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Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game
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BASEBALL AS A ROAD TO GOD
BASEBALL
as a Road
TO GOD
SEEING BEYOND THE GAME
GOTHAM BOOKS
GOTHAM BOOKS
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Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, March 2013
Copyright © 2013 by John Sexton
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Sexton, John.
Baseball as a road to God : seeing beyond the game / John Sexton with Thomas Oliphant and Peter J. Schwartz.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-101-60973-6 (hardcover)
1. Baseball—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Oliphant, Thomas.
II. Schwartz, Peter J. III. Title.
GV867.S58 2013
796.35701—dc23
2012029685
Designed by Spring Hoteling
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON
For Lisa, who showed us the way
and
for Jed and Katie, who walk it
Foreword
The Knothole Gang
FIRST INNING
Sacred Space and Sacred Time
SECOND INNING
Faith
THIRD INNING
Doubt
FOURTH INNING
Conversion
FIFTH INNING
Miracles
SIXTH INNING
Blessings and Curses
SEVENTH INNING
Saints and Sinners
SEVENTH-INNING STRETCH
EIGHTH INNING
Community
NINTH INNING
Nostalgia (And the Myth of the Eternal Return)
THE CLUBHOUSE
Acknowledgments
Appendices
Index
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, doubt, conversion, miracles, blessings, curses, saints, and sinners. There is magic in these pages. I have loved baseball all my life, but never before did I fully comprehend the sacred dimensions of that love.
The book opens on October 4, 1955, a day long etched into the memory of baseball fans. John Sexton and his friend Bobby Douglas are on their knees, offering prayers before the radio in the hope that the Brooklyn Dodgers, after years of agonizing losses, might finally beat the New York Yankees and win their first World Series.
I, too, had raced home from school that day so that I could hear the end of the game in the familiar surroundings of my home, with my mother by my side. And I, too, prayed for victory. “Please, God, let this year be the year!” Our collective prayers were answered when the game ended and Vin Scully delivered the message Brooklyn fans had waited generations to hear: “Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the champions of the world.” My mother and I were momentarily speechless. As Sexton observes, some feelings are ineffable, too overwhelming to be expressed in words. I jumped up and threw my arms around my mother, tears streaming down our cheeks.
Storytelling is at the heart of this book—stories that reveal the connections between the joys of loving baseball and the joys of a spiritual life. Seasonal ceremonies of rebirth and renewal figure largely in both realms, as do rituals, traditions, and superstitions. Sexton tells the story of a prolonged slump endured by Dodger first baseman Gil Hodges. In the midst of the slump, a priest in Brooklyn abandoned his scheduled sermon, asking his congregation instead to pray for Gil Hodges. When Hodges began to hit, the parishioners believed they were responsible. I knew better. I had given Gil Hodges the Saint Christopher’s medal blessed by the pope that I had won in a catechism contest by knowing the seven deadly sins. Since Saint Christopher was the patron saint of travel, I was certain that my medal had guided Hodges safely around the bases.
The Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles in 1958 stands at the center of Baseball as a Road to God. This betrayal of staggering dimensions leads Sexton to an absorbing discussion of spiritual conversion. “Conversion is not for the faint of heart,” he argues. “It is a difficult process, requiring effort and perseverance.” Some Brooklyn fans rejected baseball entirely. Others consigned themselves to follow their old team from a distant shore. The arrival of the New York Mets in 1962 eased the way for many, allowing a peaceful transfer of allegiance without losing the sense of community engendered by a hometown team.
John Sexton experienced a more dramatic conversion. For nearly two decades, still living in New York, he continued to root for his beloved Dodgers. When his son, Jed, fell in love with the New York Yankees, however, the “unthinkable” happened. The bond between father and son trumped Sexton’s old loyalty to the Dodgers. He experienced a “moment of conversion,” finding a new faith in the team he had once hated—he became and still remains a tried-and-true Yankee fan.
