Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

by John Sexton

  Aaron Boone, who with one swing of his bat in 2003 became a legend, had acquired faith—and fed the faith of others. The scion of a Major League Baseball dynasty (grandson of Ray, son of Bob, and brother of Bret), he had come to the New York Yankees in the middle of the season from Cincinnati after several modestly successful years, but had left no discernible mark in his short time wearing pinstripes until he was inserted as a pinch runner into Game Seven of the American League Championship Series against the archrival Boston Red Sox. Boone came in to run for pinch hitter Ruben Sierra in the eighth inning following a dramatic three-run Yankee rally that exploited one of the worst managerial decisions ever (by Grady Little of the Red Sox, who left an aging and tired Pedro Martinez in for one inning too many). Boone stayed in the game at third base as it went into extra innings and was due to lead off the Yankee half of the eleventh.

  By then, the Yankee bullpen was spent. Mariano Rivera had just finished his third and final inning, and the Bombers (a nickname that stuck from the record-shattering Ruth–Gehrig era) needed to end the game quickly. By his own account, facing a skilled knuckleball thrower in Tim Wakefield, Boone was prepared to take Wakefield’s first pitch in order to get a feel for his tricky delivery. However, as Boone waited on deck for Wakefield to complete his warm-up tosses, Derek Jeter, already one of the Yankees’ living legends, approached him. Sensing Boone’s tension, Jeter told him not to worry: “The ghosts will come.”

  Jeter was referring not to the famous Curse that had, so the legend goes, kept the Red Sox from a world championship since 1918; he was referring to all the legendary figures of the Yankees’ unmatched, celebrated past (Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle) who had helped put the Yankees in thirty-eight of the first ninety-eight World Series and who had enabled them to win twenty-six of them. In a flash, Boone’s attitude changed. As he walked to home plate, he junked his plan to take the first pitch. Instead, he would be looking for what the players call “a pitch to hit.”

  Wakefield obliged with a knuckleball that didn’t flutter very much and drifted toward the middle of the plate. Boone was ready and sent a beautiful, long fly ball deep into the left field grandstand. Bedlam ensued. Jeter’s message had transformed Boone from a defensive hitter to an aggressive one, the kind who wins pennants. His faith had carried him forward.

  So it was with another monumental home run. This one, hit in the 1988 World Series, may be the most exciting mixture of spirit, mind, and matter in the history of the game.

  Kirk Gibson was one of those stars about whom managers dream. He could run like the wind, hit for power, field his outfield positions with acrobatic skill, and motivate his teammates with his hustle and fierce competitiveness. He came first to the Detroit Tigers after an All-American career at Michigan State University in two sports (the NFL coveted him as a wide receiver); soon he emerged as a key cog in their 1984 championship season.

  As a Dodger in 1988, Gibson had a Most Valuable Player season and led the team through a tough seven-game National League Championship Series against the Mets. But he was a wreck on the eve of Game One of an intra-California World Series battle with the heavily favored Oakland Athletics. He had a damaged left hamstring and a severely injured right knee; moreover, on the day of the fateful game, he had developed a stomach virus. He was nursing his wounds and missing from the Dodger dugout as the game began—nestled in the adjacent clubhouse, listening to NBC’s broadcasters declaring him unfit to play.

  However, Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda refused to accept his star’s total absence. Lasorda loved players who hustled and delivered in the clutch. He was desperate to get Gibson into the game, even if only for a pinch-hitting appearance, both for his potential impact on the outcome and his certain impact on the team’s spirit. Between innings, he regularly stuck his head in the clubhouse door to ask his star if he thought he could hit; each time, though, Gibson glumly gave a thumbs-down response.

  Until the ninth inning. With the A’s nursing a 4–3 lead, the Dodgers were facing the best relief pitcher in the game, Dennis Eckersley. Originally a flashy starter with Cleveland and Boston, Eckersley had matured (achieving sobriety along the way) into a dominating closer, with forty-five saves to his credit that year alone—although he was destined for agony on this night and four years later against Roberto Alomar.

