Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

by John Sexton

  But Hollywood and real life aside, The Natural is a richly absorbing, tragic drama. The hero has deep flaws—ambition, lust, selfishness—that are nearly fatal. However, he also wrestles with his flaws, struggling to understand what matters and what does not. The themes are eternal. The issue is not the Hall of Fame and baseball sainthood but the journey everyone takes toward whatever judgment awaits; along the way, most records, and not merely Shoeless Joe’s and Roy Hobbs’s, are mixed.

  Because professional baseball is played by humans, it is hardly surprising that the sport reveals the human propensity to cut moral corners—and even to cheat. Some “cheating” in baseball—like stealing the other team’s signs—is seen as clever and not penalized. But breaking the rules of the game is more ambiguously accepted or rejected: stories of doctored baseballs and bats are legion. Players and teams undeniably try to bend or even get away with breaking the rules, but baseball seems prepared to tolerate the attempts as long as the violator accepts punishment if caught. More than one pitcher who got caught wetting or cutting a baseball has a plaque in the Hall of Fame. As the baseball cliché goes, it’s “part of the game.”

  There is no written rule, but in its fitful, rarely courageous handling of human failings, official baseball has policed most carefully those offenses, above all gambling, that threaten the integrity of its product; by contrast, in recent years those responsible for the stewardship of the game have been lamentably late in addressing steroid abuse.

  The story begins with the presence in the game of alcohol and substance abuse. For decades, liquor and baseball were practically synonymous, a fact of the life that made clean livers (pun intended) like Christy Mathewson exceptions. Eventually, as understanding of substance abuse and its frequent companion, addiction, evolved, people with serious problems were treated differently, depending on how they handled their problem. Those lucky enough to get help or moderate their consumption were rewarded with affection; those who didn’t were pitied more than hated, acquiring an aura of tragedy more than sin.

  Fixing games, however, always has been the cardinal sin. Even before Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis arrived on the scene, baseball tried to be tough when players were caught betting or even associating with known gamblers, much less conspiring to fix games. Landis’s hard line survives to this day, especially because Bart Giamatti gave it refreshingly moral force by his handling of the Pete Rose case. Rose remains banned; the only thing that has changed since 1989 is that he now admits his gambling that he once denied.

  As steroids came into widespread use in the 1990s, official baseball was slow to answer a fundamental question: What exactly is the fan watching, a player who succeeds or fails through natural ability and hard work or a chemical marvel who is a function of his drug regimen? The judgment so far has been that performance-enhancing drugs (to use the official euphemism) strike at the game’s integrity. It remains to be seen how, in the long run, the offenders of the steroid era will be treated. Will their records stand unblemished by asterisks? Will these offenders be eligible for the Hall of Fame? So far, the judgment appears to be severe: Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Rafael Palmeiro have suffered mighty blows to what would have been stellar reputations.

  Judging others is a flawed endeavor, whether in the professions or athletics or even religion, because it is done by fallible humans. It is not for nothing that the Bible cautions in effect that what goes around comes around.

  It was in this spirit that both flawed heroes, Joe Jackson and Roy Hobbs—quintessential sinner-saints of the baseball world—were confronted by a local boy who refuses to believe stories in the papers and asks his fallen idol to “Say it ain’t so.”

  But it was.

  It was a typically muggy summer afternoon in the nation’s capital. The visiting, league-leading New York Yankees were thumping the cellar-dwelling Washington Senators as usual. The Yankees had just been retired in the top of the seventh inning on a harmless dribble in front of home plate by Gil McDougald, and were ahead 10–3. At that moment, just before Rocky Bridges of the Senators hit a triple to ignite a mini-rally, the youngest of the late President Gerald Ford’s four children, Susan, was born—to her laboring mother’s considerable relief.

  On that day, July 6, 1957, Ford, then a Michigan congressman, had tickets to see the Senators at the old Griffith Stadium and planned on taking his young sons along. The onset of Betty Ford’s labor changed all that, but at the hospital she couldn’t help noticing that her husband, her sons, and even her doctor were distracted by the television images of the game as her labor intensified. Understandably displeased by their very divided attention, she made her feelings known as women in labor are wont to do. But not to worry.

