Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

by John Sexton

  I remember how the Diamondbacks’ infielders raced to the mound to console a disconsolate Kim (the New York tabloids the next day carried a full-page picture of the dejected pitcher crouched in agony on the mound). This wasn’t merely the Yankees or New York post-9/11. This was baseball. Heartbreaking to some, even as it creates joy for others. And it wasn’t over yet.

  Game Seven: After Arizona, back in Phoenix, erupted to crush the Yankees 15–2 in Game Six, the stage was set for a special ending. Mike Murray and I could taste a Yankee victory and had decided to suggest that the victory parade in New York’s concrete canyons should reverse its traditional route, beginning uptown and ending (this year only) at Ground Zero.

  Roger Clemens, still an ace at thirty-nine and completing his eighteenth season, would face the Diamondbacks’ ace, thirty-four-year-old Curt Schilling—starting his third game of the Series and pitching his three hundredth inning of the season, his fourteenth, on just three days’ rest. Schilling stayed in perhaps one inning too long as Soriano hit a solo home run in the eighth to break a 1–1 tie. Yankee manager Joe Torre immediately brought in the mighty Mariano Rivera to attempt a two-inning save.

  Rivera struck out the side in the bottom of the eighth (shades of Kim), yielding only a single. But after Randy Johnson, the other Diamondback ace (who, after his victory in Game Six, was giving the team four outs of relief while pitching on no rest), retired the Yankees in the ninth, the roof caved in. It is still a maddening blur for me: a single by Mark Grace, an off-target throw to second by Rivera on a bunt by Damian Miller, an accurate throw to third by Rivera on a bunt by Jay Bell to get Grace, a Tony Womack double to right to even the score, and then a bad pitch by Rivera (his only one) that hit Craig Counsell to load the bases.

  The next batter, slugger Luis Gonzalez, then hit as weak and soft a line drive as has ever been hit (a “dying quail,” as such hits are sometimes called) over the head of Derek Jeter, just far enough to make it to the outfield grass. Had the Yankees not been drawn in—hoping to force out the potential winning run at home plate—it would have been the most routine of catches. Instead, it scored Bell with the Series-winning run.

  In baseball, some of the most solid hits become line drive outs and some of the weakest become box score hits; a few even win games. There are other times when players accomplish precisely what their team needs, only to see their own statistics diminished as a result; and times when they fail in their objective yet are rewarded—on paper or, even better, on the scoreboard. In religion, this is the idea of concupiscence—to be a saint, authorities do not require a lifetime of perfection. Rivera on this night, like Eckersley and his brethren of Hall of Fame relievers in autumns past, surely can relate. And so the human condition is reflected in this sport as in no other. Here, in the shadow of national tragedy and subsequent recovery, baseball stirred the nation’s soul.

  The Yankees had lost. There would be no victory parade through the concrete canyons. But that night in November, the latest a World Series had ever ended—because play had been suspended for several days after 9/11—baseball and its fans were treated to a miraculous game, and at just the right moment.

  There is a tacit—on occasion explicit—acceptance that some feats by individuals or teams in a game or over an entire season or in a World Series simply cannot be explained. We are left only to shake our heads in wonder, to exult, to accept the simple fact that Willie Mays and Sandy Amoros caught those fly balls and that the 1914 Braves won the World Series, and having accepted the fact, to marvel at the miracle (and how, in the midst of our ordinary days, the moment stands apart and reveals something to us).

  In religion, miracles also play an important role. In John’s New Testament, Jesus Christ observed that “unless you people see signs and wonders, you will never believe.” And yet He also celebrates those faithful who have never seen Him, avowing that “blessed are they who have not seen yet believe.”

  For his part, Thomas Jefferson, good Deist that he was, attempted an analysis of the New Testament in retirement, purging it of all references to the supernatural or miraculous. The result, many scholars have since agreed, was a rehash of garden-variety moral philosophizing that is missing any spark, much less a sign or a wonder.

  In the Hebrew Scriptures, on many occasions God speaks and acts like a participant in the thrilling narrative, using miraculous works to reward humans who do good and punish those who are not observant or who do evil. And yet many Jewish scholars are cognizant of the contradiction between the belief that God’s creation is perfect and stories of His episodic interventions in worldly affairs to correct mistakes. Some argue that everything, literally, was set in motion at creation, that God created the natural world to shield Himself from man, to force man to discover or fail to discover faith.