My own conversion followed a different path. After the Dodgers abandoned me, I could not follow baseball for eight years, until I moved to Boston and went to Fenway Park. There it was again, a “sacred place,” to use Sexton’s words, so reminiscent of Ebbets Field: a fervent crowd contained in a stadium scaled to human dimensions, the players so close it seemed almost as if you could touch them. Nor could I have found a new team more reminiscent of the old Brooklyn Dodgers: perpetual bridesmaids year after year. Nonetheless, I became an irrational Red Sox fan and have passed that love to my three sons. We have had season tickets for more than thirty years, but even though my conversion is
complete, there are days when I sit with my sons and imagine myself a young girl once more in the presence of my father, watching the players of my youth on the grassy field below: Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider. As Sexton rightly argues, the “intertwining of past and present” is at the heart of baseball’s appeal.
Through this book, I came to a better understanding of the miraculous Red Sox championship in 2004. Sexton was seated near a group of Yankee VIPs in the fourth game of the championship series. With the Sox down three games to zero and behind 4–3 in the bottom of the ninth, several of the Yankee brass began to leave, an act Sexton perceived as one of the deadly sins—the haughty pride that often “precedes a fall.” The Sox went on to win that game and the three that followed, before crushing St. Louis in the World Series.
While reason suggests that Boston won the World Series because it had better pitching than St. Louis, I found in Sexton’s discussion of faith and doubt a far more interesting explanation. Faith and doubt, he argues, are at the core of both religion and baseball. For years, Red Sox fans had been consumed with doubt and darkness. For years, the players had shared “the institutional memory” of losing seasons. After the miraculous comeback against the Yankees, however, the team played like boys—high-spirited, fun-loving, confident boys, enjoying every minute of the game. They believed so strongly in themselves that they cast a spell upon us, and once we truly believed in them, our belief redoubled their strength. Whatever happened, we had faith they would see us through. And they surely did, creating what Sexton calls “mystical moments” that will remain in our memories forever.
In the basement of my family’s home, my friend Bobby “Dougie” Douglas and I knelt and prayed with all the intensity we could muster, grasping between us in dynamic tension each end of a twelve-inch crucifix we had removed from the wall.
We prayed before a radio instead of an altar, which broadcast the sounds of Game Seven of the 1955 World Series instead of hymns. We had sprinted to my home the instant the nuns released us from our eighth-grade class—sprinted as fast as we could, driven by our knowledge that, with three innings to go, the Brooklyn Dodgers were leading the New York Yankees by the perilous score of 2–0. All we and every other living Dodgers fan had known to that point were the pain and anguish of bitter disappointment. Three innings and that finally could change.
In that basement, seconds felt like hours as we prayed and lived through each agonizing pitch; through the pinch-hitting appearance of an injured Mickey Mantle with one man on and two out in the bottom of the seventh inning (he popped out); through the tension an inning later as the Yankees put two men on with two out (the young Dodger pitcher Johnny Podres struck out Hank Bauer on a high fastball to end the threat). Release did not come until Yankee rookie Elston Howard tapped the final pitch (a changeup) weakly to short—indeed, not until shortstop Pee Wee Reese’s low throw had been snared by the outstretched glove of Gil Hodges at first base.
For three innings, time had slowed; but in that moment it froze: The Brooklyn Dodgers had won the World Series! Seven decades of waiting were over! Dougie raised his arms in exultation, releasing the crucifix, whereupon the laws of physics drove the head of Christ into my mouth, chipping my front tooth. I wore that chipped front tooth, unrepaired, as a visible memento for nearly fifty years.
All these years later, every pitch of those last three innings is etched in memory—not because our prayers were answered (at least not in any way that I would acknowledge today). That day lives for me still because it was magical (better yet, mystical): the improbable triumph, yes; but even more important, the intensity of the hope and ecstasy that Dougie and I shared.
For the two of us, baseball and our still-forming Catholic faith were not connected literally; nonetheless, though we did not appreciate it at the time, baseball that day displayed some of the profound and complex elements that constitute religion. We were transported to a plane familiar to “the faithful”—to a place where faith, hope, and love were as much on display as Podres’s arm.
October 4, 1955. For me and millions of others, a sacred day. Why? Hard to put into words. Impossible to capture completely in our limited vocabulary.
But we do have a word for something that defies reduction to words: ineffable. We cannot define the ineffable, even though we can experience and “know” it profoundly (I know Lisa, my wife, loves me). And we can evoke it—in story or “myth” (not myth as “falsehood,” but myth in the original, sublime sense of the word).
