Tim Hawkins sings about the yummy goodness that is Chick-Fil-A.

Hunting A Detroit Tiger
Troy Soos
(Book 4 of the Mickey Rawlings baseball mystery series)

I love baseball. I love mysteries. Put them together in one novel and I’m in literary nirvana.  Troy Soos’ Mickey Rawlings series is just the ticket. Mickey Rawlings is a journeyman utility infielder (the longest he’s spent with any major league club is 3 years) who keeps stumbling onto mysteries.  Intriguingly, in this novel, he’s the killer.

It’s Detroit in 1920, just before the season is about to start.  The papers are splashed with the news that Rawlings shot and killed Emmett Siever in self-defense.  Siever was a former ballplayer who, more recently, was trying to organize the players into a union.

Other union representatives are angry with Rawlings for killing Siever.  Some even want him dead.  Rawlings also becomes persona non grata with his teammates, even the ones who aren’t necessarily interested in a union.

On the other side of the coin, representatives of the owners are pressuring Rawlings to make an official anti-union statement and stance.  Some of these representatives are, uh, less than scrupulous.

Rawlings is interested in neither side of the issue — he just wants to play ball.

Oh, one other complication.

Rawlings didn’t kill Siever.

So, who did?  And why?  And why is Rawlings taking the rap?

Parental Guidance:  I’d probably put language at a PG, and violence at a soft PG-13 (nothing really graphic, just kinda icky and scary).

I’m sitting on an insanely boring conference call with about 75 other people. Somebody with a cold kept sniffing directly into the phone.

One of the other people on the call said:

If you’re not talking, please go on mute. There’s a lot of background nose, I mean, noise.

BONUS: Five minutes later, someone else (who obviously didn’t do as they were told) burped long and loud.

Lance Sperring was principal of Stone Mountain Christian School (my alma mater ) for most of my high school tenure. He was killed instantly last night in a head-on crash with a teenage driver who suddenly swerved into his lane.  Reports are mixed as to whether the teenager was drunk.  They’re also irrelevant.

I want to mention a couple funny stories about Mr Sperring first before getting into the “meat” of this.  As with most Christian schools, SMCS was small — there were a whopping 31 people in my graduating class.  So when we went on the senior trip, all the students and the chaperones fit on one bus, driven by Mr Sperring.  The trip went to Philadelphia, NYC, a week at a Christian retreat in upstate NY, and a visit to Niagara Falls.

We left Niagara in the mid-morning, with plans to make the drive back to Atlanta in 2 legs (that day and the next). Unfortunately, the worst blizzard that upstate New York had seen in 20 years hit us and we were way behind schedule.  (I think we stopped for the night about 150 miles short of where we planned and 3 hours later than we had planned.)

Between the length and the weather conditions, it was a very exhausting drive for Mr Sperring.  Many hours into the drive, he started singing to himself — rather boisterously and largely children’s choruses — mostly to stay alert.

One of the songs he sang was “I’ve Got the Joy”:

I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart
(Where?)
Down in my heart
(Where?)
Down in my heart
I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart
(Where?)
Down in my heart to stay

One of the verses begins:

And if the devil doesn’t like it, he can sit on a tack
(Ouch)

With each “ouch”, Mr Sperring jumped about 2 feet out of his seat (I think he even repeated that verse a couple of times).  Not that he was ever a stuffy man, but it still seemed a bit incongruous to see your principal bouncing in his seat and singing loudly.  Though it was a lot funnier than incongruous. 

Earlier in the trip, the students were occasionally playing goofy pranks on each other.  One girl had a stuffed animal with her named “Teddy Dog”.  It was an appropriate enough name — he was definitely a dog, but shaped more like a teddy bear.  Teddy Dog quickly became the center of some of the pranks that the guys played.  After lunch one day, one of the guys went out to the bus before the rest of the group, grabbed Teddy Dog, and put him under one of the bus’s windshield wipers.  Nearly everyone — except Teddy Dog’s owner — noticed as we returned to the bus.

Now given the fact that the “prankee” was the only one who didn’t notice, this simply wouldn’t do.  So, in order to bring to her attention that which had thus far eluded it, Mr Sperring turned on the wipers (on an absolutely sunny day).  He didn’t even have the bus in gear before a shriek went up. 

Now for the more serious part.

To put it bluntly, my class (the class of 1984) was hell on wheels.  Although no one got expelled, there were  some of my sophomore classmates (and maybe from freshman and junior years, too) who were, er um, “invited” not to return the next year.

Apparently, for my senior year, Mr Sperring decided that this reputation (and the actions behind it) were neither acceptable nor necessary.  Though it may sound a bit clichéd, the man believed in us.  And he put his money where his mouth was by teaching our Bible class himself (thereby spending 45+ minutes with us every day).

I really can’t put my finger on what he said or did specifically, but I do remember him believing in us.  And it worked.  By November, teachers were approaching him unsolicited, remarking that my class was the best that had ever come through SMCS.

One specific example came in February on that senior trip.  Before the trip, he gathered all the guys together.  He acknowledged that the girls outnumbered us more than 2:1, but said that he wanted us to go way overboard in being gentlemen on this trip — opening doors, carrying luggage, etc.  We went for the idea big-time, and if we hadn’t been having so much fun doing it, there probably would have been fist-fights over who got to carry luggage.  I think we even cracked the girls up a bit, once they got over being stunned.

Yes, it was a little thing, but I still remember it 25 years later.  And it was indicative of what Mr Sperring meant to us.

Hebrews 10:24 says “And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works”.  That’s exactly what Mr Sperring was doing in that instance — stirring us up to good works — and I’m sure many other instances as well.

This is one story of the impact that this man had.  I’m sure there are hundreds.

UPDATE: Mr Sperring’s church has set up a memorial page where you can send your story to the family of how he ministered in your life.