Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

by John Sexton

  Once upon a time, a great author, poet, and fan sat in the bleachers of the original Yankee Stadium and saw more than a building and a baseball game.

  From his outfield perch, John Updike studied the stately facades, the towering columns, and the expanse of gorgeous green grass in front of him.

  “Distance brings proportion,” he wrote in a poem first published in The New Yorker in 1956 during baseball’s golden age. “From here the populated tiers as much as players seem part of the show.”

  Of course, Updike also saw a baseball game. But even as he watched the box score entries come to life before him with an eye that noticed “[Mickey] Mantle’s thick baked neck,” he connected to the received history of the game in the older men around him who once had watched “Hans” (his more famous nickname was Honus) Wagner play shortstop with his notoriously large “lobster” hands.

  Most of all, he saw unity in time and place, in the nature of the “show” (not coincidentally, the word many baseball people use for the major leagues). Old and young, past and present, change and constant, building and playing field, all viewed under a Bronx sky inspired Updike to see the unity in life. To him, it was an ideal way to spend an afternoon.

  Baseball moves beyond ordinary space and time, as the poem tells us, in its flow of feelings and images. Updike invoked Taoism (the poem is titled “Tao in the Yankee Stadium Bleachers”), referencing Taoist parable, the great Tao teacher Chuang-tzu, and above all the “pureness” of the experience—“‘pure’ in the sense of undisturbed water.”

  And he looked to the classics of the West as well. Baseball, in its totality, is “a constructed stage beast, three folds of Dante’s rose”—suggesting the Italian poet’s visions of heaven, hell, and purgatory.

  The poem ends serenely: “The Inner Journey seems unjudgeably long when small boys purchase cups of ice and, distant as a paradise, experts, passionate and deft, wait while Berra flies to left.”

  It is a tough, demanding poem (one reason I assign it in my class). But its elements are accessible, if not familiar, to any fan who has embraced the whole show—whether in Yankee Stadium or the “friendly confines” of Chicago’s Wrigley Field or Pittsburgh’s long-gone Forbes Field or any other of baseball’s venues.

  Whether as stage, setting, or metaphor, we visit the ballparks for more than a game. For even a modestly passionate fan, much less a spiritual one, there is the tableau. It tugs at us, calling upon us to notice the details, to raise our awareness, to see deeply, and by so doing, to move beyond the obvious.

  It is a composite, joining the ballpark and the game. In Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s novel The Celebrant, there is a wonderful description of what happens on a line drive to left (by a player named Kopf) with a runner (Duncan) on second base:

  Here was all the intricate movement of a play in baseball: Duncan taking tentative steps toward third, then exploding into a full gallop as he saw that the ball would drop in front of Jackson; the left fielder dashing to the line of the hit, overrunning it slightly to ensure the freedom of his gloved left hand as he scooped the ball from the grass; shortstop Risberg aligning himself and raising his glove to offer Jackson a near target for his direct throw home; the third baseman to his station, the second baseman to his, and the catcher, Schalk, stripping the mask from his head and flinging it far away as Duncan turned third and headed home. And the forgotten portion of the plan: Kopf, the batter, rounding first and making for the extra base that a play at the plate would allow him.

  So it is that a character in W. P. Kinsella’s The Iowa Baseball Confederacy urges his son Gideon and the reader to watch closely the choreography of such plays:

  “Gideon, there’s a lot more to watching a baseball game than keeping your eye on the ball…. [T]he real movement doesn’t start until the ball is in play. After the ball is hit, after it has cleared the infield, especially if it is going for extra bases, you’ve got to train yourself to look back at the infield. While the outfielder is running down the ball, watch who is covering which base, watch to see who is backing up third and home. You’ll be amazed at the amount of movement. Ah, Gideon, when everyone is in motion it’s like watching those delicate, long-legged insects skim over calm water….

  “You’ve got to watch the pitcher, Gideon…. and you’ll appreciate why baseball is a combination of chess and ballet. Watch him back up the bases, watch him get across to first on a grounder to the right side, see how the first baseman leads him, tossing to an empty sack, trusting him to be there.

