Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

by John Sexton

  Now I live in New York City, and I have a three-year-old son. Of course, I wanted him to fall for Chicago’s lovable losers. [However] a hometown team would be better, I knew. But I grew up in the shadow of the Miracle Mets of 1969, and I still resent them. The Yankees? God forbid. With twenty-six titles and the culture of entitlement that comes with them, the franchise offends those of us raised in Wrigleyville. So really, what choice did I have?

  Also, I admit, I believed that my son might be the one we’d been waiting for, the guy who would turn the Cubs’ luck around. And then something incredible happened. In 2007, his first full season, the Cubs made the playoffs. My grandmother bought him a cap and T-shirt. I persuaded my wife to let him stay up late to watch the games on TV. I’ll confess that it hurt when the Diamondbacks swept us 3–0 in the first round. But we were off to a promising start.

  The next year was better. The Cubs were sensational all season. They cruised into the playoffs with the best record in the National League and had home-field advantage against the Dodgers. Once again, I outfitted my boy in Cubs regalia and got him permission to stay up late to watch the games. I taught him to say Soriano, Lee, and, yes, Fukudome, to sing “root, root, root for the Cubbies” during the seventh-inning stretch.

  But it didn’t matter. The Cubs lost the first game of the NLDS badly, the second game worse. Then they went to Los Angeles and were swept again. I couldn’t help asking: What was I doing to my child?

  This year I vowed to do things differently. No, I didn’t renounce the Cubs. But I didn’t replace his Cubs cap when he lost it, either. In June I did the unthinkable: I bought him a Yankees hat, classic black, then another, in red. I got us tickets to see the Red Sox at the new ballpark. Gave him a baseball signed by all the Yankees and a plastic batting helmet filled with ice cream. We started reading the sports page together, cheering each time the Yankees triumphed. “I love the Yankees because they’re winners,” he announced one day. And though I smiled, I also felt my heart sink.

  Last week, the Yankees won their twenty-seventh World Series. Yes, those of us from Chicago are counting, too. My son was jubilant. He learned to say Matsui, made the Yankees symbol with Play-Doh, and asked if we could go to the parade.

  Part of me wonders if I did the right thing. My son is now a Yankees fan, as is his birthright, and so he carries a burden. He may never be content in a second city. He may expect, even demand, a championship each year. He may not develop the character that comes from enduring disappointment, nor have faith that fidelity and suffering will be rewarded someday.

  Then again, he has already experienced a World Series title, something neither my grandmother (now ninety-one) nor I have done. I suppose I’m a bit envious, but mostly I’m enjoying his—okay, our, November happiness.

  Maybe next year I’ll get my own Yankees cap. Then again, next year may belong to the Cubs.

  My journey from the Dodgers to the Yankees (like Eric’s from the Cubs to the Yanks) did not take me back to the pain and thrills of my youth; it took me forward to something else. Any comparison is apples and oranges, absurd on its face. For me, the affection is no less strong or meaningful; for me the New York Yankees of today are not—in an existential sense—the Yankees who vexed the post–World War II Brooklyn Dodgers. Such has been my journey.

  And I am not alone. The renowned British writer C. S. Lewis once asked rhetorically, “Is God a clown who whips away your bowl of soup one moment in order, next moment, to replace it with another bowl of the same soup? Even nature isn’t such a clown as that. She never plays exactly the same tune twice.”

  Conversion is not for the faint of heart. It can begin with a dramatic external event; or it can be the result of a lengthy period of reexamination and introspection. It is a difficult process, requiring effort and perseverance. In baseball, at least sometimes, it can be entirely about the future, requiring no rejection of previous allegiance; nothing can ever disturb the special place the Brooklyn Dodgers occupy in my heart. But a spiritual conversion looks both forward and backward. Our previous allegiances are, in the end, rejected, even as our new one is faithfully embraced. All the great stories—the modern ones like C. S. Lewis’s diligent journey and the ones from antiquity like Paul and Augustine—leave something behind as the great leap forward is taken.

  What the two worlds share is an infinite variety of journeys down a multitude of paths. I was hardly alone, for example, in having to process the loss of my Brooklyn Dodgers. By no means have all who processed it experienced what I did or even experienced a conversion. But many have.

  Each spring, for my final class at NYU, I have two writers, good friends each, visit to talk about the Dodgers as wonderful leitmotifs and metaphors for their youth. Their stories of conversion are quite different from mine.

  The eminent historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is today one of the best-known, most delightfully fervent citizens of Red Sox Nation. As in my case, Doris’s was not a sudden or easy transformation from her deep Dodger roots growing up in Rockville Centre on Long Island. But as she explains in her bestselling memoir Wait Till Next Year (the famous, defiant, unfortunately annual cry of Dodgers fans everywhere), her transformation was complete within twenty years of the departure that broke her heart.

  My collaborator on this book Tom Oliphant, the author of the bestseller Praying for Gil Hodges, after a lifetime in political journalism, has gradually realized that the team passion of his youth cannot be replicated for him. His passion today is for the game itself and is every bit as intense as he once felt about one team, though he confesses happiness still at the passage of any October without another World Series championship for the Yankees.

