Sitting under blue Arizona skies wilting in its withering heat I am reminded that baseball is as elegant in its essence as anything. Starters and closers vie with hitters in pursuit of the perfect game.
So too, since 1979 has Iran pitted itself against the Western world with belligerence and intractability, playing their own perverse game of imperfection.
As the boys of spring trot by, the thoughts of fans go to what is yet to come. Inevitably to the dream of their team in the World Series. The smaller dimensions of spring training ballparks put the ball player and fan so close they can see the humanity of their heroes up close.
The mighty US military has made the world smaller, and its precision guided munitions transform both buildings and Iranian mullahs into the smallest version of themselves. Heroes in fatigues now show humanity to Iranian civilians, sparing them the cost of their leaders’ crimes.
In Tehran, the sum of forty years of spreading fear, funding terrorism, and fomenting hate is falling in on the heads of those who promised the destruction of the world. The closer is now on the mound and he intends to punch out this evil regime.
The world looks on and as with fans of our national pastime their thoughts, too, go to a dream of victory. A victory for stability in the Middle East, where the power structure and potential for peace no longer rests on an insane fulcrum of a nation whose purpose is to sow chaos and death all over the world.
The baseball pitcher, Curt Schilling, once said “In baseball, I was always in control of everything until I let the ball go.” Once the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand we don’t know whether it will find the batter’s bat, body, or end up in the strike zone.
The same can’t be said of US missiles and munitions in Iran. While a hurler may never be quite certain of the outcome, it is the opposite with precision projectiles which unerringly land on the turbans and towers of Iran’s leadership. Yet we can’t be certain at this moment that what is being removed won’t be replaced with something worse.
For more than four decades, US presidents and other world leaders appeased, bribed, and coddled Iran, believing that the devil we knew was better than one we didn’t. All the while forgetting the Devil we know is the only Devil.
As with relief pitchers who are inserted into games, often when things are the most volatile and the risks the highest, so too did the Big Orange right-hander toe the bump in 2024 in a world of disorder and danger. Trump, the penultimate “closer” entered the geopolitical game to win the game and save the world.
The first pitches of his second term were in the Middle East where he strengthened partnerships and created new avenues for mutual prosperity.
Then he turned his attention to the drug cartels where his strikes denuded and incapacitated a thorn of death and addiction in the flesh of our country. The cannoning of cartel canoes interrupting the flow of money to terrorists.
The next batter was a ruthless dictator, Nicolás Maduro, whom Trump blew away with one pitch. In so doing he crippled narco-terrorists and the flow of embargoed fuel to rogue nations, tightening a trap that was forged in the sands of Saudi Arabia.
Trump saw Iran in the on-deck circle and knew that everything he’s done to this point was meant to bring the Iranians to the plate. He hoped they would capitulate, that they would abandon their pursuit of nuclear weapons and funding terrorism.
Iran wrongly believed Trump would behave as had every one of his predecessors, yet another feckless dupe who would pay for their own destruction.
Every pitcher has a plan for every batter Trump’s book on Iran, and the execution of his strategy has been flawless thus far. Nothing but heaters right down the middle. Strike after strike each one making Iran smaller and weaker.
What comes next? No one is sure, but we can’t know until the last out is recorded. This mission has been, so far, a show of unbridled firepower by the US and Israel with Trump amid an international foreign-policy no-hitter.
Iran is down to its last out and Trump will throw the last pitch.
As spring training winds down and the World Baseball Classic comes to an end, fittingly one including Team USA, we all look at what comes next. For baseball, another season approaches in which its enduring beauty is unchallenged by fad or fashion.
On opening day, every fan will dream of their team’s ascension to the World Series because baseball and hope do not exist independent of one another.
Hope and peace also exist co-dependently. A season of peace, promise and prosperity for the people of Iran, the Middle East and humankind is within reach of a world serious about the future.
For the future, Donald Trump will earn the save.
Stephen Piccirillo 2026
