together and build memories that might well last a lifetime.

Farewell to winter.

Play ball!

Image credit: Paul Batura (L-R, Rev. Jennings Hamilton, Riley Batura, Jim Batura, Paul Batura)

For the first time in over one-hundred years, Planned Parenthood will not have an operating facility on New York City’s Manhattan Island.

The abortion provider has announced plans to sell and close its headquarters located at 26 Bleecker Street in the SoHo neighborhood of the city.

Planned Parenthood of New York City has been operating at the address since 1992. For decades, the city even co-named the street after Margaret Sanger, the racist eugenicist who started the organization in 1916.  It took until 2022 for city officials to scrub her name from street signs after the hypocrisy of her record became too much to defend.

“We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,” Sanger once said. Speaking to the Ku Klux Klan, Sanger declared, “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

Some apologists for Sanger have actually suggested awful statements such as those were “a rhetorical tool rather than a personal conviction.”

Planned Parenthood is suggesting the closure of its Manhattan flagship location is economically and strategically driven.

According to Wendy Clark, president of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, “It is a building that requires more and more expensive maintenance, and it’s not designed to support the health care needs of the future.” 

The organization is listing the property for $39 million. It plans to “ redirect those resources to health centers in historically underserved communities.”

Translation: The abortion giant is targeting poor and minority populations.

Contrast the destructive and evilness of activity that’s been plotted and executed at 26 Bleecker Street these last decades with what was originally carried at out the property.  

Back in 1857, a woman named Elizabeth Blackwell opened the “New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children” there – a facility that would have seemed like only a pipe dream just years earlier.

Elizabeth was born in Bristol, England, the third of nine children. Her father was a Quaker and abolitionist. They eventually emigrated to America, Sadly, her father soon died, which forced Elizabeth, along with her mother and two sisters, into teaching.

But the Lord was at work. He always is.

It was while teaching that a dying friend told Elizabeth her ordeal and even fate would have been made much easier had her doctor been a woman. Only there was no such thing back in the 1840s. Elizabeth Blackwell was determined to be the first.

So, that’s what she did. Despite widespread criticism and prejudice, Elizabeth was admitted to Geneva College, now Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She graduated top of her class and became the world’s first Doctor of Medicine.

After opening the Bleecker Street facility, Dr. Blackwell would go on to open a medical college in New York City and eventually return to England where she served as professor of gynecology at the new London School of Medicine for Women.

It’s the tale of two women, two organizations – and one historic Manhattan address.

Two organizations, the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children and Planned Parenthood – one used to serve and the other guaranteed to cause the suffering and death of countless preborn babies.

Two women, Elizabeth Blackwell and Margaret Sanger – one pioneering to save life and the other scheming to take them.

One address, 26 Bleecker Street, the site of life saving and affirming care back in the late 1800s – and eventually the home for the grim and gruesomeness that is Planned Parenthood.

Let’s continue to pray that Planned Parenthood’s retreat from Manhattan marks the beginning of the end for the organization that has traded in death and deceit for over a century.