  In Islam, Muhammad was no miracle worker and indeed rejected entreaties to perform miracles, insisting according to Muslim scholars that the Koran itself is the miracle; and yet the stories of his life are replete with miraculous acts. So also Buddhism, built as it is on rigorous self-effacement, rejects miracles as a general matter; Buddhists aspire to om mani padre hum, a mantra that means “jewel in the lotus,” referring to finding nirvana (the jewel) in life (the lotus of the universe)—a self-journey through the “gateless gate” of Zen. Its literature, however, contains stories of Buddha himself walking on water and of monks who achieve states where they can levitate or become invisible.

  In the end, however, the great traditions acknowledge that the divine is by definition beyond the capacity of a human to fathom, that faith is not certainty, that room must be left for wonder at the ineffable. This is the place from which miracles arise.

  Chet Raymo, in his book When God Is Gone Everything Is Holy, discussed how we might approach these miraculous moments. He said there are two pathways. The first, which he notes is the one followed by an overwhelming majority of people all over the world in all historical periods, “looks for God in exceptional events” and reflects “the human predilection for the supernatural,” a desire to see an active God filling the gaps in our knowledge as well as literally performing miraculous feats.

  “It is easy to understand why the God of the gaps is so popular,” wrote Raymo. “By looking for God in our ignorance, we can make him in our own image, call him Father, speak to him as friend, claim a personal relationship, count on his intervention in our lives. It is a consoling thought to think that the creator of the universe—those hundreds of billions of galaxies—has me, yes me, as the apple of his eye.”

  Raymo offers a second path, however, one that embraces mystery and wonder. He correctly associates this path with the earliest Christian mystics like Saint Columbanus, who wrote: “Who shall examine the secret depths of God? Who shall dare to treat of the eternal source of the universe? Who shall boast of knowing the infinite God, who fills all and surrounds all, who enters into all and passes beyond all, who occupies all and escapes all?”

  Nikos Kazantzakis (who also gave us Zorba the Greek) described this force as “the dread essence beyond logic.” For those who enjoy Latin, this is Deus Absconditus, the God of mystery, whom Raymo calls “the hidden God who is not this and is not that, who evades all names and metaphors, even the pronouns ‘who’ and ‘he,’ Rudolph Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans. It is not a God with whom we can have a personal relationship or who attends our personal needs. It is a God we approach through the valley of shadow and the dark night of the soul, who always hides just beyond our reach.”

  Vic Wertz’s fly ball falls into Willie Mays’s glove. Johnny Podres throws nine shutout innings on October 4, 1955. These miraculous, ineffable events are true hierophanies of a baseball life. Explanation and analysis can’t begin to do them justice.

  And it simply is the case that on one day, a perfectly ordinary person, a sinner named Don Larsen, pitched a perfect game in the World Series. No one can truly explain his feat, which is why it remains so wondrous more than half a century later.


  The Atlanta Braves were one out away from defeat in yet another World Series when their mercurial manager, Bobby Cox, finally ran out of signs to flash to his players. All he could muster was a deep sigh and a cold, blank stare toward the pitcher’s mound.

  Cox had been there before—three of his previous four trips to the Series had ended in bitter disappointment—but this one, in 1999, felt different. For the first time since their captivating run of division and league championships had begun nearly a decade earlier, the mighty Braves were about to be swept four games to none. Cox had already decided to decline the post-Series interview with NBC—another first. He would send star pitcher John Smoltz in his place.

  Elsewhere in the dugout, Cox’s third baseman and that season’s Most Valuable Player in the National League, Chipper Jones, also was scanning the Yankee Stadium scene. He had a different reaction; he simply shook his head and started to laugh. Moments earlier he had seen the Braves’ powerful first baseman, Ryan Klesko, break three bats in a single turn at the plate, the last one shattering as he produced a meek pop fly to second base. Klesko then trotted back to join the rest of his teammates in watching their season end with a whimper.

