a teachable moment?

Yesterday, I had a bad day. I spent way too much time spinning my wheels at work, fretting over some challenging homework for a class I am taking, even panicking over dinner preparations. By 6:00 I was spent.

So, I laced up my shoes, pocketed a snack and...

Went to a Detroit Tigers game. (You thought I was going to say I went running. Well, that would have been predictable.)

As much as running is the universal soother, sometimes it's just not a good fit. That's when getting away from home and getting lost in a crowd is the perfect antidote. Why wouldn't I relish spending an evening with my husband and 10-year old son, Kit -- who, by the way, is crazy into baseball -- at a late-season game on a beautiful Monday evening?

The row of men sitting in front of us had a running joke about a blue sign they were wrongly accused of harboring -- allegedly emblazoned with a derogatory comment regarding the Detroit Lions head coach --but they did take time to chuckle over my son's incredible baseball prowess. Although Kit's incessant ramblings about RBIs, ERAs and pick-offs can get tedious at home, in the ball park it's really all very interesting. And relevant.

And of course, we came to see the aftershocks of last week's incredible dust up between aging designated hitter Gary Sheffield and pretty much the entire team of Cleveland Indians. We caught that little jaw dropper on television, and it was one of those moments during an otherwise ho-hum game that made us sit up straight and pay attention.

Afterward, our family conversations swayed between "Ooooh! Can you believe the Sheff? He was MAD! That was cool," and "Of course, punching the pitcher in the face is really no way to resolve a conflict."

I'll let you guess who was saying what.

Grown men, the idols of kids across the nation, can find no other way to show disapproval of another player's actions than to flip him like a pancake? What does that prove? And who laughs last?

Certainly not Sheffield, who was absent from last night's game against the Kansas City Royals serving a four-game suspension. And it doesn't help that today's Detroit News reports Sheffield as saying "It will never end until I get you. That's just the way it is. I don't mess with nobody. I don't bother anybody, but when you bother me, it's on. It could be off the field, on the field, it doesn't matter."

Yikes. Is Sheff planning to jump from the sports page to the front page after hunting down Indians pitcher Fausto Carmona and catcher Victor Martinez in Cleveland, which, by the way, is geographically very close to Detroit? I mean, what else does a guy do while he's suspended? Is revenge that sweet?

And on a larger issue, is Sheffield's mother proud of all this? Can she say she's happy that her son is openly vengeful and, apparently, will spout his intentions to any sports reporter who's asking?

I'd love it if my sons can recognize that rising above punching fists or turning the other cheek can be a very manly thing to do. Even if it isn't such a popular option these days.

You can be sure I will continue to talk with my kids about all of the choices we have for resolving conflict. And I expect our conversations to continue for some time, or at least until Kit stops muttering "But it was pretty cool" under his breath at the first mention of Gary Sheffield and his pancake-flipping shenanigans.