Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game Read online

  Channeling Charlie and relishing the student’s challenge, I made him a proposal: “If you will read twelve books that I choose next semester, I will direct you in an independent study at the end of which you will realize that baseball is a road to God.” He did, and I did, and it didn’t take long before word of our work together spread. Other students asked to take “the course,” and it became a seminar that I have taught for ten years.

  My work with my students and the course that has evolved from it has never been about proselytizing them for religion or for God (whatever that word means to you). At first, it was about forcing them to develop their understanding of what the words religion and God could mean, so that they could make considered decisions about whether they wished to pursue either; baseball was the vehicle for developing that understanding, as we would probe each week whether, for the characters we encountered in the readings, it operated as a religion or caused them to encounter God (in any sense of the word). I was and remain indifferent to whether a student came to view baseball as a road to God (the indefinite article clearly signals it is not the road for everyone). Over the years, however, I became very interested in helping the students to develop their capacity for contemplation, sensitivity, awareness, and mystical intensity. Baseball, it turns out, is a wonderful laboratory.

  Not long ago, the PBS journalist Bill Moyers featured the seminar as part of an interview he did with me. He taped during two classes, in one asking a student to explain the content of the course. “You know,” the student replied, “my friends ask me to explain it all the time. Is it about baseball? Not exactly. Is it about God? Not exactly. So what is it about? If you want to know, you’ll have to come and experience it for yourself. It’s ineffable.”

  There’s that word again: ineffable. That which cannot be defined or captured by words, though poetry and music and art sometimes come close. As Rabbi Heschel put it: “By the ineffable we do not mean the unknown as such; things unknown today may be known a thousand years from now. By the ineffable we mean that aspect of reality, which by its very nature lies beyond our comprehension and is acknowledged by the mind to be beyond the scope of the mind.” Like what Dougie and I experienced that day in 1955 when the ball landed in Hodges’s glove.

  If there is the rational, the irrational, and the nonrational (or the known, the unknown, and the unknowable), the ineffable lives in the last category. And it is our purpose to explore it. We use tools employed by scholars of religion to analyze the game of baseball and how its fans experience it. What we find is that there are similarities—surprising similarities. Baseball evokes in the life of its faithful features we associate with the spiritual life: faith and doubt, conversion, blessings and curses, miracles, and so on. For some, baseball really is a road to God.

  The superficial similarities between baseball and religion are many and varied: a ballpark is a church and a ball game is a mass; there are three strikes to an out and three outs to an inning, another set of holy trinities; or there are nine positions on the field, nine innings in a game, and nine muses in Greek mythology. There are also more poetic connections between baseball and religion, ones evoked by the beauty of the outfield grass or the serenity of a high-arching fly ball. Still others verge on silliness. For example, the mistaken claim made by the character Annie in the movie Bull Durham that there are one hundred and eight beads on a Catholic rosary and one hundred and eight stitches in an official baseball (actually, the number of beads varies depending on the rosary, and the number of stitches in a baseball is two hundred and sixteen). The more revealing connections between baseball and the religious experience go much deeper than that.

  Some of the most interesting writing on the nature of religion done in the last century is by Mircea Eliade, a professor at the University of Chicago (though not, safe to say, a fan of the nearby White Sox). Eliade chronicled the continuous human search for meaning and for vehicles capable of connecting believers to the sacred—what for them is experienced as holy. With thousands of examples drawn across time and place, he shows that the experience of the sacred is subjective. Each person in his own time, place, and context makes a choice, separating what is sacred for him from what is profane for him. Eliade’s definition of the sacred and the profane is deliberately circular: The sacred is that which is not profane; the profane is that which is not sacred.

  The sacred manifests itself, he tells us, in space and time; certain places, things, and actions evoke for a religious man the spiritual plane. And connecting to this ineffable domain forms the basis of the religious experience. Eliade called this phenomenon a hierophany (the shining through of the sacred). Such experiences are not the exclusive province of organized religion; as it turns out, we humans have developed a variety of ways (from yoga to a well-turned 6-4-3 double play) to transcend the mundane experience of everyday life.

  And sometimes, we are transformed and/or transported in an utterly profound way. As Eliade wrote, the mundane and profane can become holy and sacred:

  It is impossible to overemphasize the paradox represented by every hierophany, even the most elementary. By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience, all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany.

  He went on to say that the revealed sacred “effects a break in plane” and “makes possible ontological passage from one mode of being to another.” That’s a lot to come from a stone (or a baseball), but Eliade showed that, for us humans, it always has been such.

  Rudolf Otto, whose work influenced Eliade, described the sacred as mysterium tremendum et fascinans (Latin for a “mystery, both fearful and fascinating”), that which is “wholly other” from what is experienced in ordinary life. This mysterium is an unknowable reality, incapable of being reduced to cognitive categories.