  In the clubhouse, before the Dodgers came to bat in the bottom of the ninth, Gibson realized that the pitcher’s spot was due up fourth, which meant the Dodgers might need a pinch hitter. He dispatched a message to Lasorda that he would try to hit, and he returned to a batting tee set up in the room for practice swings. He groaned in pain with every swing.

  Meanwhile, Eckersley appeared headed for yet another save, getting two quick outs as Gibson limped into the dugout. Before he could climb the steps, however, Lasorda ordered him to stop. The crafty manager did not want Gibson in the on-deck circle as the third Dodger hitter of the inning, outfielder Mike Davis, walked to home plate; he wanted everyone, above all Eckersley, to see a light-hitting reserve infielder, Dave Anderson, on deck. Because Davis had hit for power the previous three seasons while playing for Oakland, the Dodger manager was certain Eckersley would pitch to him carefully with an easier out on deck. Eckersley did, walking him. And Gibson got his chance.

  The Dodger Stadium crowd roared as Gibson limped toward home plate.

  Eckersley pitched masterfully—inside and outside, high and low. He missed with a couple after Gibson fouled off three, his intense pain obvious to everyone. On a 2-2 pitch, with Eckersley’s concentration completely on Gibson, Davis stole second base on ball three (shades of the Dave Roberts’s play against the Yankees sixteen years later), meaning that a mere single could tie the game.

  Eckersley was preparing to throw the payoff pitch when Gibson suddenly called time and stepped out of the batter’s box. To the naked eye, his deep breath signaled a final effort to compose himself and concentrate. However, as Gibson later revealed, he was thinking about the scouting report on the A’s before the Series began. It had been compiled by one of those characters who make baseball so endearing, a sharp-eyed man from Louisiana, Mel Didier, then sixty years old, who had spent his career finding, helping develop, and scouting major league talent.

  Throughout baseball, Eckersley was known for his devilish slider, a particularly tricky pitch to hit. If it is thrown correctly (the grip should be on the outer third of the baseball instead of over the middle), it will move, or “slide,” laterally as well as down. Encountering a group of the Dodgers’ left-handed hitters before the Series (a small bunch that included Mike Scioscia and switch hitter John “T-Bone” Shelby), Didier delivered this oracular message: With a full count, a lefty could count on what baseball people call a “backdoor slider”—for them it would move down and toward the inside corner if thrown perfectly. Gibson resolved to bet on a slider and focused on swinging low, his best chance to put the thick, or fat, part of his bat on the ball, with what he liked to call his “emergency stroke.”

  True to form, Eckersley threw the backdoor slider and Gibson connected solidly, his healthy upper body providing all of the power through his swing. The Dodgers’ renowned broadcaster, Vin Scully, barely had time to announce a fly ball to right field before the ball landed deep in the seats. There is no more famous World Series image than the sight of an overjoyed Gibson rounding second base, pumping his right arm repeatedly as he limped toward home. After a momentary pause that allowed the home viewers to absorb the moment, Scully serenaded them with what is now among baseball’s most memorable calls: “In a season that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!”

  This was faith in action: Lasorda’s belief in his star and Gibson’s faith in himself, supplemented by a healthy dose of detailed preparation.

  Faith is often the handmaiden of hard work, intellectual and otherwise. In religion, thinkers often have tried to use reason to convince others to join them in faith. Much ink has been spilled, for example, on various philosophical arguments
designed to “prove” God’s existence. I find it interesting that the argumentative style and logical structure of some of these arguments have parallels in baseball that could be used—with equal force—to suggest that something more than coincidence is involved in some of baseball’s most delightful anomalies.

  Consider, for example, this piece of trivia. The annual MVP (Most Valuable Player) Award has existed in its modern form since 1931. A few remarkable players have won the award not just once, and not just more than once, but two years in a row. Wondrously (miraculously?), the first nine men to win the award back-to-back could fill the nine spots on a lineup card: that is, at the start of their MVP years, each of the nine played one of the nine positions in the field (one at first base, one at second, one at short, and so on—no two the same).

