Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

by John Sexton

  Justice Blackmun eagerly cited a passage from the lower court opinion: “Baseball’s status in the life of the nation is so pervasive that it would not stain credulity to say the Court can take judicial notice that baseball is everyone’s business. To put it mildly and with restraint, it would be unfortunate indeed if a fine sport and profession, which brings surcease from daily travail and an escape from the ordinary to most inhabitants of this land, were to suffer in the least because of undue concentration by any one or any group on commercial and profit considerations. The game is on higher ground; it behooves everyone to keep it there.”

  Then, in the midst of his own account of the history of the game, Justice Blackmun took a detour, the fan bursting from within, and offered his list of nearly ninety of the game’s most legendary figures. In the best tradition of baseball’s “hot stove league” (the debates that rage among fans over the winter), Blackmun said he offered his list to provide “tinder for recaptured thrills, for reminiscence and comparison, and for conversation and anticipation in-season and off-season.”

  The list has attracted attention ever since. It includes many of the obvious greats: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, and Christy Mathewson. But it also includes Hall of Famers known to a smaller circle of hard-core fans: Wee Willie Keeler, Carl Hubbell, Rube Marquard, George Sisler, and Eppa Rixey (most wins ever by a National League left-hander until Warren Spahn supplanted him).

  The good justice’s list also displayed his command of trivia: Deacon Phillippe, who started the very first modern World Series game in 1903 for the Pirates, beating Cy Young of the Boston Americans; Germany Schaefer (three guesses where his parents were from), who amazingly pioneered the art of stealing first base (with runners on first and third, he would steal second, hoping to attract a throw that would enable the runner on third to score; then if the catcher didn’t throw to second, he would dash back to first on the next pitch and try again, a ploy that led to a rule banning the running of bases backward); and Charlie “Old Hoss” Radbourn, one of the first nineteenth century pitchers to make the Hall of Fame, a three-hundred-game winner who in 1884 won fifty-nine or sixty games (depending on which version of history you prefer) in nearly seven-hundred innings of work—records not likely to be matched ever again—and whose leg injury is often said to be the origin of the term charley horse. Finally, there are Harry and Stan Coveleski, pitcher brothers from the teens and twenties. Harry is pure trivia but Stan is in the Hall of Fame, not only for his 215 victories but also because he was one of seventeen pitchers permitted to continue throwing the spitball after it was banned in 1920; two other spitballers also are honored who won even more than he did (Burleigh Grimes and Urban “Red” Faber).

  Justice Blackmun also offered a nod to the talent brought to the major leagues when the color line broke. So he included Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey as well as Satchel Paige and Roy Campanella. However, just as many of the Court’s opinions leave observers guessing, so also Justice Blackmun’s list contains a glaring ambiguity: he listed Sad Sam Jones, but he does not make clear whether he meant the solid American League pitcher (229 wins between 1914 and 1935) or the pitcher from the fifties and sixties who was the first African-American to hurl a nohitter.

  In the end, the justice’s opinion, as he predicted, served only to start arguments, not end them. It undeniably is, however, an illustration of the power of baseball and its function as an element of our civil religion.

  It is that extra dimension that defines religious communities as something more than congregations that gather for services. As Jesus said in the Gospel of Matthew, “When two or three are gathered together in my name,” a greater spirit also is present.

  So also where baseball communities large and small convene—from father and son playing catch to a nation turning its collective eyes to Yankee Stadium after 9/11—wherever they gather, a spirit lives that reveals a dimension beyond what appears to eyes and mind.

  The crowd at Fenway Park turned its collective attention to the man standing atop the dugout. They watched as he meticulously adjusted his bowler hat and tie, took a deep breath, and lifted the oversize, pylon-shaped megaphone toward his mouth. With as much force as could be mustered, he cried into it, introducing the home team players, each of whom was greeted with raucous applause.

  Stomping and shouting, the fans watched their guys take the field wearing the traditional home team uniforms, all white, interrupted only by black belts and, of course, the bright red stockings stretching to the knee that gave the team its colorful name.

  Mere minutes later, same ballpark, same crowd but a different scene entirely: The sun had dipped below the stands and out of sight, bringing the illuminated signs that pitched beer, sneakers, and insurance companies sharply into view. Booming speakers blasted rock and roll while high-definition images filled the giant screen above center field. The iconic Green Monster in left sprang to life with the latest scoring updates from far-flung ball fields—one had Florida hosting Tampa Bay. Fans could be spotted eating that modern ballpark staple, sushi.