We live in the age of science; the wonders of knowledge and the results created by it surround us. Its possibilities give us hope for a better world. In some quarters, however, the promise of science has spawned what might be called “scientism”—a belief that just because something is said (ipse dixit, as scholars like to say), science captures or will capture all that there is to know in any sense of that word. I do not believe this.
As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: “God is not a scientific problem, and scientific methods are not capable of solving it….[T]he problem of God is not only related to phenomena within nature but to nature itself; not only to concepts within thinking but to thinking itself. It is a problem that refers to what surpasses nature, to what lies beyond all things and all concepts. The moment we utter the name of God we leave the level of scientific thinking and enter the realm of the ineffable.”
My New York University colleague Thomas Nagel, who is widely recognized as one of the most thoughtful philosophical minds of our time, argues forcefully in his most recent book, Mind and Cosmos, that our present methods of gaining knowledge likely will be supplemented by new tools. As he put it:
It is perfectly possible that the truth is beyond our reach, in virtue of our intrinsic cognitive limitations, and not merely beyond our grasp in humanity’s present stage of intellectual development. But I believe that we cannot know this, and that it makes sense to go on seeking a systematic understanding of how we and other living things fit into the world. In this process, the ability to generate and reject false hypotheses plays an essential role. I have argued patiently against the prevailing form of naturalism, a reductive materialism that purports to capture life and mind through its neo-Darwinian extension…. I find this view antecedently unbelievable—a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense. The empirical evidence can be interpreted to accommodate different comprehensive theories, but in this case the cost in conceptual and probabilistic contortions is prohibitive. I would be willing to bet that the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two—though of course it may be replaced by a new consensus that is just as invalid. The human will to believe is inexhaustible.
I agree. The story of the advance of knowledge has been and will be a continuing translation of the unknown to the known; and it surely is correct that science as we know it today is but one of the tools our successors will have to continue the process.
Beyond what is unknown today, there is something that is plainly unknowable, ineffable, no matter how hard we try to figure it out. This dimension of human experience touches some of the most important features of our existence.
Stephen Jay Gould, scientist and baseball fan, once referred to science and religion as “nonoverlapping magisteria.” I think he had it just right; and unlike the priests or disciples of scientism, I comfortably embrace both the wonders of the first magisterium (science) and the ineffable wonders of the second (the religious or spiritual).
Today, as for thousands of years, it is possible to find meaning beyond words everywhere—and in this domain beyond words, the religious or spiritual resides. In an age of gigabytes and picoseconds, we tend to live too quickly and to miss much that we might see. Baseball, as it turns out, can help us develop the capacity to see through to another, sacred space. Indeed, the more we come to appreciate the sport’s intricacies and evocative power, the clearer it is that it shares much with what we traditionally have called religion.
It was November 21, 1999, and I was standing in the garden of Villa La Pietra, NYU’s fifty-seven-acre campus in Florence, Italy. I was then dean of the School of Law, and we had just finished three days hosting seven heads of government, led by the President of the United States.
We had received the wheels-up signal, meaning all the leaders were aloft in their jets and no longer our responsibility, and we had begun a party for those who had worked on the event. Just then, an impious student (one of the volunteer workers) approached me: “I understand you’re a big baseball fan,” he said. “I think the sport is silly and I don’t understand why anybody would waste time on it.”
“You are among the great unwashed,” I replied, invoking a favorite line of the mystical Charlie Winans, my mentor during high school and long afterward.
Charlie is central to this story, literally and spiritually. Father William O’Malley, one of his colleagues at the remarkable Jesuit high school I attended, caught the essence of Charlie when he wrote: “Charlie had the body of Orson Welles, the voice of James Earl Jones, and the soul of Francis of Assisi. Charlie could drink till three but be up for mass at six. He was the first fully real-ized Christian I ever met.”
In and out of class, Charlie urged us, a group of Brooklyn Catholic working-class boys, to “play another octave on the piano” (taste the food you have not tasted, sing the song you have not sung, visit the place you have never visited). He pressed us to find wonder in places and things that seemed unremarkable on the surface but that could be transformed by careful inspection and introspection.