Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

by John Sexton

  Today, ironically as a result in part of the presence in Japan of General MacArthur’s troops after World War II, America is not the only nation with a passion for baseball. Japan’s love affair with Seattle Mariner (and later a Yankee) Ichiro Suzuki, who set a record by collecting more than two hundred hits in each of his first ten major league seasons, runs so deep that millions of people oceans away stay up through the latest hours of the night and the earliest hours of the morning to watch him play on television. In this regard, they are imitating thousands of Roberto Clemente fans in his native Puerto Rico and throughout Latin America who followed his every move over the course of a storied career.

  So revered was Clemente, who died in a plane crash in 1972 while attempting to deliver aide to earthquake victims in Nicaragua, that statues, bridges, public schools, parks, and stadiums have been named in his honor in no less than three countries. He is one of only a few players for whom the Hall of Fame has waived its usual five-year waiting period before candidacy (he was voted in on the first ballot). “The mythic aspects of baseball usually draw on clichés of the innocent past,” Clemente’s biographer David Maraniss wrote. “But Clemente’s myth arcs the other way, to the future, not the past, to what people hope they can become. His memory is kept alive as a symbol of action and passion, not of reflection and longing. He broke racial and language barriers and achieved greatness and died a hero.”

  At its most potent, the unifying power of baseball is in the passion that builds in communities over its 162-game season, often leading to huge downtown rallies and parades of the kind usually reserved for presidents, war heroes, and astronauts.

  Randy Johnson was no stranger to such adulation; yet he had one day that was special for its generosity of spirit. Nearing the end of his amazing pitching career, Johnson had the good fortune in 2009 to find himself in baseball’s moral center, St. Louis. He had already passed the milestone few pitchers have ever reached—three hundred victories—and was earning his last paychecks working for the San Francisco Giants. This day, he was pitching against the home team Cardinals.

  Lifted in the late innings just before the All-Star break, and clearly on his way to pick up victory number 303 (which turned out to be the last in a twenty-two-year career), Johnson was startled to see the entire crowd at the new Busch Stadium rise as one to cheer him, a kind of thanks-for-the-memories ovation to a worthy opponent from what is arguably the most closely knit, tradition-soaked baseball community in the country. On this day, the rabid St. Louis fan base expanded their community by one—no matter that he was wearing the other team’s uniform.

  Johnson may have been startled, but he was not surprised. The middle-American river town has enjoyed a revered reputation for generations among baseball wags. As Johnson himself has put it, “It’s a fun city to come to because you know it’s all baseball.”

  And baseball there is played famously hard and well, from the spikes-high “Gashouse Gang” rowdies of the thirties to the mad dashes on the base paths of Enos “Country” Slaughter in the forties, to the elegance of Stan “the Man” Musial in the fifties, to the glare of fiery concentration on the face of the Hall of Fame fireball pitcher Bob Gibson in the sixties. Though the record must show that this border-state city was notoriously hostile to Jackie Robinson during his rookie year, the St. Louis tradition generally has been that the game is left on the field, that opponents are respected, that booing is for Easterners, and that rooting for the home team is no less intense during lean years.

  St. Louis may just barely be among the twenty largest metropolitan areas in the country, but in recent decades only the far larger-market Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees have kept pace in attendance. When the Cardinals drew three million fans for the first time in 1987, only the Dodgers had done it. Their success was magnified by a famous radio station, WMOX, one of the first fifty-thousand-watt behemoths on the scene; in the years before the major leagues expanded, WMOX saturated the South; if you lived in Dixie, you were a Cardinals fan.

  Much of baseball’s enormous, lasting attraction flows from its ability to stitch people together, to create communities, to foster bonds of lasting power based on shared memories and experiences. It doesn’t happen everywhere and it doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does it is extraordinary to behold. An unusually large national television audience got more than a sniff of this in 2011, when the Cardinals awoke from ten and a half games behind the pack in late August, salvaged playoff eligibility on the last night of the regular season, and upset what were on paper two much better teams (Philadelphia and Milwaukee) to get to the World Series. Once in the Series, they beat the heavily favored Texas Rangers in seven games, including a Game Six come-from-behind victory in extra innings that ranks among the most thrilling baseball games ever played. In two separate potentially terminal innings, the Cardinals were down to their very last strike. Their victory unleashed an ecstasy worthy of Beethoven, incapable of expression in words alone. An entire rejoicing community rose mightily to proclaim its joy.