  William James put it this way: “How infinitely passionate a thing like religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deductible from anything else.” He adds that the essence of the religious experience, those highest flights, is found deeply within ourselves: “in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making and directly perceive how events happen.”

  The ineffable is experienced, not defined, revealing itself in moments of intense feeling. The setting is beside the point, be it a house of worship or a mountaintop or a ballpark. One label for the sacred (for mysterium tremendum et fascinans) is God. Used this way (the way I use it), the “God” involved is not the anthropomorphic deity who resides in green pastures.

  Karen Armstrong, in her wonderful book The Case for God, put it well:

  The catechism definition I learned at the age of eight—“God is the Supreme Spirit, who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections”—was not only dry, abstract, and rather boring; it was also incorrect. Not only did it imply that God was a fact that it was possible to “define” but…I was not taught to take the next step and see that God is not a spirit; that “He” has no gender; and that we have no idea what we mean when we say that a being “exists” who is “infinite in all perfections.” The process that should have led to a stunned appreciation of an “otherness” beyond the competence of language ended prematurely.

  The great theologian Paul Tillich, whom Armstrong also cites, captured the way we use the word God in my course:

  The name of this infinite and inexhaust
ible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even the word itself. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him.

  In this book, we ask whether baseball, like Catholicism or Islam or peyote in the desert, can be a road to God—not the road to God for all, but a road to God for some. The traditional religions also have deep appeal to adherents but little or no appeal to others.

  The essence of the agony and ecstasy Dougie and I experienced during the final innings on October 4, 1955, is not in the confluence of baseball and religion on a surface level—listening to a broadcast while clutching a crucifix—but is in its depth, the feelings and sensitivities that were evoked by the experience. During Podres’s long walks to the mound, it was impossible not to wonder if he had a few more pitches in his tired left arm, to worry if too much was being asked of the twenty-three-year-old pitcher. After he threw his final pitch, after that last ground ball, we were released from all those years of misses and, as tension turned to joy, we celebrated with exultation worthy of the dervishes. In only three innings of baseball, all that: wonder, awe, hope, passion, heroism, and community.

  And there are as many other examples as there are baseball storytellers. My journey along this road, from childhood to the cusp of old age, provides a less exhaustive list of hierophanies than Eliade marshaled in his comprehensive surveys of the world’s religions; but, still, the entries are legion. For one more, let me jump forward nearly fifty years from that October day I knelt with Dougie praying for the Dodgers.

  Strictly as baseball, it was one for the ages—the Yankees ahead three games to none in the 2004 American League Championship Series and ahead in the fourth game, 4–3, in the bottom of the ninth inning. As the Red Sox came to bat, Boston’s Fenway Park was a funeral home. Seated behind the visitors’ dugout in an enclave carved out for Yankee staff and a small group of fortunate fans, I could sense the brooding presence of the famous Curse of the Bambino. Three more outs and the Red Sox could count eighty-six years without a championship.

  Suddenly, there was movement nearby. Several of the VIP Yankee fans around me were starting to leave, trying to beat the large crowd out of the ancient ballpark. Granted, an early exit seemed reasonable: The spirit of the Sox had been broken (the score the night before had been 19–8), the Yankees were ahead again, and the Red Sox were facing Mariano Rivera, the magnificent relief pitcher who had already retired the heart of their batting order an inning earlier while barely breaking a sweat. Still, it was troubling to see these VIPs so sure of their team’s victory that they couldn’t be bothered to stay and see it happen. It reeked of hubris, the sin of pride. Pride, one of the seven deadly sins. Pride, in the words of Proverbs, the “haughty spirit” that precedes a fall. More than one pair of eyes glared at them, including two pairs belonging to the polar opposites of Yankee celebrity, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and filmmaker Spike Lee. I warned a friend and minority Yankee owner who got up to join those leaving: “If you go, you will reverse the Curse.”

  The bottom of the ninth began with a walk to Red Sox infielder Kevin Millar. I knew, along with everyone in the ballpark, that the pinch runner sent in to replace Millar at first base—speedy veteran Dave Roberts—would try to steal second. It was so obvious, we later learned, that Red Sox manager Terry Francona didn’t even bother to give Roberts the steal sign; he simply winked at him as he left the dugout to enter the game.

  Yankees manager Joe Torre also knew a steal attempt was coming, and he should have ordered a pitchout. But he didn’t, and Roberts made it safely to second, where he was in a position to score the tying run on the single that followed. And that set the stage for Red Sox slugger David Ortiz’s home run that won the game in the bottom of the twelfth inning.

  Virtually the same thing happened the next night in Game Five to tie the score in the bottom of the eighth inning. The Red Sox won (this time with an Ortiz single) in the fourteenth inning, ending what was then the longest postseason game ever played, nearly six hours.