  “When it looks like nothing is going on, choose a player and watch him react to every pitch, rising like water, receding like water. Watch a different player every inning. It takes a lot of years watching baseball to learn not to follow the ball every second. The true beauty of the game is the ebb and flow of the fielders, the kaleidoscopic arrangements and rearrangements of the players in response to a foul ball, an extra-base hit, or an attempted stolen base.”

  For Updike and legions of others who open themselves to such wonders, the sights and sounds of a day at the ballpark can summon an inner self, conjured as one moves through the park’s entrance (the Great Hall at Yankee Stadium), crossing a threshold separating the “profane” world outside from the “sacred” world that lies inside its gates.

  Updike viewed the old stadium from the center field bleachers. But its enormity was overwhelming from any vantage point. For my part, I remember how as a boy I felt awe as I walked the outfield after a game. In those more innocent days, at the Stadium and at a few of the other then sixteen major league ballparks (the New York Giants’ Polo Grounds, within sight directly across the Harlem River, was another), fans could walk the outfield grass (always watched carefully by the groundskeepers) after the game as they began their journey home. In those magical moments, we could examine up close the chalk-etched geometry of the field. Believe me, to pause on the grass in Yankee Stadium’s short right field and stare at the area around first base, where Lou Gehrig once ruled, quickens the heart. And a few dozen steps farther into right field, where it was possible to touch the turf Babe Ruth once patrolled, it beats still faster. From the field, the facade and the columns were even more imposing. As hundreds of fans gazed in wonder, ushers had to urge them along. NYU’s commencement is held annually at Yankee Stadium; and I must confess that, as I retrace those steps of long ago in the academic procession each year, I feel as much a baseball fan as a university president.

  For some of us, a visit to the ballpark is a move from one state of being—the more familiar one—to another. It is a transformation, evoking a connection to something deep and meaningful. This is more than the simple, surface observation that a stadium can be a church and the bleachers can be its pews; the stadium acts as what Eliade would call axis mundi—a channeling of the intersection between our world and the transcendent world, a place “sacred above all” that connects the ordinary and the spiritual dimensions. It is not that this evocative experience occurs for everyone in every ballpark every time; but it can happen to anyone, in any ballpark, anytime. In this place, magic can happen, and the fan can be transported to a space and time beyond, to an experience we know profoundly but cannot put into words.

  Stadiums sometimes are less majestic than Yankee Stadium, but several are famously intimate, linked to their communities by their own histories and traditions, representing much more than concrete and steel.

  Only the spiritually numb would miss the wonder of Wrigley Field, one of only two stadiums (the other being Fenway Park) still standing from the construction binge that began early in the last century. Designed tastefully to fit into its residential neighborhood on the Second City’s North Side (the stadium was built not for the Cubs but for the Chicago Whales of the Federal League, who played there for two years before folding), Wrigley is famous for its ivy-covered outfield walls; but there is much more to this great park.

  The best way to approach Wrigley is by the stands in the left field corner. As you enter, you see the green ivy th
at defines the place, stretching around the outfield. This distinctive feature was the vision of a thirteen-year-old fan named Bill Veeck, whose father, a Chicago sports reporter, literally wrote his way to the presidency of William Wrigley’s Cubs. When the boy eventually joined the team’s management, he got to execute his vision, at one point even helping to plant the ivy. Today, a ball hit into the tangled greenery that is lost like an errant golf shot (it happens frequently) is an automatic double.

  A bit to the right you see the giant scoreboard—also Bill Veeck’s idea—still operated by hand and devoid of the instant replays that mark today’s ballparks—and still untouched by a batted ball.

