Baseball as a road to god by peter haynes for fb

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Baseball as a Road to God

By The Very Rev’d Canon Peter D. Haynes Since January 22, 2002, I have wanted to write a paper on baseball and have used being scheduled off-baseball season as an excuse for not doing so. The real reason I have not written this paper earlier is “Who am I to extol the virtues of baseball to other baseball fans?”

Then in March 2013 I was given a book titled “Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game” by John Sexton, President of New York University, with a forward by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize winning American biographer, historian and political commentator, who wrote: “This book takes the reader on a remarkable spiritual journey, using the secular sport of baseball to explore subjects ordinarily associated with religion: prayers, altars, sacred space, faith, conversion, miracles, blessings, curses, saints and sinners . . . Faith and doubt ... are at the core of both religion and baseball.”

Jim Wallis wrote a review of Sexton’s book concluding, “The beauty and simplicity of baseball reminds us that at the heart of our lives is a need for joy and hope. Easter reveals its source.”

And The Alban Institute says, “Sexton drives home the basic point that, as with faith, one ‘can learn, through baseball, to experience life more deeply’.”

I felt my desire to write a paper on baseball for Madres y Padres was legitimized … somehow!

Thanks be to Dean for scheduling me during this baseball season to present a paper which has percolated internally for a long time.

As for the “Who am I..?” to write this paper among other fans: Baseball was a family sport! I am the son of a Dad who was an All-American baseball player at Ohio State University in the late 1920s; if there had been a stable financial future in playing professionally in those days, he might have tried to do so .. he didn’t. He wanted his son to enjoy the game as much as he did, and I do as he taught me all the nuances which make baseball a game of complexity and technique as well as God-given ability and skill.

The first “term paper” I wrote was an eighth grade “History of Baseball” ... in nine pages! In high school I won a regional debate contending that “the best baseball player ever” was Ty Cobb, not Babe Ruth.

And ... Dad wanted me to be as good at playing the game as he was, I never have been. When I’d played a good game in Little League (ages 8-12), Pony League (12-13) and Babe Ruth League (14-15) there was celebration in the home of my family of origin. When I’d struck out in key situations or made an errant throw from my catcher position, there was dark silence over the dinner table.

When 15, I was voted the “Most Valuable Player” in my Babe Ruth League not because I was the best player (I certainly wasn’t), but because I was all hustle and enthusiasm, even playing the championship game (which my team - the Dodgers! won) with a dislocated jaw from being hit by a fastball in the first inning. After I received my MVP trophy, I returned to my seat next to my beaming Dad (& Mom), gave him the trophy and said, “This is the last official organized game of baseball I will play. I want to play football.” Both Dad & Mom supported my decision and I haven’t played a game of hardball since (though lots of softball ... and that’s another story).

As an adult, “conversion experiences” from the Dodgers to the Giants and the A’s to the Angels have been among my most passionate … but I’ll spare the details which, having told these stories to other friends, seem to be interesting-only-to-me.

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Any paper on baseball following a paper extolling football best highlight the incomparable George Carlin’s classic comparison of baseball and football: Baseball is a 19th-century pastoral game.

Football is a 20th-century technological struggle.

Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park!

Football is played on a gridiron in a stadium, sometimes called “Soldier Field” or “War Memorial Stadium.”

Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.

Football begins in the fall, when everything is dying.

In football you wear a helmet.

In baseball you wear a cap.

Football is concerned with downs. “What down is it?”

Baseball is concerned with ups.

“Who’s up? Are you up? I’m not up! He’s up!”

In football you receive a penalty.

In baseball you make an error.

In football the specialist comes in to kick.

In baseball the specialist comes in to relieve somebody.

Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting and unnecessary roughness.

Baseball has the sacrifice.

Football is played in any kind of weather: Rain, snow, sleet, hail, fog ..can’t see the game, don’t know if there is a game going on; mud on the field ..can’t read the uniforms, can’t read the yard markers, the struggle will continue!

In baseball if it rains, we don’t go out to play. “I can’t go out! It’s raining out!”

Baseball has the seventh-inning stretch.

Football has the two-minute warning.

Baseball has no time limit: “We don’t know when it’s gonna end!”

Football is rigidly timed, and it will end “Even if we have to go to sudden death.”

In baseball, during the game, in the stands, there’s kind of a picnic feeling. Emotions may run high or low, but there’s not that much unpleasantness.

In football, during the game in the stands, you can be sure that at least 27 times you were perfectly capable of taking the life of a fellow human being.