  Together, our trinity of stories represents the angst and anguish over the Dodgers’ move felt in every corner of Brooklyn and the vast Brooklyn diaspora. They are a sampling of just some of the divergent paths that frustrated fans were compelled to travel.

  It is interesting to note the ways in which we went about our journeys and how each journey mirrors the nature of religious conversion. Each of us gravitated toward one of what Paul Tillich described as building blocks of faith: actual experience, my methodical search for a team after the birth of my son; surrender, Doris’s baseball transformation based entirely on feeling and emotion; or acceptance, Tom’s measured reconnection with the game he loves.

  Each of us was an adolescent when the possibility that the Dodgers might leave slowly morphed into probability. Each of us had the most intimate ties imaginable to our Dodgers, through our fathers at first and then through our own experiences. But each of us could see and interpret the depressingly numerous signs that something terrible was going to happen. It might have been the heinous attempted trade of Jackie Robinson to the detested Harlem rival New York Giants (thank God Jackie retired instead after the 1956 season); it might have been a strange schedule that included “home” games across the Hudson River in Jersey City; it might have been the first appearance in the newspapers of those two dreaded words, Los Angeles (anything but the “City of Angels” to us).

  As Doris put it, “In 1957, the auguries of Brooklyn’s betrayal began to multiply…. Every day a new piece was added to the dismal puzzle.”

  She signed one of the many fan petitions that were circulated that spring and summer; she attended a “Keep the Dodgers” rally in the city; she wrote an impassioned letter to the Dodgers’ infamous boss, Walter O’Malley; she even daydreamed about going to see him in her favorite dress and high heels, successfully persuading him not to do the unthinkable that would eventually become the unforgivable.

  To no avail. Poignantly, she follows an account of the crushing announcement and the Dodgers’ last game at storied Ebbets Field with an account of the final decline of her mother’s health (she had battled serious problems for years), which began that same awful September.

  Doris did not merely wander in the baseball wilderness after her beloved team abandoned her; she rejected the wilderness entirely.

  In
her words, “Although time and events outdistanced and reconciled my personal losses, my anger over O’Malley’s treason still persisted. At Colby College and in my first year at Harvard—where I would teach for almost a decade before leaving to become a full-time historian—I refused to follow baseball, skipping over the sports pages with their accounts of alien teams called the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants.”

  It was a date during the second year of her doctoral work that changed everything; it brought her from Cambridge on the subway to Fenway Park, more than intimate enough and filled with more than enough people who knew their baseball to awaken a dormant fan’s deep needs and memories. And her timing was impeccable, her reawakening coming just as the Red Sox were beginning to emerge from a period of almost boring incompetence to truly torment their fans with famously close calls—another link to her past.

  “For years,” as she put it, “I had managed to stay away. I had formed the firmest of resolutions. I had given myself irrefutable reasons, expressed the most passionate of rejections. But I could not get away. Addiction or obsession, love or need, I was born a baseball fan and a baseball fan I was fated to remain.”

  In a few years, talking baseball again with her father during pennant races (his fatal heart attack came in 1972 while he was watching his adopted Mets play on television)—she had converted. In 2007, as the Red Sox fought toward their second championship since 1918, she announced her candidacy for president of Red Sox Nation, a fan organization. Her principal opponents were Jerry Remy (a former second baseman and popular broadcaster) and a local teacher and coach who called himself Regular Rob Crawford.

  At the candidates’ night in a tavern near Fenway Park, however, she found herself nodding in agreement as Crawford argued a simple proposition passionately: A regular fan was in a better position to do more for other ordinary fans. She promptly withdrew from the race in his favor.

  “Sometimes, sitting in the park with my boys,” she wrote in her memoir, “I imagine myself back at Ebbets Field, a young girl once more in the presence of my father, watching the players of my youth on the grassy fields below—Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges. There is magic in these moments, for when I open my eyes and see my sons in the place where my father once sat, I feel an invisible bond among our three generations, an anchor of loyalty and love linking my sons to the grandfather whose face they have never seen but whose person they have come to know through this most timeless of sports.”

  It is this experience, an opening of oneself to an ineffable connection to something greater, that Tillich characterized as surrendering to faith. He described the transformation as an “awakening from a state in which an ultimate concern is lacking (or more exactly, hidden) to an open and conscious awareness of it. If conversion means this, every spiritual experience is an experience of conversion.”

  Doris’s experience at the ballpark, sitting next to her sons while reflecting on her father, transported her to another plane. It conjured feelings that allowed for a break from ordinary time and place, enabling her to touch the transcendent, where the sacred manifests itself through what many would consider the profane. To the uninitiated, that vehicle appears to be a mere game; but for Doris, and countless fans like her, baseball possessed a powerful capacity to induce this sensation and stir the feelings of childhood: excitement and anticipation, sorrow and joy. The Red Sox of today took her back to the Dodgers of yesterday, when she lived the game alongside her dad. In this sense, the process of conversion has actually brought Doris closer to her original baseball faith than would have otherwise been possible.

