Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

by John Sexton

  In the first inning, Pee Wee Reese patiently worked the count to three balls and two strikes before looking at a called third strike. In the second, Jackie Robinson (playing his final games) hit a smash at third baseman Andy Carey that glanced off his glove; it glanced, however, directly over to Gil McDougald at shortstop, who threw out the aging Robinson at first by less than a step (just a few years earlier, Jackie would have had a single).

  The key moment came in the fifth inning. With one out, Gil Hodges hit a line drive into deep left-center field. Running over, Mickey Mantle made a one-handed catch at full gallop for the second out. The next batter, Sandy Amoros, pulled a Larsen fastball deep toward the upper deck in right field, but it curved barely foul at the last instant. After the game, the umpire patrolling right field, veteran Ed Runge, held his right thumb and forefinger an inch apart to show reporters just how close the play really was.

  There is, in retrospect, an illusion of inevitability about almost every perfect game, belied by its nail-biting reality. Even so, there is an age-old belief that the surest way to jinx a perfect game is to talk about it. For the last third of the game, the other Yankees followed tradition and ignored Larsen in the dugout. On the air, the Dodgers’ legendary announcer, Vin Scully, avoided the dreaded words while doing the play-by-play with his customary professionalism. The only player known to have broken the unwritten rule, ironically, was Larsen himself, who earned more than one rebuke down the stretch from teammates by wondering aloud if he could really do it.

  He could. The final out, a called third strike by umpire Babe Pinelli on pinch hitter Dale Mitchell, was only the ninety-seventh pitch Larsen threw that day. You could break down each of them and still fail to grasp Larsen’s achievement. The picture of Yogi Berra jumping into Larsen’s arms on the mound immediately after that last out is one of the most reproduced photos in baseball history. The ecstatic joy it conveys is at once transforming and elevating.

  The miraculous is the grist of myth; and myth permeates religion. Sometimes the story of a miracle entails the intervention or manifestation of a higher power: Yahweh’s message reaching Moses at the burning bush; the angelic revelation before Hagar in the desert; Krishna teaching Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. But always the miracle conveys a wonderment and amazement that transports one to what Eliade called “a place that is sacred above all.”

  So too in baseball. Just before the end of a roller-coaster 1991 season, the Minnesota Twins’ popular, fundamentals-fixated manager, Tom Kelly, observed with atypical enthusiasm, “This is a storybook. Each chapter is a game and each game is better than the last.” Kelly’s wonderment was justified. By October, his Twins were one World Series game away from the most improbable championship ever, a phoenix-like resurrection, from last the year before to Game Seven of what many baseball people consider the best World Series of them all—a Series made of the stuff from which hierophanies and stories of the miraculous arise.

  The Twins were the first team ever to have gone from dead last to first the very next season; however, the Twins’ momentary status as baseball’s only phoenix did not last. Just six days after Minnesota secured its first-place finish, the Atlanta Braves finished an eight-game winning streak and edged out the Los Angeles Dodgers on the penultimate day of the season to become the second team to have moved from last to first. When the two teams met in the World Series, they were the first two worst-to-first teams to face each other for the championship of any major professional sport; and it hasn’t come close to happening since then.

  It was fitting that the World Series was an epic affair—the kind that accentuates the importance of every pitch and play. It was a blend of exhilaration and anxiety, of motion and rest that is possible only in a sport without a clock: Pitch by pitch, the percentages and strategy change. A runner, an out, the inning, the score, the matchups—all part of a complex formula unfolding in slow motion until, in a flash, a move is made, and an equally complex ballet begins as the intensity grows. A sport without a clock.

  Of the seven games, five were decided by a lone run, four of those in the winning team’s last time at bat. And Game Seven was an extra-inning cliff-hanger, decided by the only run scored in the game after as heroic a pitching performance as the Series has ever seen by a grizzled veteran who both willed and expected victory. For the victorious Twins, the deciding game was the second extra-inning win in as many nights.

