When pitchers begin firing bullets, not baseballs, then the game can be described as a war.
If football's "bombs" were delivered by planes, not quarterbacks, it would be war.
When boxers enter the ring wearing side arms, their fights can be referred to as wars.
Until such tragic time, let us agree to spare the war metaphors when discussing sports.
It's irritating in the best of times. In times such as these, it verges on blasphemous.
In war, people die. In sports, the deaths are largely figurative.
This tirade is occasioned by a radio sound bite in which the baseball player — it really doesn't matter which one because the sentiment is ubiquitous throughout sports — talked of war between the white lines.
Likely it was said without deep thought. The time has come to begin to think.
"I love the game of baseball," Pirates manager Lloyd McClendon siad, "but you take some of the things that have happened, particularly in this country, over the last year, there's a lot more important things in life than baseball.
"And baseball ain't no war. You know what I mean?"
We do, but old habits die hard. Hours later McClendon would say, in discussing the halting progress of pitcher Kris Benson's comeback, "The strongest and fittest don't always win the battle, but they win the war."
McClendon might have said the race doesn't always go to the swiftest. He could have used the tried-and-true observation that the season is a marathon, not a sprint. Instead, he went with a war metaphor.
In McClendon's defense, he didn't liken Benson's experience directly to combat. He didn't say baseball was a war.
Sometimes war references can be amusing in their context. Prior to the 1978 Sugar Bowl, a boisterous Alabama fan declared loudly and often along Bourbon Street, "This is going to be a civil war."
A Penn State fan, having heard that maybe five times too often, shot back, "As I recall, we won that one, too."
There were laughs all around.
Alabama got the last laugh, winning the football game. No Nittany Lions were harmed, though.
As a personal aside, I had several uncles who served in World War II, either in Europe or the Pacific. My father served in Korea. A cousin was a helicopter door gunner in Vietnam who came home with a Purple Heart but escaped serious injury despite on one occasion having the barrel of his machine gun shot off by the enemy.
Funny, not once did I hear any of them describe war experiences in terms of a baseball or football game.
I came of age when the Vietnam War was drawing to a chaotic close. My friends and I signed up for the draft as required at age 18 but were classified 1-H, a holding category. The joke was that in case of further war, we would be held as hostages.
Current professional athletes are, almost without exception, too young to recall a grinding, prolonged war such as Vietnam. Korea or World War II. For them, those conflicts are the stuff of history books and no more.
One athlete qualified to make war analogies is baseball great Ted Williams. Not only is he revered as the last man to bat .400 for a season, Williams also served as an aviator in World War II and Korea.
Williams flew 39 combat missions in Korea, twice coming back with badly shot up planes. Once, he was forced to land a flaming aircraft.
Williams was decorated for his service and returned to baseball, writing of his war experience, "I was no hero."
Williams was a hero, as are the lesser-known men and women who wore the uniform of this country.
If our current athletes want to compare war and their sport with greater insight, recruiting offices are open. Failing that, ditch the war analogies.
Sam Ross Jr. is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review .