  Baseball’s communities exist in a web of expanding concentric circles, from the nuclear to the national. Nothing is deeper than the bonds we share with parents and loved ones. And for many, such bonds were nurtured by what some people call “a catch” and others insist is “a game of catch.” One of baseball’s delightful arguments is a question of syntax: Do two people play catch or have a catch? Whatever the right words to describe it are, they describe an intimate pastime, for many emotionally associated with childhood or parenthood or (as in my case) both. The ball goes back and forth hypnotically, as life outside the arc slowly fades away and only the ball and the partner remain; sometimes there is conversation, often no words are required. Just quiet intimacy interrupted only by the pop of ball colliding with leather.

  The final scene of Field of Dreams, Phil Alden Robinson’s adaptation of W. P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe (as in Jackson), is, of course, a game of catch. Ray Kinsella has built the ball field in his Iowa cornfield, the eight players banned after taking Rothstein’s money in 1919 have reappeared to play against a pickup squad of old-timers, and a bitter and reclusive writer has had his idealism rekindled enough to join the story. As the old-timers walk off the field into the tall corn one last time, one player, the catcher, hangs back. The catcher is Ray’s father, not yet into the life of disappointment and semi-estrangement we know he will lead; in this moment, he has been transported back in time to a place where he can be happy playing the game he loves. He is a modest talent still dreaming.

  Ray introduces the young catcher to his wife and daughter; it would be unthinkable to destroy the moment by telling John Kinsella what the future holds for him and them. As he begins to walk away again, Ray calls out suddenly, “Hey, Dad, you wanna have a catch?” “I’d like that,” his father-to-be says.

  The ritual tossing continues as the camera pans to show the line of headlights stretching to the horizon, cars bringing people to the Iowa ball field (more than two decades after the movie’s release, thousands of ordinary folks still come to that cornfield, drawn by the magic). In this scene, the tiny circles of parent, child, and family merge with a larger community of those who let baseball’s delights bring them together. The meaning of the moment had been foreshadowed by the writer character (J. D. Salinger in the novel, a fictional Terrence Mann in the film to avoid trouble from the reclusive and litigious real-life author):

  I don’t have to tell you that the one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers. It is the same game that Moonlight Graham played in 1905. It is a living part of history, like calico dresses, stone crockery, and threshing crews eating at outdoor tables. It continually reminds us of what once was, like an Indian-head penny in a handful of new coins.

  Like a congregation in a house of worship, the members of baseball’s ultim
ate community, the outermost circle, share that faith. It lives now in the hearts of thirty major league towns and countless others. For me and my circle, it thrived as never before or since in Brooklyn; and for me, my unconflicted son, and thousands of others, it continues today with the very different New York Yankees.

  There is a cliché about life in Brooklyn while the Dodgers were there: You could walk down one of the borough’s broad boulevards and follow a Dodgers game on the radios blaring through the open windows of apartments and storefronts. It might be myth (the Truth-carrying kind that sometimes is not factual) that you could follow every pitch, but it is beyond doubt that as you walked one of the borough’s two dozen neighborhoods, you easily could keep track of a game through the lilting erudition of Red Barber and then the harder consonants of young Vin Scully (horror of horrors, he was actually from the Bronx).

  The Brooklyn community was suffused with the Dodgers’ achievements and failures between 1941 and their departure for Los Angeles; and it delighted in seven National League pennants. The ingredients of this community were there for all to see and feel: the affection for the team’s core of approachable stars, almost all of whom lived in one of the neighborhoods; the pride that it was their huge, diverse borough that was home to Jackie Robinson’s courageous breakthrough; and the collective defiance of despair and cynicism that saw them through six World Series defeats at the hands of the Yankees and the loss of three pennants on the final day of the season.