  The popular TV highlight of the Twins’ 1990 cellar-dwelling season was a July day in Boston when they pulled off two triple plays in the same game, each a ’round-the-horn, third-to-second-to-first improbability; in reality, the highlight of that failed season was a set of shrewd off-season moves that quietly set the stage for the miraculous season of 1991. They let a beloved veteran, Gary Gaetti, go and found a cheaper replacement at third base in a human spark plug named Mike Pagliarulo. They outbid others for slugger Chili Davis. They promoted from the minor leagues two of their best prospects, pitcher Scott Erickson (who would win twenty games in 1991, his first full season) and second baseman Chuck Knoblauch (the 1991 Rookie of the Year). But above all, they obtained St. Paul native Jack Morris, a ferociously competitive pitcher who had led the Detroit Tigers to a championship seven years before and who, the following year, would be a key cog in the Toronto Blue Jays’ breakout season.

  The dramatic effect of these moves was apparent as the 1991 season unfolded. Team spirit was high: Several team members recorded a dance video and others recorded a team song to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The team had a very strong first half and never relinquished first place after claiming it in mid-July, finishing eight games ahead of the White Sox and then cruising past Toronto in the playoffs to reach the World Series.

  Atlanta’s transformation was more laborious. In 1990, their highlight was a new manager appointed midway through the season, Bobby Cox. The choice of Cox was interesting because he made it himself (as the team’s general manager). As he returned to a position he had held in the eighties, no one could have known he was on the verge of an unprecedented fourteen consecutive division titles, several postseason heartbreakers, but one memorable world championship in 1995.

  Cox made few changes to his young team as 1991 began. And at first the team was mediocre. There was, however, a young, talented pitcher named John Smoltz who had grown up in Michigan idolizing Morris. A fourteen-game winner in 1990, Smoltz began the season distracted by his wife’s pregnancy: He lost eleven of his first thirteen decisions, then he and the team stabilized and ignited. Smoltz won twelve of his next fourteen decisions, while the team’s record after the All-Star Game was a dominant fifty-five wins against just twenty-eight losses. What would become Cox’s trademark emphasis on pitching began to pay off in the playoffs as well: The Braves won an exciting seven-game series against the Pittsburgh Pirates, with a young Steve Avery winning two 1–0 shutouts and Smoltz notching victories in the other two, including a 4–0 shutout in Game Seven.

  The World Series was spectacular in every sense. Atlanta had a chance to win it when the Series shifted back to Minneapolis for Game Six, a nail-biter that was tied after the Braves batted in the top of the eleventh inning. In the Minnesota dugout, the first man due up, All-Star center fielder Kirby Puckett, told Chili Davis he was going to try to bunt his way on base against Brave reliever Charlie Leibrandt. “Bunt my ass,” replied Davis. “Hit it out and let’s go home.” (Foreshadowing Derek Jeter–to–Aaron Boone twelve years later.) Puckett did precisely that. The picture of his joyous arm-pumping trot is memorialized today in a statue outside the Twins’ new ballpark.

  The next night belonged to Morris. Matched against Smoltz, the two pitchers each produced scoreless masterpieces that masked the tension in the dugouts. After the seventh inning, Kelly kept asking the aging Morris if he wanted to call it quits; Morris answered with cold stares and head shakes.

  After Morris recorded the third out in the Braves’ half of the tenth inning on his 126th pitch of the night (astonishingly, his 3
20th of the Series), the victory came with sudden decisiveness: a double, a sacrifice bunt, and two intentional walks to the team’s sluggers (Puckett and Kent Hrbek) by a relief pitcher (Alejandro Pena) who preferred facing light-hitting Jarvis Brown. Kelly scoured his depleted bench for a pinch hitter, focusing only on an injured Gene Larkin for the bases-loaded one-out opportunity. Larkin delivered on the first pitch, a sharp hit into left field that ended the game, the Series, and a miraculous season—and sending fans in the Metrodome into a raucous frenzy.

  For fans with long memories and a sense of history, the sudden ascent of Atlanta in 1991 echoed an earlier Series, with a happier ending for the Braves—a Series that caused the word miracle to be affixed to a team for the first time.