And finally, the objectives of the two games are completely different: In football , the object is for the quarterback, otherwise known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy’s defensive line.

In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! “I hope I’ll be safe at home.”

-- George Carlin (Watch Carlin perform it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIkqNiBASfI )

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For us politicos ... here is a 2013 ode to Carlin published in the Newport Beach-Costa Mesa-Corona del Mar newspaper, The Daily Pilot, by a tennis-&-basketball-playing friend, Jim Gray, who also was the vice-presidential candidate on the Libertarian Party ticket in the 2012 national election, and with whom I have been in the empty tomb in Jerusalem on our parish pilgrimage in 2011: “Republicans are like football players, a rough sport where uniquely, to be awarded more downs is a good thing.

There are lots of opportunities during the lulls between each play to analyze what has just happened, and everyone knows the action will resume. Of course, only the skilled players can legally touch the ball, and normally only the strongest and fittest teams prevail.

Democrats are like baseball players more of a gentleperson’s game in which the ball is put into play by the defense and those on offense are actually prohibited from touching the ball at all. The game can dragon unlimitedly until one team prevails. The manager wears the same uniform as the players so everyone can at least appear to be equal.

Libertarians are like soccer players. This game, like life itself, is played year-round. The players wear functional uniforms with short pants; occasionally, to celebrate, they take off their shirts.

The action is continuous. Both offense and defense can touch the ball and score.”

- Jim Gray Baseball … Gotta love it! What a game!

Anticipation of baseball’s assault on the senses begins even before leaving for the game: the hustle-and-bustle of the roaring crowd; the smell of hot dogs cooking; the satisfaction of one icy cold beer on a hot afternoon/evening; the crack of the bat; the seventh inning s-t-r-e-t-c-h; words of wisdom from Vin Scully . . .

“Entering the stadium is like walking through some ancient catacomb, up unpainted concrete stairs, suddenly bursting into light, the cool vista of green grass etched in lime-white boundaries far below. Red/Blue clad players glide effortlessly across the green in classic motions, pulling down line drives, pivoting, each cocking his arm and unsheathing a throw straight as a arrow to the infield. The crack of the bat is swollen now by the amphitheater. The visual beauty, and the smells, and the restlessness in the rapidly filling shiny seats overwhelm the senses. Already, before the game begins, satisfaction lifts the spirit. At a ballgame, as in a place of worship, no one is alone in the crowd. The “park” is a world, a universe, neat and lovely as a painting in a frame or a sonnet in its 14 lines, designed for high accomplishment. Children from all neighborhoods race around the aisles shouting, quarreling, barely holding their churning energy. The place pulses with emotion, is tutored in restraint by the flawlessly mowed lawn and geometrically precisioned boundaries. Second base, like a square white punctuation mark, sits in isolation in the smooth brown dirt of the infield.

“Grounds crew members swarm over the field, damping down the dust, smoothing out every cut and cleat mark, raking gently at the mound, fastidious as barbers, freshening the clean white lines of chalk. One dusts off the sacred “home,” starting place, keystone, source and touchstone of triumph: those who cross it most often, according to the classic and almost immemorial rules, carry off the victory.

“Baseball is a voyage. “Around the world” is the myth: batter after batter trying to nudge forward his predecessor in this most American of games until the whole universe is circled, base by base and runners can come ‘home!’”

As my dad taught me, baseball is a cerebral game, born out of the Enlightenment and the philosophies of Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton. It is to games what the “Federalist Papers” are to books: orderly, judiciously balanced, incorporating segments of mild violence and collision in a larger plan of rationality, absolutely dependent on an internalization of public rules. Baseball depends on a balance of power between pitchers and hitters, on the delicate interplay between fielders at each position, and on the heights and distances, relating every object of interest in the game (fences, pitcher’s mound, bases, stands, obstructions).

The game depends on a very high sense of individual dignity and honor. Batter faces pitcher in utter solitude, depending on no one but himself and on every resource of free-flowing instinct he can summon. The most cutting accusation player can make against player is “choke,” that is, standing there alone, the individual panics under pressure, blocks, can’t get instinct,

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will, body and execution in single harmony. Baseball is a game of magnificent self-control, of “cool,” of passion transmuted into unruffled instinctual perfection.

Baseball is a Lockean game, a kind of contract theory in ritual form, a set of atomic individuals who assent to patterns of limited cooperation in their mutual interest. “Fair play” characterizes baseball more than it does football. In football, contact between individuals and teams is infinitely more complex and offers much greater possibilities for sneak advantage.