  What the Braves also were watching was greatness. There was simply no answer for Mariano Rivera’s cut fastball. When the game finished, Jones compared the pitch to “a buzz saw.”

  The Yankees’ closer had discovered his cutter by accident two years earlier, in 1997, while tossing a ball to another reliever in the bullpen. After initially trying to change his mechanics to straighten out the pitch (when gripped correctly, it resembles a four-seam fastball but is held slightly off-center, with the thumb toward the inside of the ball, causing it to break, or cut, toward a right-handed pitcher’s glove side as it reaches home plate), Rivera decided to embrace it, and the game of baseball has never been the same. By 2011, Sports Illustrated estimated that a quarter of all major league starters regularly used the pitch as part of their repertoire. But no pitcher, starter or reliever, throws it as skillfully as Rivera.

  With a week remaining in the 2011 season, Rivera threw twelve cutters in thirteen pitches to retire the Minnesota Twins’ batters in order and earn his record-breaking 602nd career save. James Traub, my dear friend who for several years joined me in teaching the Baseball as a Road to God seminar at NYU, wrote in The New York Times Magazine: “Rivera, when pressed, attributes his gifts to providence; people of a more secular bent say that he combines one of the single greatest pitches the game has ever seen—his cutter—with an inner calm, and a focus, no less unusual and no less inimitable.”

  That inner calm, indispensable in a closer, traces back to the shores of Puerto Caimito, Panama, a fishing village that counted Rivera, his parents, and his three siblings among its thousand or so residents in the seventies. “Life was simple,” he remembers.

  Rivera was born into poverty but remembers his childhood more for the many gatherings of his tight-knit family and long, baseball-filled days. Tree branches (the straighter, the better, Rivera said) or sticks found lying in the street served as bats; makeshift balls were created by wrapping fishing nets with tape. Rivera’s glove was fashioned from a flattened-out milk carton or, sometimes, part of a cardboard box. “It had to fit in your back pocket,” he once told a reporter, recalling how in the days before he pitched in baseball’s grand coliseums, he considered that cardboard glove as “beautiful as a major league glove.”

  Shortly after Rivera’s record-breaking game against the Twins, Sweeny Murti, a local radio reporter who has covered the Yankees for years, asked him if he had allowed himself a small moment to revel in his achievement—his long journey from, quite literally, sandlot to superstardom. Rivera, a deeply pious man who plans someday to be a minister, did not consider it an achievement but a “blessing,” he said. “From the mercy of God.” Maybe so.

  “I have always said that you cannot be a major league baseball player unless you have been touched by the hand of God. Period.” So said the never-doubting Tippy (of the Stottlemyre and Wilhelm questions) in a spontaneous soliloquy on the game. “Baseball players are born, not made; you cannot turn someone into a major league baseball player unless he was touched.” Here he reminds me of Michael Jordan’s failed attempt to transform himself from a great basketball star to a successful professional baseball player.

  “What’s more,” Tippy continued, “even those who have been touched have to hone their talents every single day. There are those who have had the gift but have squandered it.” He lists Joe Pepitone of the Yankees, Lou Johnson of the LA Dodgers, and Richie Allen of the Phillies. They were accomplished ballplayers, but they never achieved the superstardom for which they once seemed destined.

  “Allen is the most egregious case,” he said. “He could have been one of the eight or ten greatest ever, but he just did not do the work. He once hit two inside-the-park homers in one game. Nobody has done that but him.” I decided not to challenge him. He continued: “Yet he never made it big.”

  Tippy concluded: “What makes baseball so great is that everybody can play it—little kids and old people. But only the blessed are destined to play in the majors.”

  We often speak of a blessed ballplayer in the sense that Rivera and Tippy use the term. And the word blessing is used in many other ways and contexts, both religious and secular.

  There are those blessed folks who walk through life (or a baseball season) with a special light shining upon them—in baseball terms, teams of destiny like Tug McGraw’s 1973 Mets.

  There are those times when what are called in religion “prayers of petition” are believed to have been answered with a blessing, as when a batter gets a hit after crossing himself or, conversely, when the same batter strikes out with the bases loaded after a fan of the pitcher entreats his God.