  “Susan was very cooperative,” Betty Ford recalled years later. “She was born during the seventh-inning stretch, so we didn’t disturb anybody.” Whether the ordeal is a mother’s labor or a tense ball game or a religious service, emotions and concentration are not infinitely sustainable.

  Anyone who has ever been to a religious service is aware that the level of pious intensity occasionally abates; intensity must be relieved. All religious services therefore include what look (and sometimes feel) like intermissions.

  Muslims, for example, are instructed about the when and where of the breaks in the sequence of their daily obligatory prayers.

  Jews often separate afternoon and evening services (the Mincha and Ma’ariv) with a brief lesson (the Shiur) from an elder or rabbi that frequently discusses the sacred texts just recited in light of experiences in everyday life. In some Conservative congregations, as the Sabbath nears its completion, there is a longer pause to break bread, a chance not only to reflect but also to bond before continuing the prayers.

  And Christians reserve time for choral or musical interludes that provide a few moments between rituals. From Christianity’s earliest moments, there has been an imprecise division, imprecise but no less real, between the preparatory part of the service and the part where believers affirm their central faith or take communion or both. And in some liturgies, this transition is marked by the “kiss of peace” or the “holy kiss.” Whatever it’s called, it is another break in the worship, one that most definitely enhances the feeling of fellowship. But the atmosphere is different from the moments of communion with God. The kiss of peace serves, as do the musical interludes, as a pause—meaningful but different, a break in the intensity of the action.

  Baseball fans get this. At the midpoint of every seventh inning, we need no announcement, no request, much less a command. We simply rise from our seats. For some ninety years, this collective move has been accompanied by music—in most major league cases a very, very familiar song that dates to the early-twentieth-century days of Tin Pan Alley. The Wave may have come and gone, beach balls have bounced into distant memory, but the seventh-inning stretch lives on in every baseball congregation. Possibly the most famous pause in American culture, it is an occasion to salute the game. And it is a break in the intensity of the action.

  This being baseball, the origin of the stretch is obscure and the subject of more than a little debate. The term cannot be found in print before 1920; the practice, however, appears to have started much earlier and to have begun because of the nature of seating in the game’s early years. Many people simply stood for the entire game; those who sat occupied plain wooden benches—not the most comfortable resting place for the two or so hours a game consumes. It is not surprising that the folks on the benches would want to stand for a bit (and to avoid blocking views, that they would do it in unison and while there was a break in the action).

  As far back as 1869, a letter from a pioneer of the professional game, Harry Wright (a British-born star ballplayer, later manager, and later executive with the original Cincinnati Red Stockings), described what certainly sounds like the seventh-inning stretch. As he wrote: “The spectators all arise between halves of the seventh inning, extend their legs and arms, and sometimes walk about. In so
doing, they enjoy the relief afforded by relaxation from a long posture upon hard benches.”

  For his playing, innovation, and leadership, in both the development of the professional game and the formation of what became the National League, Wright is in the Hall of Fame—as is his accomplished brother, George, giving baseball its own Wright brothers twenty years before the aviation pioneers (also out of Ohio).

  There is little evidence, however, of how widespread the practice of stretching was back then, much less when it became an established ritual. To fill out the picture, another story is worth a mention.

  The man who brought baseball to Manhattan College in New York was Brother Jasper of Mary. He was not only the college’s first baseball coach but also its prefect of discipline. Therefore, when on a muggy day in 1882 during the seventh inning of a tense game against a local semipro team, the Metropolitans, he called time and asked the student fans to stand and relax; they listened to him and stood in unison. It is said the New York Giants were so impressed by accounts of the event that they copied the stretch at their own games by the 1890s. Meanwhile at Manhattan College, the good brother is remembered well: The school’s teams are to this day known as the Jaspers.