  And all of this was cemented by the power of radio, a blizzard of broadcasting that filled the airwaves not only of New York but also of the entire country. Amidst it all, there was one voice that is not so well-known today but was certainly known to a huge audience back then that belonged to a man named Nat Allbright. Allbright was not a New Yorker (indeed, as far as can be determined, he never saw the Dodgers play except in spring training), but in the fifties he was the voice of an unprecedented network of stations (more than one hundred) that broadcast simultaneous re-creations of Dodgers games. From a studio near Washington, DC, where he spent his long career (he died in 2011), Allbright mastered the art of giving pitch-by-pitch reports from snippets of wire service transmissions, complete with a variety of recorded crowd noises and tricks like a tap of a pencil eraser on his microphone to mimic the sound of bat meeting ball. The listeners knew, of course, that this was an imaginative enlivening of wire service data; and for the millions that made it even more special.

  A young Ronald Reagan got his start doing Cubs games this way out of Des Moines in the thirties, before moving on to his career in show business and eventually finding work in an Oval Office not far from Allbright’s broadcast booth. But relatively few fans heard Reagan, the broadcaster. Allbright’s audience, by contrast, was enormous—for two important reasons that reveal the concentric circles of baseball community.

  One was simply Brooklyn’s enormity: It was the fourth largest city in the country at the time of its reluctant annexation to the rest of New York at the end of the nineteenth century (and it would be the fourth-largest city today if it ever broke away from the rest of New York). Moreover, because throughout American history, Brooklyn has been both a destination for immigrants and a gateway to the rest of the country for their children, its national ties are especially large; experts in demography have calculated that one of six (maybe more) Americans either lived there or has a close relative or ancestor who did. And consciousness of roots has always been a defining feature of this Brooklyn diaspora.

  The second reason was race, always a punctuation mark for important American stories. In the years before teams used chartered jets to move around the country, they usually arrived by train late in the evening before a road game. In the late forties and fifties, the Dodgers frequently disembarked in some town to be met, no matter what the hour, by crowds—mostly African-American fathers with their young sons in tow who sought, in respectful silence, a glimpse of Jackie Robinson.

  Nat Allbright’s Dodger network was therefore no accident. The Dodgers were America’s team back then. And in a virtuous circle, he both profited from that fact and helped build it. In 1955, the year Brooklyn finally won it all, the team gave him a World Series ring.

  The Yankee dynasty that beer baron and owner Colonel Jake Ruppert constructed in the twenties with general manager Ed Barrow had become after World War II something more like the Roman Empire (many a Yankee foe compared them to US Steel, and Red Sox president Larry Lucchino famously dubbed them “the Evil Empire”).

  But in spite of (perhaps because of) their success, best symbolized by their five consecutive World Series victories (1949–53), the Yankees were not America’s team; indeed, outside their natural fan base, they more often faced antipathy (“Damn Yankees” was as much a national cry as a popular musical).

  Here, too, the story was, at least partly, about race. It was not until the 1955 season that the Yankees introduced their first African-American (outfielder-catcher-first-baseman Elston Howard, who would make the final out in the Game Seven loss to the Dodgers that autumn), and it was not until after the owners sold the team nearly a decade later that the Yankees became truly color-blind. We want our heroes to be good as well as great, though we often manage to turn a blind eye to their vices. Somehow, however, between Joe DiMaggio’s record-shattering hitting streak of fifty-six games in 1941 and the pursuit by Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle of Babe Ruth’s home run record twenty years later, genuine affection for the Yankees was difficult to find.

  That began to change in the late seventies, driven as much by the tribulations of New York City as by the return of Yankee success. In this period, beginning my second decade as a reborn Yankees fan, I was living in Washington and clerking for Chief Justice of the United States Warren Burger. One of the many rewards of the year was a lunch with each of the Supreme Court justices. When my time came with Justice William Brennan, it was not long after the Yankees won it all in both 1977 and 1978. Justice Brennan, an avid fan who did not abandon the Dodgers when they moved west, turned the conversation at lunch to baseball.