  A little farther right you can see atop a building across the street the bleachers of the Lakeview Baseball Club, where fans watch the game from seats outside the park (you pay a stiff price for these Lakeview Club seats, though you still can watch the game for free from a number of the other buildings that ring the outfield). These unusual seats are marked by two huge signs, each featuring Latin. The first reads EAMUS CATULI!, meaning “Go Cubs,” and the second reads AC (as in anno catuli, the year of the Cubs) followed by a string of numbers representing the number of years since a division championship, since the last World Series appearance, and since the last world championship. In 2012, the AC sign was taken down for repairs, igniting a debate about whether the numbers should be restored or eliminated as too negative.

  Tucked inside the grandstand is the oldest organ still in use in the major leagues, whose predecessor was actually the first one to produce one of baseball’s distinctive sounds. There remains no canned music at Wrigley Field today.

  If you grab a hot dog and a beer (the favored brand is still Old Style), you can get it where the major leagues’ first built-in concession stand stood.

  And during the seventh-inning stretch when some favored guest, often a celebrity, leads the fans in “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” it continues a tradition started by the team’s delightfully daffy broadcaster, the late Harry Caray (né Harry Christopher Carabina). Usually with a few Old Styles in him, he would lean precariously out of his booth, instantly recognizable in his thick black-rimmed glasses, wave an arm, and shout out: “And a one, and a two, and a three…” It still happens.

  Walk toward home plate and you can, if you ask politely, sit for a minute or two in the legendary front-row seat that symbolizes the Cubs’ long championship-missing drought—aisle 4, row 8, seat 113. That was where a lifelong Cubs fan, Steve Bartman, was sitting for Game Six of the National League Championship Series against the Florida Marlins on October 14, 2003—ninety-five years to the day from when the Cubs beat Detroit in 1908 to win their second consecutive World Series (they haven’t won one since). With one out in the top of the eighth inning, five outs from the World Series, and the Cubs leading 3–0, the Marlins’ Luis Castillo hit a high fly ball that twisted toward that seat, looking like easy pickings for left fielder Moises Alou. Oblivious to the oncoming Alou, and with headphones in place, Bartman reached for it, his hands just above Alou’s outstretched glove. The ball glanced off Bartman’s hand and fell to the ground. Alou was furious at the lost chance for an out, and the fluke play set off an eight-run Marlins inning. The next day, the Cubs lost Game Seven as well, and the Marlins went on to beat the Yankees in the World Series. It could have happened to anybody.

  Walk a little farther and stop behind home plate, the actual site of as famous a home run swing as there is in the game’s history. Babe Ruth stood on that spot during Game Three of the 1932 World Series. With two strikes against him, and with some very rough language from the Cubs’ dugout ringing in his ears, the Babe gestured toward center field. What he meant remains a subject for debate (arguments are part of what makes baseball appealing), but Ruth hit the next pitch from the Cubs’ Charlie Root into the very bleachers he had marked.

  Wrigley is hallowed, sacred space. So, too, the onetime home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, the team that joined the Giants and the Cubs to dominate the National League during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Not far from downtown (in the Oakland section of the city), in a quiet courtyard on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh, a visitor in the right frame of mind can travel metaphorically to the America of his father or grandfather. Here is the site, lovingly memorialized, of Forbes Field, where the Pirates played from 1909 through 1970. They won two of their three seven-game World Series victories of this period here, among the most thrilling ever staged.

  In the courtyard, there is a large section of the old brick wall from the cavernous ballpark’s center field, complete with a flagpole right where the original stood. When Forbes Field opened, it was just barely the second stadium (Philadelphia’s old Shibe Park was first by a nose) built with concrete and Pennsylvania’s most famous product, steel. These new parks were such wonders of entertainment for ordinary working folks, they in fact often were called cathedrals.

  The first year the park was open, the Pirates, led by Honus Wagner, nosed out Ty Cobb’s Detroit Tigers in a tight series that still stirs arguments. And sixteen years later, against Walter Johnson’s Washington Senators, they were the first team to win a World Series after trailing three games to one (it wouldn’t happen again for more than thirty years).

