I don’t like when people overuse the word just.
I’m not talking about just when it’s used as a noun to reference a foundational moral rightness. I like that kind of just.
I’m talking about just in its smaller, meaner form, when it’s used as an adverb to signify simply, only, no more than – as in just a moment, just a kiss, just a game.
I’m a hypocrite, of course. I like to minimize things, so I use the adverb more often than most people. But I was thinking of this while watching Andrew McCutchen’s first home at-bat in five years.
Cutch is my favorite Pirate ever.
As I wrote last year, he’s the only true superstar that Pittsburgh’s baseball team has fielded in my lifetime, the face of its only winning teams in the last 30 years. It was gut wrenching when he was traded to the Giants in 2018; it was unexpected good news to hear he’d signed to come back this offseason.
Pittsburgh loves Cutch. So as soon as word got out that he was coming home, every Pirates fan knew his first game back would be special.
It was.
Watch that video. If you have a heart, I think you’ll shiver.
The park was packed – every seat filled, every square inch of the railing along the left-field rotunda pressed with people, every voice hoarse as a crowd of 30,000 focused their collective will and affection toward a single point.
Of course Cutch got a hit, striking a sharp grounder just past the glove of the too-far-shifted second baseman. As my favorite journalist wrote in his post-game column, “The great ones always rise to the occasion.” (As a Pirates fan, it’s hard to know if that’s true, but I’ll accept it on the basis of Cutch and faith.)
In one sense, this whole scene was meaningless.
If all goes well, Cutch will have about 500 more at-bats this year, which makes this one of many. And it came with no special tension in the game itself – it was just the second inning, just a slow game in a long season, just a contest featuring two teams unlikely to appear in the playoffs this year.
If you aren’t a Pirates fan, this was just an at-bat.
But if you are a Pirates fan, you know that line of thinking is ridiculous.
If you, like me, have watched Cutch carry a young team to its first playoff win in two decades, you know what he means to every 30-something Pirates fan; he represents the first point of pride in our lifetime.
If you, like my dad, have watched the Pirates win a World Series in 1979 and then seen all hope shrivel and die for decades, you know what Cutch means even more deeply; he represents the return of something once-good that seemed gone forever.
That’s why I don’t like the word just: It reduces meaning to the edges of our own experiences.
Sure, you can cut the cord wherever you choose; if you’ve never cared for it, baseball is certainly just a game. But also it’s the context for the love between some father and son, and the context for the cruelty between some others.
The cheap mug on my desk (it’s just a trinket) was made by someone’s son or grandma in some factory, the construction of which probably altered some town or city block forever.
Even Pigpen’s perpetual cloud of dust, as Charlie Brown so wisely observes, may have been trod upon by Solomon or Nebuchadnezzar. It’s not just dirt.
The truth is that significance has no stopping point.
This is heady and humbling at once. As Lewis writes in the summit scene of Perelandra, “In the plan of the Great Dance plans without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else had been directed. There seems no center because all is center.”
Probably we have no right to use the word just at all. If we trace the threads, we’ll find that everything is sacred. We can only follow so far, of course. We’re limited.
It’s good to think that God isn’t.
And it’s good to see Cutch in a Pirates’ uniform again, too, even if it is just a game.