  I noted how all of New York had been caught up in the Yankees’ reemergence. After the city’s near-bankruptcy, its long and painful road back to solvency, and its horrid problems with crime and neighborhood decay—as flames engulfed the South Bronx during Game Two of the ’77 Series, ABC broadcaster Howard Cosell famously told the nation, “There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning”—the Yankees provided a spark of hope, something to cheer.

  Justice Brennan, though a New Jersey product, had been in his youth, like me, a passionate Brooklyn Dodgers fan. He said he disagreed about the newfound appeal of the Yankees, summing his views up with a single word, uttered with contempt that was rare for him: “Steinbrenner.” As in George III, the Ohio- and then Florida-based shipbuilding magnate. The synonyms and phrases evoked by that surname summarize the force of Brennan’s argument—self-ensnared in Watergate money crimes, free-agent-era poster child, managerial musical chairs, leader and bully, rule-stretcher and -breaker, two suspensions from active management of his franchise, defeats as well as victories, legitimate celebrity and shameless headline hound, control freak, dramatic victories and maddening defeats.

  The justice had a point. The return to success—based in large part on the Yankees outspending teams to bring in free agents like Reggie Jackson—had a tinge about it that stood in the way of the kinds of communities that grew up around teams like the Cardinals and Dodgers. But I had a point, too. It mattered greatly to New York that it have a winner—and to far more people than those who simply rooted for the Yankees. New York was supposed to be a preeminent city, and for the first time since what seemed like forever (of course, it had been only a decade since the Mets’ Miracle Year), they had a baseball team big enough to match the city’s own ambitions.

  The evolution of the Yankees and their role in both New York and the national community reached critical mass after 1996, thanks in large measure to a single, quiet man of
enormous character—not Steinbrenner, but a guy from Brooklyn, whose St. Francis Prep baseball teams battled my own alma mater, Brooklyn Prep. Joe Torre, from the moment his team came storming back from a two-game deficit to take the 1996 World Series from the favored Atlanta Braves, gave the country powerful reasons to like the Yankees—reasons beyond simple success. His inner strength wordlessly communicated to Steinbrenner: “Lay off.” And Steinbrenner largely did.

  A combination of Torre’s skill at the game he had once played magnificently and his quiet humility allowed a new generation of largely homegrown ballplayers to share his spotlight (this would change somewhat in later years with the acquisitions of superstars such as Jason Giambi, Roger Clemens, and Alex Rodriguez). The team that the city and the country came to celebrate was built around homegrown talent: Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera; lunch-pail players like Tino Martinez and Paul O’Neill joined them, bringing their own formidable skills; and there were contributing-role players who would have their moments in history, like Scott Brosius and Aaron Boone.

  The bulk of the regeneration was accomplished before the horror of 9/11. After the attacks, the Yankees helped unite a more than stricken town; they gave the country more than an entertaining distraction. For a change, it was not championship baseball that drew attention, it was really, really good baseball played by people you could admire at a time of intense national grief. In baseball terms, it was in many ways the ninth-inning and extra-inning heroics of the team in the 2001 World Series against Arizona that inspired—even after the ninth-inning defeat in Game Seven deflated the hopes of a championship. In a sense, the Series demonstrated the continuing power of baseball to bring people together for something more than merely baseball.

  The evocative, unifying power of the game runs from the sandlot to the corridors of power in America, and even to the Supreme Court. So it was that in a 1972 opinion for the Court involving a challenge (by former St. Louis Cardinal star Curt Flood) to the clause in baseball’s standard contract stifling players’ mobility, Justice Harry Blackmun could not resist waxing poetic on the central position of the game in American culture—thereby revealing a love for baseball I later witnessed firsthand over our late-night chats during the year I worked at the Court for his fellow Minnesotan, Chief Justice Burger (the two jurists, both appointed by Richard Nixon, were called by many “the Minnesota Twins”).