  THE BALLPLAYERS WITH THEIR POSITIONS, TEAMS, AND MVP YEARS

  Pitcher: Hal Newhouser of the Detroit Tigers (1944 and 1945)

  Catcher: Yogi Berra of the New York Yankees (1954 and 1955)

  First base: Jimmie Foxx of the Philadelphia Athletics (1932 and 1933)

  Second base: Joe Morgan of the Cincinnati Reds (1975 and 1976)

  Shortstop: Ernie Banks of the Chicago Cubs (1958 and 1959)

  Third base: Mike Schmidt of the Philadelphia Phillies (1980 and 1981)

  Left field: Dale Murphy of the Atlanta Braves (1982 and 1983)

  Center field: Mickey Mantle of the Yankees (1956 and 1957)

  Right field: Roger Maris of the Yankees (1960 and 1961)

  This wonderful list allows believers in the specialness of baseball to say “such things don’t just happen.” This is an intellectual cousin of a common argument for the existence of God, an argument that has been employed by various faithful since it was first used by the ancient Greeks, a backdoor contention that the delicate, ordered, intricate mosaic of the universe could not exist without a higher intelligent force doing the ordering. In short, the nature of nature proves there is a creator-God.

  This clock-maker argument (as it often is called)—that a timepiece, with all its intricate interconnected parts, presumes a clock-maker/creator’s design—is to some the basis of faith. For most, the clock-maker argument proves no more than the MVP data: It is interesting, but not dispositive. Faith, not reason, gets us to God. As Rabbi Heschel said of the clock-maker argument: “The problem thus faced concerns not the existence of the universe but its cause; not its present but its past. Since the ultimate structure and order of nature were thought of in mechanical terms, its origin or creation was also conceived of as a mechanical process, comparable to the process of constructing a watch. The shortcomings of this view lie in its taking both the watch and all of reality for granted.” What is more, “God is not a scientific problem, and scientific methods are not capable of solving it,” Heschel said. “The moment we utter the name of God we leave the level of scientific thinking and enter the realm of the ineffable.”

  I don’t believe that a clock-maker directed the Mets’ drive to a pennant in 1973, or that any ghosts were present as the drama of the 2003 Red Sox–Yankee playoff built toward Aaron Boone’s decision not to take Tim Wakefield’s first pitch, or that there was an invisible hand guiding either Tommy Lasorda’s determination to play Kirk Gibson in 1988 or Gibson’s sudden recollection of the scouting report on Dennis Eckersley’s backdoor slider.

  But baseball offers a window into the nature of faith, even in the deepest meanings of the word—as a source of comfort, of motivation, of understanding, and above all, of meaning and ultimate purpose. There are moments when baseball can lift us from the ordinary to a different plane as well as propel a drive toward a National League pennant. Tug McGraw had it: Ya gotta believe.

  For this reason, I take baseball seriously—at a profound level. For me it is also very personal.

  As it happens, Tug McGraw and his teammates knew a little something about winning in unlikely situations. Four years earlier, in a season so stunningly improbable that the word miracle has always been attached to it, the Mets, up to then the lowliest of teams, found a way to win the World Series. But for me, the Mets’ unexpected rise forced a personal question: Which team should I bestow upon my son, Jed, who was born in January of that same year, 1969? Baseball fandom, like religion, after all, is most often a matter of legacy; it is something inherited and passed on from one generation to the next. In the words of popular science writer Chet Raymo: “People who hold religious beliefs…seldom consider, for example, that the factor that correlates most closely with their beliefs is the circumstance of their birth. The vast majority of Christians were born Christians; the vast majority of Muslims were born Muslims.” In this sense, the vast majority of Angels and Cubs fans were born that way as well.

  Of course, legacy is not the sole reason why a person prays to a certain deity or roots for a certain team, but for most people, it’s how it starts. And I knew that the team I chose for Jed was likely to stay with him for life—perhaps longer than the Catholicism I bestowed upon him by having him baptized.