  Forbes Field is a wonderful example of baseball’s historic role in American life. When the park opened, there wasn’t much a steel-mill worker could afford to do in his precious free time, but he could afford to see a game; and folks dressed in suits and nice frocks to do so. When they got to the ballpark, they saw players who were just like them, not yet distanced by lucrative contracts and mass media attention. And they could root and celebrate and grieve—but, above all, enjoy and bond—with the team and one another.

  The team meant a great deal to working families, especially recent immigrants. The Pirates’ owner, Barney Dreyfuss, was himself an immigrant who had come from Germany and whose family made money in the liquor business. It was he who bought into the franchise in Pittsburgh and moved several of his best players there from the team he owned in Louisville; he helped negotiate the peace between the older National League and the upstart American League that created the modern majors; and he suggested celebrating the union with what became the World Series in 1903. (Pittsburgh lost that first Series, narrowly, to Boston.) It was also Dreyfuss who ripped down the Pirates’ wooden grandstand downtown ballpark, Exposition Park, and built a new stadium at the end of a trolley line. It was a park built for working families, especially recent arrivals.

  Pittsburgh was a natural place for immigrants to go, because they were certain to find work—extremely hard work and extremely low-paying. The typical immigrant in the early 1900s would make about fifteen dollars for a sixty-hour workweek. But hard as it was, every once in a while they would find their way to the ballpark and buy a seat for about twenty-five cents. Sometimes, if they saved their money, they could take their family.

  And on the field they saw people like them—such as the revered Honus Wagner, one of nine kids whose father came from Germany to toil in the mills. Wagner himself dropped out of school at the age of twelve to go to work. Then came baseball. And how he played the game! With eight batting titles, more than seven hundred stolen bases, and a career batting average of .327, he was among the first five men inducted into the fledgling Hall of Fame in upstate New York (along with Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, and Christy Mathewson, against whom he once got five hits in five at-bats). Only Cobb received more votes, and only a few more at that.

  Naturally, there is a big statue of Wagner in Pittsburgh today. It originally stood outside Forbes Field; then in 1971, it was moved to Three Rivers Stadium; and finally, it was placed where it now stands outside the main entrance of PNC Park. Nearby there is another memorial, a section of the original Forbes Field outfield wall, from left-center field, complete with its old distance sign of 406 feet. The most important home run ever hit at Forbes Field, one that has to be on the short list of the most import
ant in baseball history, sailed directly over that wall on October 13, 1960. When it did, for the first time ever, a World Series—and a seventh game no less—ended with a home run.

  That historic blast was hit by the Pirates’ second baseman, Bill Mazeroski—who was building a Hall of Fame career but who, truth be told, was not known at the time as a power hitter—to end possibly the most thrilling World Series game ever played. It was anything but a pitchers’ duel. After multiple lead changes, comebacks, and bizarre plays, the score was tied 9–9 in the bottom of the ninth inning—as, of course, was the series (three games each) between the Pirates and the heavily favored New York Yankees.

  Mazeroski, the first man up, faced the Yankee relief pitcher (normally a starter) Ralph Terry; he took the first pitch for a ball. When the second pitch came in over the middle of home plate, a bit more than waist high, Mazeroski jumped on it. The celebration of that swing, which brought glory after a thirty-five-year drought, continues to this day. People gather at the Forbes memorial every October 13 to play a tape of the radio broadcast. And a few years ago, a kinescope recording of the NBC television broadcast, thought to be lost forever, was discovered in pristine condition in the San Francisco wine cellar of a onetime minority owner who had the film made because—too nervous to watch in person—he went on vacation to Paris during the World Series. That owner was Bing Crosby.

  A footnote to the story is that in the split second before Mazeroski’s home run soared over the left-center field wall, it passed over the head of Yogi Berra. By then, the aging Yankee catcher had started to play left field. Berra, a noted poet of the oxymoronically obvious, once said that “it is tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” an insight also attributed to nuclear physicist Niels Bohr. In any event, true to his aphorism, Berra would say after the game that he no more expected Mazeroski’s blast than anyone else.