  Even presidents got into the act. On Opening Day in 1910, William Howard Taft attended the game between the Senators and Athletics, his three-hundred-pound frame stuffed in a very small wooden chair down front. By the seventh inning, he was too uncomfortable to stay put, so he rose from his seat; nearly everyone else in the ballpark did, too.

  Contrary to the claims of some, this is not the moment the stretch was born, but that day would become famous for another reason. Before the game started, the chief umpire handed Taft a baseball, which the President promptly threw to one of the players near home plate. Since then, every president has thrown out a first ball at least once.

  Through the years, the details of the stretch have evolved; and it is not done uniformly across baseball. Various teams use different music to accompany the stretch. And one glorious tune has adorned it for decades. Riding the New York City subway one day in 1908, the writer and vaudevillian Jack Norworth noticed a sign in the car: BASEBALL TODAY—POLO GROUNDS. Inspired, he began writing lyrics about a girl who is asked to a show but who has another idea, as she proclaims: “Take me out to the ball game.” The music was written by another show business figure of the day, Albert Von Tilzer, who would have one more hit song, “I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time.”

  The baseball anthem was an instant hit, first sung by Norworth’s very popular wife, Nora Bayes. The couple were everywhere in show business in 1908, together writing the smash hit “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” which Bayes introduced. (A decade later Bayes also introduced and recorded George M. Cohan’s World War I standard “Over There.”) Neither Norworth nor Von Tilzer had ever been to a baseball game when their masterpiece debuted at the ballpark, and neither would see a game for decades. It hardly matters.

  As time passed, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” became more routine than special, until a new twist was added one day in 1976 on Chicago’s South Side. It was then and there that the irreverent, most would say visionary, White Sox owner Bill Veeck Jr. persuaded a reluctant Harry Caray, then the broadcaster for White Sox games, to serenade the Comiskey Park crowd over the public address system.

  As the story goes, much to the delight of fans who happened to be sitting nearby, Caray used to sing the song to himself while listening to the ballpark organist play it for the fans. Upon discovering this, Veeck proposed to Caray that he sing into a microphone so that all present could join him; but the broadcaster, who never fancied himself much of a singer, refused. Caray relented, however, once Veeck claimed to have recorded him in an earlier rendition and threatened to play it anyway. And baseball has never been the same.

  When Caray moved across town to broadcast Cubs games six years later and took his seventh-inning routine with him, the power of cable TV helped make the song special once again. Today, “Take Me Out” is one of the game’s great fixtures, offered by choruses of players and fans at Little League diamonds and big league ballparks alike. At Wrigley Field, celebrities and politicians make the pilgrimage to Caray’s old booth each game, often doing their best impression of the daffy broadcaster while they’re there, to lead the friendly confines in song. On rare occasions, when a game goes deep into extra innings, those who stay are rewarded with the tune for a second time, since the Cubs are one of several teams that have made a tradition out of repeating the entire seventh-inning ritual midway through the fourteenth. For those dedicated fans, it is as Yogi Berra once put it, “like déjà vu all over again.”

  Many major league teams have put their own musical spin on the seventh-inning stretch by playing a hometown anthem immediately after “Take Me Out”—“Deep in the Heart of Texas” at Astros and Rangers games, the “Beer Barrel Polka” at Brewer games, and “Meet Me in St. Louis” at Cardinals games, to name a few. Baseball’s other two birds, the Baltimore Orioles and Toronto Blue Jays, have created perhaps the two most unusual seventh-inning scenes in all the game.

  In the seventies and early eighties, much of Baltimore fell under the spell of a maestro by the name of “Wild” Bill Hagy. Wild Bill didn’t conduct an orchestra in the traditional sense (he actually drove an ice-cream truck or taxicab, depending on the season), but he created beautiful music nonetheless, leading thousands of fans in a nightly chant of O-R-I-O-L-E-S to start the stretch by contorting his ample limbs to spell each letter—a routine that became so popular it was even mimicked on television by Homer Simpson. All this from his perch in the upper deck and, later atop the home team’s dugout at old Memorial Stadium. Around the same time as Wild Bill was joining the fray, another Oriole tradition began, this one continuing to this day. After singing “Take Me Out,” the city crowd, inexplicably, joins in for a raucous singing of John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” a practice that has since been copied by the more fittingly country Atlanta Braves.