Baseball is “America’s game.” What baseball satisfies in the psyche is restraint in bodily movements, law, grace, swiftness of judgment, poise, respect for order -- even enormous love for order.

Baseball feeds delight in numbers through quantification of every aspect of the game: runs, hits, errors, hitting percentages, earned-run averages. For Americans, nothing is real until it’s counted!

Baseball conveys a kind of mysticism of numbers. Its dimensions may be the closest we will come to perfection. To circle the bases is to traverse exactly 360 feet, the precise number of degrees in a circle. Each base is 90 feet away from the preceding, a distance that leaves almost an exact balance between runners and fielders when a player hits a deep infield grounder or tries to steal a base; another inch in either direction might settle the issue decisively between them and leave no doubt about the outcome.

Baseball has three strikes; three outs; three players in the outfield; six in the infield; nine players in all; nine innings; 90 feet between bases; 360 feet around the world -- it is suffused with a gentle Trinitarian mysticism.

The “Reach Baseball Guide” for 1887 calls baseball the “froth and foam and chalice of life.” It argues that “when the Pilgrim Fathers landed in America they brought with them the English national game of cricket . . . too slow a sport for the blood of young America.” In the first centuries of our national life, of course, as de Tocqueville reports, there were relatively few organized sports in America; the United States was distinctive in the West in this respect. In the 1840s, Alexander Cartwright, a surveyor and member of the New York Knickerbocker Club, laid out the geometry of the diamond. Within two th generations, Henry Chadwick (a mid-19 century sports writer, not the 20th century British academic and theologian and Dean of Oxford’s Christ Church Cathedral) had developed the precise mathematical coding of the game’s every action that became the box score. “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America,” Jacques Barzun was to write in 1985, “Had better learn baseball.” Our public image is activist, but a writer in Harper’s Weekly stresses the contemplative and leisurely side of our national ideal: “A great beauty of baseball is that it contains just the right proportion of action and inaction. That is one of its chief charms.

Nothing palls so quickly as continuous action. The times between innings in baseball, bringing relaxation amid the whirl and excitement, are restful and pleasant.”

There is in baseball that spirit of equality that de Tocqueville said was so pervasive in this land. Essentially, baseball is each man for himself {or herself in such circumstances as the “All-American Girls Professional Baseball League,” 1943-1954}. The game is associational. It requires joint timing and coordination, and so the individual is not entirely anti-social; a certain “public-spiritedness” (so to speak) is highly valued. The early ambience of the game is described by a Reverend Sawyer in a th late 19 century baseball magazine: “At the baseball match, we encounter real democracy of spirit; one thing in common absorbs us; we rub shoulders high and low, we speak without waiting for an introduction; we forget everything -- all the petty conventionalities being laid aside; individual experiences submerge in union of human feeling; we are swayed by a common impulse; we are all equal; the pressure of the crowd makes us one -- the office boy who has stolen away, the businessman from the counting room, the clergyman from his study, the clerk from his desk the woman from the factory –all are on equal footing. Barriers are forgotten and how good it seems for us to be human beings. It was just this experience which must have moved Ernest Howard Crosby (American reformer) of New York to explain: ‘I find more th genuine religion at the baseball match than I do at my father’s (Presbyterian) Church on Fifth Avenue.’” (Late 19 century) Baseball eschews violence. Most of the injuries that occur in baseball are strains and sprains, pulled muscles, jammed thumbs and blistered fingers -- injuries that are the revenge the human body takes upon the spirit. Comparatively few injuries result from the violence of contact with opposing players. Only when a base runner tries to crash his way through a defensive player who is unavoidably in his path is physical contact licit. (This season most contact between the catcher and a runner trying to score has been banned .. a rule this catcher-who-wanted-to-play-football regrets.) A pitcher who hits a

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batter with a pitched ball automatically gives the batter first base. While a little intimidation is permissible (a high hard fastball to back the batter off crowding home plate), the rules of the game and its traditions, oblige the pitcher to avoid hitting the batter and to concentrate on the impersonal target of the strike zone.

Burt L. Standish, author of the timeless and inspirational Frank Merriwell books which take nostalgic journeys back in time to an age when we had heroes who were humble, fearless and unbeatable, expressed baseball’s credo in 1910: “I have no word of praise for the tricky, treacherous, contemptible fellow who wins at anything by underhand methods. Win on the Level. Play Fair!”

