Who handled Major League Baseball’s ceremonial first-pitch honors in 2013?

21. Chicago White Sox

AP/CHARLES REX ARBOGAST
Former Chicago White Sox great Bo Jackson waves to the crowd before throwing the ceremonial first pitch before the White Sox and Kansas City Royals season opening baseball game Monday, April 1, 2013, in Chicago.

Bo Jackson, former White Sox outfielder

Despite batting only .250 during eight years spent mostly with the Kansas City Royals, Jackson is an athletic legend who managed to play two professional sports. He was a running back for the NFL’s Los Angeles Raiders from 1987 to 1990, but an injury cut short his NFL career. His athletic versatility was celebrated in Nike’s famous “Bo Knows” ad campaign for cross-training shoes, in which he was shown excelling in everything from ice hockey to playing the guitar. In throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at Chicago’s US Cellular Field, Jackson joked that his team was guaranteed to win, since he had played for both the White Sox and Royals. Rather than take sides, he wore a plain black hat and fired a strike to his former teammate Robin Ventura, who is now the White Sox manager. 

21 of 30

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.