  Before coming to Atlanta in 1966, the Braves had been in Milwaukee, and before 1953, they had been one of the charter National League teams as the Boston Braves. The team had emerged as the Boston Red Stockings in the 1870s and were next the Red Caps, the Beaneaters, the Doves, and then the Rustlers. They became the Braves in 1912 because one of their owners, ex–New York cop James Gaffney, was a fixture of the Tammany Hall political machine and Tammany’s famous symbol had long been an American Indian.

  Whatever their name, the Braves were terrible, losing an average of ninety-eight times a season for the first decade after the National and American Leagues were joined while their American League counterparts, the Red Sox, were flourishing. And then it happened, what The New York Times would label in a midcentury review the greatest upset in sports history to that point. A new manager helped—George Stallings, a tempestuous motivator and a pioneer in shuffling players in and out of lineups (what we know as platooning). Stallings needed to platoon because he had no first-class hitters. His players were known for their fielding—second baseman Johnny Evers, near the end of his career six years after he helped the Cubs win it all, and a very young, very small shortstop named Walter James Vincent “Rabbit” Maranville, in the third of what would become twenty-three Hall of Fame seasons.

  The team began 1914 with characteristic incompetence, losing twenty-eight of its first forty games. They were in last place as late as July 18, eleven games behind the New York Giants. Legend has it that a clubhouse tirade by Johnny Evers ignited the team—a tirade prompted after the team lost a doubleheader to Brooklyn and traveled to Buffalo to play an exhibition game, only to get crushed by a minor league team.

  For their final 86 games that year, the Braves’ record was an astonishing 67-19. Pitching was central, as three otherwise forgettable pitchers had career years. “Seattle” Bill James, who would disappear after just four seasons, won twenty-six, as did Richard “Baldy” Rudolph, while George “Lefty” Tyler won sixteen. They caught the Giants after Labor Day, winning a three-game series (attended by nearly one hundred thousand amazed fans) that included a victory over the legendary Christy Mathewson. At this point, the Braves had so captured the town’s fancy that the haughty Red Sox lent them their new ballpark and the Braves left their tiny home in the city’s South End for Fenway.

  The climax of the surge was the September 9 game against the Phillies. The Braves had a pitcher who had reported late each spring for a few years because he was a student at Harvard Law School. George “Iron” Davis had been persuaded that spring by Stallings to learn the still-legal spitball. Against the Phillies, with the Braves clinging to a one-game lead in the pennant race, Davis threw a no-hitter for one of his three victories that year (he won seven in his career). After that, the Braves never looked back.

  But they were huge underdogs as they approached the World Series against the Philadelphia Athletics, managed by owner Cornelius McGillicuddy—or Connie Mack as he eventually preferred. The Athletics were among the elite. The team featured two future Hall of Fame hitters (Eddie Collins and Frank “Home Run” Baker) and three future Hall of Fame pitchers (Eddie Plank, Herb Pennock, and Charles Albert “Chief” Bender). The Athletics were so stocked with talent and Connie Mack was so tight with his money that he passed on a young pitcher that year who was being shopped by his minor league team in Baltimore; instead, Babe Ruth signed with the Red Sox.

  Before the World Series, Chief Bender was so confident and cocky that he refused to read the scouting report on the Braves, saying it was beneath him to worry about “some bush league team.” In the first game, the Braves clobbered him, 7–1. They followed that victory by winning the next three games, completing the first sweep in the young World Series’ history. It was the first time the word miracle was used to label a team, in this case the Miracle Braves.

  Baseball miracles can happen anywhere, of course. They are not the sole property of the World Series or even of the major leagues. I was reminded of this in March of 2011 as I read reports of the hideous earthquake and tsunami that devastated much of northern Japan, killing thousands. In the aftermath of the disaster, a high school team from the region decided to keep playing in a national tournament on borrowed fields far from their home; their decision caught the country’s attention. According to newspaper accounts, they had survived the tsunami because they were practicing on a field high above their town, which was destroyed; indeed, the players helped evacuate patients from a nearby nursing home during the disaster.

  One of the young players, Toshiki Onodera, explained his team’s decision: “We were playing baseball and we were all together when the tsunami happened. We were saved. Now I think baseball is helping to save us again.”