  Tommy Lasorda has described his relationship to the Dodgers as devout, something that stirs deep inside his core, which he calls “bleeding Dodger blue.” For many years, I had been Lasorda, bleeding Dodger blue from birth. But in 1969, I was forced to reconsider. And I knew I could not impose my Dodgers upon Jed; they only came to town for six games a year and their contests were usually decided too late in California to make the morning papers. The choice reduced to the Yankees (the nemesis of my youth) and the Miracle Mets. The difference between the two teams, in terms of quality and personality, couldn’t have been any starker.

  The Yankees of 1969 were pitiful. It had been only five seasons since the team’s five consecutive American League titles, but the halcyon days of Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris seemed like a very distant memory. In the half decade since, they had lost 424 games; only the Athletics, the Senators, and the Angels had lost more in the American League.

  Yankees fans, having grown accustomed to pennants and parades, were stunned. Mickey Mantle, the last of the old, great Yanks, retired before the 1969 season. It is telling that the most dramatic thing to happen to those 1969 Yankees was that shortstop (later a general manager) Gene Michael succeeded in pulling the hidden ball trick—a ruse usually unseen beyond Little League—and for good measure, he did it four other times in his career. There were two pitchers on the team, lefties Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich, who later gained a measure of fame, or infamy, for swapping their wives and entire families (dogs included), leading one Yankee executive to quip, “We may have to call off family day.”

  Bizarre, yes, but more than that, the story helped form a collage that depicted Yankees’ dysfunction—just how far the once mighty team had gone astray in recent years—and more than any other example, it encapsulated the period that the Yankees spent wandering baseball’s wilderness. Salvation, spurred by a shipping magnate named Steinbrenner, was still another four years away.

  The Mets, meanwhile, were captivating the city, win by unlikely win, all the way to the World Series. But to me, the expansion team, then in its eighth season, didn’t possess sufficient gravitas and did not touch the soul as had the Dodgers, even if Brooklyn stalwart Gil Hodges was flashing signs as the manager from their dugout and their uniform featured Dodger blue in a nod to the team that had once played in Brooklyn. Simply put, the Mets would have been the easy choice, but they didn’t speak to the depths of the “fifties Catholic” in me—the part that responds to Tradition with a capital T. The Yankees, despite their recent troubles, had both gravitas and Tradition.

  Those who are taught to think about the world through the lens of religion think in the long term. Faith goes century by century. And as a professor and chairman of the religion department at St. Francis College in Brooklyn at the time, I tried to practice what I preached. The Yankees were sure to return to form eventually, or so I figured. The Mets were the moment; the Yankees were enduring tradition.

  And giving my son the
Yankees would also be giving him the trappings of their history, from the larger-than-life persona of Babe Ruth to the gracefulness of Lou Gehrig to the elegance of Joe DiMaggio—all that Jeter (at this point, a gleam in his parents’ eyes) later invoked to Boone as he stepped toward the batter’s box that October night in 2003, the ghosts.

  But I also realized that picking the Yankees, the team that tormented me for much of my youth, would be an act of self-sacrifice—one that might seem trivial to the uninitiated, but one that a fervent fan would recognize as borderline sacrilegious.

  These were the thoughts racing through my head when I faced the moment of truth—when I decided to give Jed the Yankees. Gravitas and Tradition, a fitting gift. Ultimately, my decision rested on one factor and one factor alone: the love between father and son.

  It was a decision that I did not come to lightly. In the sixties, Catholicism was undergoing the tremendous transformation from being a triumphalist religion to an ecumenical one, a wondrous embrace of all perspectives led by a great pope, John XXIII. There was turbulence in and around established orders—religious, political, and otherwise—the beginning of the decline in faith in institutions we see today. Could baseball and its teams be the exception? Could we still believe in them? I at least wanted to give my son a chance at saying yes and at having a tradition to enjoy.

  Of course in my own life, I had experienced by this point the wrenching of the Dodgers from their rightful place—the theft of the team by Walter O’Malley, as if he and not the people of Brooklyn owned them. But this only underscored for me the important role baseball can play from childhood to old age. Just as I had once forged a powerful bond with my father through a ball club, so too, I decided, must my son be given the opportunity to experience such wonders with me.