Nick Adenhart

One of the beauties of baseball is that the inexplicable and unfair things that happen on the field are transitory. We can press reset after the injustices and bad bounces of each game and start anew. In the immediate aftermath of last night's Angel game it would have seemed that Nick Adenhart was the victim of bad luck. After pitching 6 scoreless innings and leaving with a 4-0 lead he watched his teammates allow the A's to score 6 runs. Adenhart lost the second win of his career and the Angels lost the game. But this is baseball, and the injustice of that lost win would not endure, because he would make many more starts, when things might be different.

But there won't any more starts. Nick Adenhart was killed by a drunk driver late last night, as I am sure anyone reading this knows. We are off the field now, where there is no reset, no new game.

There are on average nearly 50 people killed in drunk driving accidents in the United States every day.

The death of Nick Adenhart is sad, and incomprehensible, and tragic. Is it any more tragic than the other 50 drunk driving deaths each day that pass by largely unnoticed? Is Nick Adenhart's death more tragic than the deaths of Courtney Stewart and Henry Pearson, also killed in the crash?

There is really no way to answer this question, except to say that today we do take notice. Nick Adenhart's death is a reminder of all the others who are killed whose names we never know.