Baseball is exquisite in fairness. Achievement is unambiguous, earned, recorded. Look it up . . . The box score is printed for every game, registering the abstract mathematical equivalent of nearly every significant action of every player. No one is perfect. The record shows every error, every strikeout, every wild pitch and passed ball .. and every hit, run, and run batted in.

Excuses fall limp! Family fame, status, and connections do not hit home runs or pitch no-hitters; each player alone is responsible for success or failure “The structure of baseball, “Marvin Cohen writes in his poetic “Baseball the Beautiful,” “is art. It’s a structure that admits of infinitely complicated possibilities and combinations, within the rigid framework of rules in common, of distances to fences, of worked-out angles, of human proportions. The Major League ballplayer is the measure of the distances on his field of trade. Given these, he must do or die, win or lose. It’s the majesty that dignity imparts.

Proportions and measurements are the poet’s tool, the sculptor’s trace. And they rule in baseball.”

Baseball, Cohen argues, is objective and verifiable; it holds up crystalline standards and keeps alive the myth of absolute values and the vision of an ideal harmony. Its “intricate possibilities of clarity” give the mind and heart a form by which one may seek manifestations of the beautiful in the more anarchic, muddled, relativistic realms of modern life.

Baseball is objective, geometric, chaste. It is as clean and confident as John Dewey. It is almost a parody of the linguistic analysis of the Cambridge school. One can imagine Wittgenstein breaking up its “actions” into “elements” and “units.”

Baseball is an optimistic game. “Wait ‘til next year!” is an annual cry. Under the lights or in the full heat of summer’s sun, it offers an arena, a universe, a world in which reason and individual action rule, in which the elements are known and planned for, in which balances, fairness and public-spiritedness reign. In a favorite quote about the game, Leo Durocher said “Baseball is like church: Many attend. Few understand.” Durocher also said more famously, “Nice guys finish last.” But in baseball the reverse is true. Aggressive, pressing, active, chafing at the limits, yes; dirty play, no. The game has too much balance; retribution is too easy, too systematic. Baseball is like a do-gooder’s dream of order and individual accomplishment, precisely measured. Mean guys are, inexorably, driven from the game. Their presence jars. They create scandal. The game is justice exemplified.

Baseball is as orderly as ever Spinoza would have made the universe, had he been God; as regular as the sunrise and sunset and the seasons. Yet, as with “Mother Nature,” “this fragile earth, our island home,” so in baseball: chance rules. Within this well-defined world, human control reaches limits. Care and cunning do not, in the end, suffice. The “gods” mock human fairness.

And, so, of all athletes, baseball players are the most religious. Rituals and fetishes grow like jungle weeds, keep their minds at rest, assist their concentration, keep their doubts from unsteadying their hands. Timing is so essential, requiring instantaneous, instinctive judgment in situations in which baseball players know their actions are not entirely under their control -- not conscious control, at least. They are thrown back on inner mysteries. A slump arises, a hitter cannot get a hit, goes game after game doing as he has always done, then systematically adjusts and reviews every muscle and every angle of his stance, and then despairs, waiting like the Israelites in the desert for the return of a fruitful rain of hits. As it left, so grace returns, unbidden. The athlete is the human achiever par excellence (body, mind and spirit harmonized as one), and yet achievement, every athlete knows, is in hands other that his/hers and escapes the reaches of her/his will.

If baseball holds the secret to our national character, that character is far removed from Hollywood, or Broadway or Madison Avenue. Until the last out has been registered, anything can happen. The game can be as placid and predictable as you please, three up and three down, for inning after inning; then, suddenly, amazingly, the earth may open up and swallow an entire team.

Even in the bottom of the ninth inning with two out, a team can surprisingly score 5 or 7 or 9 or 11 runs. Baseball is a quiet game of fairness and precision, of control and discipline, of private hurt and aching limbs. The most highly developed state

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of the individual is to be a good “team player,” to encourage an assist teammates; one must “hold up their end” and “not let others down.” Players are like links in a chain, the whole being no stronger than its weakest link; they perform their actions not so much in unison as serially.

Baseball ... Gotta love it! What a game!