  In Toronto, the song “Take Me Out” was not at first part of the stretch ritual; instead, the club takes the seventh-inning stretch literally, as fans are led through a series of calisthenics exercises during the playing of a portion of “OK Blue Jays,” a song that was once so popular in Canada its recording went gold. By contrast, when the expansion Florida Marlins introduced a similar exercise routine in 1993, those leading the drill were booed off the field almost immediately, never to return. But Toronto’s status as the last major league team to do the stretch without playing Norworth and Von Tilzer’s classic tune ended in the late nineties. Ever since, “Take Me Out” remains a staple in every park.

  At Dodgers games, tradition dictates playing “Take Me Out” twice, with only the briefest of pauses in between. But not before “God Bless America” is played first.

  Following the horror of 9/11, when baseball helped affirm a sense of community for a shaken nation, an executive from the San Diego Padres petitioned Commissioner Bud Selig to replace the jovial “Take Me Out” temporarily with the more patriotic “God Bless America.” Selig, taken by the idea, instructed all thirty teams to do just that (although the idea of swapping songs soon morphed into just adding the patriotic hymn to what always had been done). And by doing so, baseball breathed new life into an American anthem that had fallen into disuse just about everywhere but the VFW hall and the old Spectrum in Philadelphia before hockey games.

  Today, “God Bless America” is played at every game at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles and Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. In 2001, just weeks after the tragedies in the city where the dust and smell of the destroyed World Trade Center still filled the air, the impact of “God Bless America” was palpable, deeply felt by every fan who came to Yankee Stadium. The national television audiences that watched postseason games that year also were stirred. More than a decade later, in New York, those feelings awaken each time fans rise for the stretch. The ritual has become less a break in the game than a service itself.<
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  Other teams, among them the Nationals, Braves, Red Sox, and Mets, continue to play “God Bless America” on weekends and holidays as well as during the postseason, where it has become as accepted—and expected—as the pregame playing of the national anthem. Sometimes it’s sung; sometimes it’s played by organ, saxophone, or guitar; sometimes the crowd provides the chorus.

  The seventh-inning stretch offers more than an occasion to get a beer, go to the restroom, or make a phone call. It offers time for reflection. For fans who experience the game in all its slow intensity, the pause heightens awareness, setting the stage for its culminating moments. The game, so wondrously slow while in motion, stands still.

  The spark that will ignite the action again once the pause is complete has been at the center of the game all along. During the break, baseball’s second syllable either has been lying on the pitcher’s mound or has been in the umpire’s pocket. The ball, the game’s sacred rock. Through the years its composition, design, and shape have been meticulously defined and only rarely changed. It is rubbed with a special mud and sometimes stored in humidors. Baseball’s first syllable, the base, also receives special care, but the base never has achieved the special status of the ball.

  The average ball is in play for no more than four pitches, and every game something like fifty of them wind up in a fan’s eager hands, fair and foul, mostly to be kept and treasured. Some get signed by players; a few special ones get sent to the Hall of Fame to be kept in perpetuity. The stories and legends are legion, none better than my brother-in-law Mike Murray’s (who, after a lifetime of inspired teaching in high school, now teaches my NYU class with me).

  It was the summer of 1973. After nearly a quarter century of faithfully attending ball games, Mike was sitting in a general-admission seat in right field when his date asked him to get her a beer. Mike was headed toward a vendor when Bobby Murcer—the Yankee center fielder of the gloomy period—hit a shot off a Minnesota pitcher high into the evening air, headed straight toward him. What happened next so inspired him that he wrote an op-ed piece about the thrilling experience that The New York Times published.