  Or there is the blessing of a magnificent catch or clutch home run, attributed perhaps to an intervening deity, as witness the fingers pointing skyward after a play, or the locker room “Thank you, Jesus” for a fortuitous result, or even a more general gratitude for good fortune, like Joe DiMaggio’s thanking the Almighty for making him a Yankee. In this regard, a blessing is a function of our belief that, in some way, “God is on our side,” with all the evident tensions such a statement entails once we realize that “they” (the fans on the other side) are invoking a God as well (often the same God).

  My focus, however, is on a particular, profound meaning of blessing—as an experience deeply connected to its sibling, the curse. The two phenomena have a special synergy. As I use the word, blessing is the ecstatic sensation one experiences after being released from profound accursedness. In this sense, blessings and curses are more than countervailing forces; they are as inextricably intertwined as are faith and doubt. To be relieved of a curse is to experience fully and completely a blessing.

  To be accursed is very personal. The Latin root ad, which gives force to the simple word curse, means that the curse sticks “to” its object; thus the blessing (the relief) also is deeply personal. All this plays easily into baseball, characterized as it is by slow, intense rhythms.

  The great baseball curses are associated with painful, prolonged championship droughts, booted ground balls, dropped third strikes, and most of all, wrenching defeats. They are tied in legend to events off the field, stories of the bizarre (involving a black cat, a billy goat, and a Broadway show) that in retrospect are seen as omens and harbingers.

  Three stand out, involving teams whose identities are deeply tied to how they and their fans have dealt with accursedness and epic adversity—the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Boston Red Sox, and the Chicago Cubs. What matters, as it turns out, is not so much the story behind the curse as the way the teams, towns, and fans handle it. Those reactions run the gamut, from the defiant persistence of hope to the cynical scapegoating of despair to the almost cheerful acceptance of disappointment. Hope, despair, or resignation. The reaction to accursedness is key; and that reaction, in the end, shapes the blessing when and i
f it comes, and determines its effect.

  For a wonderful example of Oscar Wilde’s witty description of second marriages (a triumph of hope over experience), the first place to turn is that sprawling agglomeration of urban villages east of Manhattan called Brooklyn, which (perhaps ironically) was once known as the Borough of Churches. Brooklyn native and later Ohio State professor David Neal Miller has described the borough’s diverse collection of two dozen neighborhoods as the “cradle of tough guys, Nobel laureates, fourth-largest city in the United States, proof of the power of marginality, and homeland of America’s most creative diasporic culture.”

  It is not known just how the famous cry—Wait’ll Next Year—originated. Most likely, it came from ordinary people and simply spread (the way things go viral in today’s Internet age) until it was a headline and then a mantra. After all the end-of-season and World Series agonies between 1941 and 1954, some soothing aphorism surely was needed. Some comfort was needed, for example, after the Dodgers missed a chance to tie the Phillies on the last day of the season in 1950 because the potential winning run (in the person of outfielder Cal Abrams) was thrown out by a mile at home plate, or after Bobby Thomson’s three-run home run in the bottom of the ninth inning the very next year ended an epic two-month slide.

  Angry fingers were pointed at the third base coach (Milt Stock) who waved Cal Abrams toward home. And pitcher Ralph Branca was hanged in effigy from several streetlights in Brooklyn on the horrible night after he threw the fat fastball that Thomson hit. But as in the years before, anger soon became hope, “next year” being just around the corner. And so “the faithful,” as Dodgers fans were called, affirmed the power of the great virtue of hope and rejected the deadly sin of despair and the ugliness it produces.

  And that spirit of hope endured against all manner of tribulations. In the 1952 World Series against the Yankees, the Dodgers’ majestic first baseman, Gil Hodges, went a horrid 0 for 21 in seven games, a famous slump that continued into the following spring. Not a single boo was aimed in his direction during his ordeal. This Indiana coal miner’s son was cherished by Brooklyn for much more than his hitting and fielding; so it was no surprise that on an unseasonably steamy Sunday, a priest named Herbert Redmond announced to his congregation: “It’s far too hot for a sermon. Keep the Commandments and say a prayer for Gil Hodges.” The point is not that Hodges started hitting again shortly thereafter (though he did); the point is that the prayers were offered.