  Added his proud father: “Our family, we lost everything. We lost three cars, two fishing boats, all the machinery to cultivate rice. Assets, they mean nothing now. But for my son, baseball still matters. Joy is more important than materials.”

  For me, this story reflected the spirit in my own city after the tragic events of September 11, 2001. In the weeks that followed, baseball bolstered a still-reeling America. It helped that New York’s Yankees (the reigning champions as a result of beating the Mets the year before) were central to the postseason drama.

  Three World Series games that year will always be remembered for their stunning drama and surprise endings; but we (my son and I) sensed that something special was happening even before the Series began. The clearest signal was a unique play in the divisional playoffs between the Yankees and Oakland. If Game One in 1954 featured “the Catch” by Mays, then Game Three of this Division Series featured “the Flip.” The hero was the consummate Yankee of this period, shortstop Derek Jeter.

  With Oakland up 2–0 in the series and needing just one more win to send the Yankees home, the game was a pitchers’ duel between Mike Mussina of the Yankees and the A’s Barry Zito. The Yankees led 1–0 on a home run by catcher Jorge Posada. With two outs in the bottom of the seventh inning, Jeremy Giambi singled to right field.

  The next batter, Terrence Long, promptly ripped a ball down the right field line, and Giambi, a notoriously slow runner, took off as the ball bounced toward the corner. Approaching third base, he was waved home by the coach, Ron Washington. The careful observer of baseball is rewarded in moments like this (an extra-base hit with men on base), as an intricate ballet unfolds: In this case, as right fielder Shane Spencer raced to field the ball before it could reach the wall, Mussina moved to back up third base; second baseman Alfonso Soriano positioned himself in short right field as the relay man; and first baseman Tino Martinez located himself on a line with Soriano closer to home plate.

  Jeter was where shortstops go in this elaborate dance—close to the pitcher’s mound, ready to do one of three things: cut off a throw toward third base, cover second in the event of a play on the hitter, or, least likely, move to get any errant throw from Spencer.

  When Spencer’s throw sailed over Soriano’s head, over Martinez’s, and bounced toward the A’s on-deck circle, Jeter raced toward the first base line, fielded the ball with two hands at the line, and with his bare hand flipped the ball sideways twenty feet to Posada, who tagged Giambi, whose right foot was in midair over home plate.

  We mu
st be careful about using the word never when it comes to baseball; that said, a second play like Jeter’s has yet to be identified, let alone one at such a pivotal moment. Such moments in baseball—and though this particular play is unique, this kind of moment occurs regularly—can be described, but the sublime experience the moment evokes cannot be captured in words; in that moment the beholder lives beyond words. Once the amazement had abated, the Yankees sailed into the World Series; but the autumn of 2001 was far from finished.

  The three classic games in the World Series against the Arizona Diamondbacks—Games Four, Five, and Seven—live in lore with the seven played by Minnesota and Atlanta ten years before.

  Game Four: Bottom of the ninth inning, Yankees trailing in the Series two games to one, Arizona leading 3–1. Diamondback reliever Byung-Hyun Kim, at twenty-two, becomes the first Korean-born player to appear in the World Series. After striking out the side in the eighth, he gives up a one-out single to Paul O’Neill. With two outs, Tino Martinez crushes Kim’s first pitch into the right-center field bleachers to tie the game. The very next inning, Derek Jeter wins the game with another home run off Kim, this one on a full-count pitch, mere moments after the clock atop the center field scoreboard strikes midnight, ushering in November baseball for the very first time.

  Game Five: Again, the bottom of the ninth inning. Again, Arizona leading by two runs. Again, Kim is pitching in relief. Again, the Yankees are down to their very last out with one runner on base, after a leadoff double by Posada. This time, Kim hangs a slider to third baseman Scott Brosius, who promptly puts it in the left field seats to tie the game. The Yankee victory comes in the twelfth, with Soriano knocking in ex-Twin Chuck Knoblauch with a single.

  To this day, I can feel the cheers coursing through my body and recall the joy. Pure amazement. Awe. Mysterium tremendum et facscinans. To me, a miracle.