  Tom’s tale is different. As he tells it:

  During the first year the Dodgers were gone my father insisted I look up and learn the meaning of the word void. Something that had filled so much of my young life, with my family and on my own, was simply gone, disappeared. And absolutely nothing existed or even loomed indistinctly on my horizon to take its place, leading me to suspect that nothing could. The initial blow was nothing compared to the daily reminders of the void as time passed.

  I remember early in that first season, 1958, when the Dodgers came east to play the Phillies, my father declared we were going to go cross-town to Pennsylvania Station, hop a train for Philadelphia and see them—perhaps rekindle a little of the old feelings or at least assuage the pain for an afternoon (it was a Saturday).

  Nothing of the sort happened. The Phillies by then were playing alone in ancient Connie Mack Stadium, the Athletics (whose Hall of Fame manager and executive gave the ballpark its name) having departed for Kansas City four years earlier, ironically the year after the name change from the original Shibe Park. It was even older than Ebbets Field and therefore offered an intimacy and feel that was at least generally familiar to me. We sat in upper deck grandstand seats on the third base side.

  My parents and I made no noise whatsoever, not when the Dodgers’ lineup was introduced, not when they took the field. For all the supposed kick of seeing Snider, Hodges, Reese, and Carl Furillo again, I still remember how weird they looked in the familiar blue caps with LA instead of B stitched on them. I also remember being attracted by the skills of a few of the Phillies’ better players (Richie Ashburn in center field, Robin Roberts pitching) that I used to pray would fail or get hurt. We resolved, solemnly, never to go there again. And then the strangest thing happened.

  We moved to California in the middle of the 1959 season.

  My father, mostly disabled from his service in the Pacific during World War II, desperately needed the change and so we went, and landed just south of Los Angeles in the middle of a pennant race. Apart from the violent cultural change (I’m pretty sure I had never seen truly blond hair that didn’t come out of a bottle), I had to confront the Dodgers in our near-backyard. My parents and I did it by rooting for them, not cheering for them. The personification of this new, odd stance for us was a new Dodger arrival that year named Wally Moon—a mean-looking man from Arkansas who appeared to rarely shave, but who for a few years appeared designed genetically for the weird confines of the majestic Los Angeles Coliseum—the team’s temporary home while its new stadium was being constructed on the other side of the city. Fitting a baseball field inside of it required a very short left field foul line, only 250 feet, backed up by a 40-foot screen to keep at least some routine fly balls from being home runs. In 1959 especially, Moon specialized in sending several towering flies just over the barrier. Moon Shots, they were called, and they were my first thought when Bucky Dent’s fluke fly landed in the netting behind the wall at Fenway Park nearly twenty years later. They all counted, but they never felt or looked genuine.

  As I came of age, I continued to root instead of cheer. All through high school, Vin Scully was an almost nightly guest in our house on the radio. I was in college when the Dodgers swept the Yankees in 1963 and trounced the Twins (née the Washington Senators) two years later in the first World Series between two transplanted teams. It was in 1967, at the dawn of my writing life, that I first realized how much I had changed. I had gotten caught up in the fascination with the Red Sox’s improbable Impossible Dream season that culminated in a pennant on the final day of the season. Enduring the first of three seven-game World Series defeats for the exasperating team, I was struck by how fascinated I had become watching the St. Louis Cardinals’ ace Bob Gibson pitch, as he won three games in the Series, including the deciding seventh. I had gradually become devoted as much to the game as to any town or any team. I simply loved the experience of being in a ballpark and absorbing a game. But unlike John Sexton and very much like Doris Kearns Goodwin, what has survived from my time with the Brooklyn Dodgers is my total inability to wish the Yankees anything but ill.

  For most of my life, I had difficulty describing, much less analyzing my intense devotion to the game, but it all became clear when I started hanging out at Sexton’s NYU class. The reading that woke me up was the John Updike poem “Tao in the Yankee Stadium Bleachers.” Alm
ost at once it was clear to me, as to Updike, that “distance brings proportion.” From that distance, where the stadium and the players and the fans are as one vast tableau, the unity of the scene is awesome and elevating. For me, the best moment is when a batter gets an extra-base hit with men already aboard and everyone on the field moves in gorgeous patterns that would move George Balanchine.

  I imagine Professor Eliade agreeing that the effect can be ineffable. And as hierophanies go, it certainly works for me, with my journey from Dodger nut to baseball nut complete.

  Each of the three of us spent some time wandering, even floundering, after the Dodgers abandoned us. Each of us stopped at more than one baseball way station on our different paths to figuring it all out. And each of us recognized that we were not trifling with trivial issues. We converted eventually to something quite different from our baseball origins, and each of us took quite a while and more than one twist and turn. No blinding revelations for any of us on our separate roads to Damascus.

  Our stories stand in sharp contrast with the Christian story of conversion on that road, the story of Saint Paul. Saul of Tarsus—tent maker, tormentor of Christians, possibly a complicit witness to the killing of Saint Stephen—was traveling to Damascus to round up Christians when he was literally blinded by a bright light and, by his account, heard the voice of the resurrected Jesus Christ. The voice commanded him to fast and wait in Damascus, where his blindness was ended, and his instructions to spread the Word issued by another man, Ananias, who also got his instructions directly.