More than any other athletic endeavor, baseball appeals to artistic sensibilities. From the current (2014) “Million Dollar Arm” which extends our “national pastime,” All-American game beyond Latin America, Europe, Australia, Pacific Rim Asia and Canada to India to the “classics” like “The Rookie” (2002) baseball movies give me goose-bumps. I sobbed unashamedly in a full theater when “Field of Dreams” (1989) suggested there might be a chance of one more “having a ‘catch’” with my dad. And “Bull Durham” (1988) offers the most sensual exchange of credos I’ve ever heard: In author Ron Shelton’s words, baseball groupie Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) says to veteran catcher “Crash” Davis (Kevin Costner): “I believe in the Church of Baseball. I’ve tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. I’ve worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I heard that I gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn’t work out between us. The Lord laid too much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see, there’s no guilt in baseball, and it’s never boring ... which makes it like sex.

“There’s never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn’t have the best year of his career. Making love is like hitting a baseball: you just gotta relax and concentrate. Besides, I’d never sleep with a player hitting under .250 … not unless he had a lot of RBIs and was a great glove man up the middle. You see, there’s a certain amount of wisdom I give these boys. I can expand their minds. Sometimes when I’ve got a ballplayer alone, I’ll just read Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman to him, and the guys are so sweet, they always stay and listen. ‘Course, a guy’ll listen to anything if he thinks its foreplay. I make them feel confident, and they make me feel safe, and pretty. ‘Course, what I give them lasts a lifetime; what they give me lasts 142 games. Sometimes it seems like a bad trade. But bad trades are part of baseball-- now who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, for God’s sake? It’s a long season and you gotta trust it.

“I’ve tried ‘em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball. What do you believe in, Crash?”

In Ron Shelton’s words, Crash responds: “Well … I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman’s back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing AstroTurf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.”

Crash pauses, then walks away saying, “Goodnight.”

Annie sighs and says, “Oh my.” {I don’t think I will use either Annie’s or Crash’s “I believe..” as an example the next time I offer a credo/creed-writing workshop to souls committed to my pastoral care.} Finally, my rabbi …other than our Rabbi.. Mark Miller of Temple Bat Yahm in Newport Beach wrote on March 30, 2012 in The Daily Pilot: “Baseball and religion have much in common. Both speak about following the right path and warn of consequences for straying. Both are filled with rituals, ceremonies and special days. Both are governed by myriad rules. Both emphasize fundamentals. Baseball and religion venerate tradition, emphasize community, and ascribe significance to special foods, be they peanuts and Cracker Jacks or matzah and latkes (&/or bread and wine). Umpires function like clergy, telling the player when he has transgressed the rules and meting out penance for sinners. Both religion and baseball preach a simple philosophy: Satchell Paige had a one-sentence rule of pitching: ‘Keep the ball away from the bat.’ Religion teaches us to keep the person away from the sin. Both emphasize practice. A player must practice in order to give his (her) best on the field, and the believer must practice his (her) faith to give their best in the game of life.

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“Of course, the goal of both baseball and religion is to ‘come home,’ the one to round the bases and return to where he (she) started, and the other to return to their original home in heaven.”

Mark concludes his article with a story which either I told him or we learned simultaneously. It is about Bob Brenly, and in 1994 when Frances was very pregnant with Don we went to Giants-A’s game at spring training near Phoenix. I was talking with Dave Righetti at whose wedding I presided when Bob Brenly approached and asked if Frances and I knew whether we were to be blessed with a boy or a girl. When we said “a boy,” he gifted Frances with baseballs a bat and a glove!

Unforgettable and endearing!

The great story about Bob Brenly is that on September 14, 1986, the Giants inserted him, a catcher, at third base to replace their injured regular third baseman. In the fourth inning Brenly made an error on a routine ground ball. Four batters later, he kicked away another grounder; then, while scrambling after the ball, he threw wildly past home plate trying to get the runner there, committing two errors on the same play. A few minutes later, he muffed yet another play to allow a total of th four unearned runs and to become the first player in the 20 century to hold the dubious record of four errors in one inning.

But in the fifth inning, Brenly hit a solo home run, and in the seventh inning, he hit a bases-loaded single to tie the score at 6-6. In the bottom of the ninth with two out and the count full, he smashed a massive home-run to win the game. He was called “the ‘Comeback Player of the Year’ in one game.”

Brenly’s box score card for that day came to three hits in five at bats, two home runs, four errors, four runs allowed and four runs driven in, including the game-winning run.

Life is a lot like Bob Brenly’s game: a mixture of hits and errors and the opportunity for future redemption. If something bad happens in the fourth inning, wait for the fifth..and the seventh..and the ninth innings for something better to come around.

Yes . . . Redemption awaits!