  What followed, with the series back in New York, was just as dramatic: a pitching feat of epic courage by Red Sox veteran ace Curt Schilling in Game Six—his right ankle bleeding from last-minute surgical repairs—helped tie the series. And then the roof caved in on the suddenly hapless Yankees in a 10–3 seventh-game blowout. Schilling’s red sock was later sent upstate to Cooperstown for display at the Baseball Hall of Fame, a relic if ever there was one. One week later, the Red Sox were world champions.

  No serious case can be made that the departure of a few high rollers precipitated the unprecedented resurgence of the Sox. Still, the chain of events—including the sense of foreboding their departure induced in some of us—built moment by moment (think Ravel’s Boléro) to an excruciatingly intense experience, ineffable at its core—a palpable feeing that there were higher forces at work. The consensus among experts and fans alike is that Mariano Rivera is the greatest reliever of all time. The statisticians will remind you that no reliever is so great that he never blows a lead and thus conclude that the Game Four collapse was simply a manifestation of the law of averages. But passionate fans, those who packed the ballpark that night and felt what was in the air, know differently.

  While the teams and players on the field may change each autumn, the game’s evocative power is continuous. Opening Day in the spring and the World Series in the fall are the bookends of baseball’s liturgical time, and within the rituals of each season, fans are converted to believers; players, managers, and even owners become saints (or sinners); and events become part of a mythology, forever remembered and repeated with the solemnity of the most beloved sacred stories. And inevitably, each season brings its moments of heightened awareness—divergent from ordinary time and place—in which some discover a connection to something deeper than the ordinary. Such moments are remembered not merely for what they literally were but for what they evoked in those who experienced them.

  Vantage point is critical. In baseball, as in religion, it is often very difficult to see through another person’s eyes. Ecstasy for some is agony for others. In the autumn of 1951 when the New York Giants’ Bobby Thomson hit his historic three-run home run to cap one of the most unlikely comebacks ever and abruptly end the Dodgers’ season, my heart sank while those of friends all around me soared to inexpressible heights. But to be a baseball fan—even in youth—is to know that fortune can change in an instant. The next game or series or season could be the one.

  Context was also central to the atmosphere that day in October 1955 when Dougie and I prayed for the Dodgers. Often, memories of past disasters and the feelings of accursedness that accompany them enhance the joy of the release from anguish that ultimate triumph provides. And sometimes, at least in retrospect, hope builds slowly to success in a way that makes success more beautiful.

  The millions of Americans who endured the Brooklyn Dodgers until they ran away to Los Angeles in 1958 knew all about crushing failure. Incredibly, during the nine seasons ending in 1953, leaving out the war years, the Dodgers faced the Yankees in the World Series five times and lost each time, twice in seventh games; they lost the National League pennant three times on the very last day of the season. And the way they lost pivotal World Series games went beyond bizarre to seem fated: In one case, a catcher dropped a third strike; in another, a pitcher actually lost a ground ball in the sun; and in a third, a potential winning hit was caught at literally the last instant before it hit the ground.

  Then came 1955 and Game Seven. Early on, while that crucifix was still hanging undisturbed on the wall in my bedroom, “signs” appeared, just as they did as the VIPs left Fenway in the bottom of the ninth inning forty-nine years later; to the careful obs
erver on that fateful October 1955 day, events suggested the possibility of a different outcome.

  In the bottom half of the third inning, the Yankees had runners on first and second with two out, with Gil McDougald batting and Yogi Berra up next. Swinging at a low pitch from Johnny Podres, McDougald sent a slow-bouncing ball to the right of third base. The Dodger third baseman, a young Don Hoak, froze, and the Yankee base runner, Phil Rizzuto, had simply to dodge the bouncing ball to get safely from second to third base, loading them all up for Berra. Unbelievably, however, he slid right into the ball, an automatic out, taking the Yankees out of the inning. The Dodgers started scoring the very next inning, and Podres pitched a shutout to give Brooklyn its first and only World Series title.

  This was the kind of play that usually ruined the Dodgers; this kind of play never went their way; but that afternoon it did. The historical record is devoid of any indication that Dodgers fans read Mircea Eliade or Rudolf Otto, but to this previously unlucky mass, Rizzuto’s slide was a hierophany—mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

  Fans occasionally do experience these moments as divergent from the ordinary, as connected to another dimension. Not all fans. Not even most fans. Not all the time. But for some fans, these special moments touch the part of us where the mystics live.

  It is through a collection of such experiences that I and my students have come to appreciate the jarring proposition that baseball can show us more about our world and ourselves than we might have thought. Or at the very least, it can demonstrate the benefits of living a little slower, of noticing a little more, and of embracing life’s ineffable beauties—as that impious student in Florence eventually understood.

  * The Knothole Gang was the mother of all pregame shows, preceding Brooklyn Dodger broadcasts in the fifties. Hosted by Happy Felton, a very large, bespectacled vaudeville performer, it featured Little Leaguers who sought tips from featured Dodgers and then threw and fielded in fabled Ebbets Field to win prizes and tickets to upcoming games. To appear on it was the highest point of many a New York childhood.