  It was “Throwback Night,” a journey from baseball’s present to its past and back again. The game, played less than two months into the 2011 season, commemorated the Chicago Cubs’ first visit to Fenway in nearly ninety-three years, when they played the final games of the 1918 World Series that the Red Sox won—a contest made famous by Babe Ruth’s dominant pitching, and kept famous by the ensuing curse that eventually took his name. A sense of novelty permeated the 2011 game. However, the great irony was that the fans most interested in baseball tradition were those most likely to be offended by the matchup; this was, after all, interleague play.

  The following season, the Red Sox–Cubs game was trumped by an even more elaborate celebration honoring Fenway Park’s hundredth anniversary. More than two hundred former players and coaches were present—most poignantly the wheelchair-bound, excellent infielders of the forties, Bobby Doerr and Johnny Pesky (who died that summer). From the stands you could see the two best-known foul poles in the game: the one in left field that Carlton Fisk hit in the 1975 World Series and the one in right field that is named after Pesky, who hit a famous home run to the short porch that it marks. In left field stands The Monster, as evocative as ever.

  The Dodgers, even in Los Angeles, brought every living member of the Brooklyn team that won in 1955 back for a perfect weekend fifty years later. And for more than sixty years, the Yankees have invoked Jeter’s “ghosts” at Old-Timers’ Days that have drawn all their great ones, from Babe Ruth through Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, to Ron Guidry. Baseball fans savor the emotion of such days and have never resisted the chance to see a hero one more time, even when the setting is scarcely the same and the players’ skills have long since yielded to age.

  Nostalgia is one of baseball’s defining attributes. The game’s past shadows its present—always there to be conjured for instruction, to prod memories, and to revive dormant emotions. Nostalgia is the tribute the present pays to the past.

  The quaint, throwback uniforms that the Red Sox and Cubs revived for their modern fans to enjoy were different from the originals in one important respect: the numbers stitched to their backs. In the early twentieth century, uniforms didn’t identify players. The first short-lived experiment with numbers involved the pennant-winning Cleveland Indians in 1916; there was another fleeting attempt by the Cardinals in 1923; but it took the mighty Yankees in 1929 to inaugurate a custom that quickly spread through the majors, becoming a requirement for teams on the road by the early thirties. But the Yankees never added names to the numbers: to this day, the Yankees, unlike all other teams, have only numbers on their home and away uniforms.

  At first, New York used the numbers to identify players according to their batting order (hence, Babe Ruth with number 3 and Lou Gehrig with 4), but the practice of assigning them less logically quickly took hold. Once players had fixed numbers, it became possible to memorialize a great player by retiring his number for
all time on that team (or in the unique case of Jackie Robinson decades later, on all teams).

  It is largely lost to history that tragedy started it all. The first retired number, in fact, was Gehrig’s on the Yankees, following his courageous revelation that he was suffering from the disease that killed him. Babe Ruth’s was retired in 1948, when he was dying of cancer.

  Uniquely, there is Cincinnati’s number 5. It once belonged to one Willard Hershberger, a decent catcher and the backup to Hall of Famer Ernie Lombardi on the Reds’ winning teams just before World War II. Hershberger is the only major leaguer to have committed suicide during a season. A victim of depression, he slit his throat in a Boston hotel room in the summer of 1940. The Reds immediately retired his number (or at least did not reassign it) and dedicated the rest of their season to him. After they won the World Series, Hershberger’s teammates voted him a share of their proceeds, giving the money to his grieving mother. During the war, however, the Reds revived the number, thereby making it available a generation later for a promising young catcher named Johnny Bench.

  Since then, more than one hundred and fifty ballplayers have had their numbers retired by the major league teams for which they played. In every case save one, they were established stars in—or with a plausible claim to be in—the Hall of Fame. And every ballpark has some kind of display to celebrate its team’s special numbers (some have grandiose names like Ring of Honor or Level of Excellence). The exception: Pittsburgh’s number 1. It belonged to Billy Meyer, who knocked around the minor leagues, and occasionally the majors, before being named Pittsburgh’s manager at a horrible time in their history. In 1952, Meyer’s team won 42 and lost 112 games, the worst record for a Pirates team ever. The manager, however, was both popular and hardworking, and two years later (by then he was a team scout) his number was retired in tribute to baseball’s Job.

  For the serious fan, old uniforms and numbers are to be venerated and treated with respect. To his dismay, a marvelous southpaw named David Wells (himself a huge fan of baseball tradition) was reminded of this in 1997. A standout pitcher in the free agent era who eventually won more than two hundred games (one of them perfect), Wells was in his first year with the Yankees when he took to the mound one day, wearing a hat he recently had purchased, one that Babe Ruth had worn in 1934. Wells was a Ruth fanatic, living by a larger-than-life credo that evoked memories of the Babe and wearing the number 33 (the closest he could get to Ruth’s retired number 3) on his back. In retirement, Wells even got a tattoo depicting himself pitching to the Bambino, naturally on his left arm. He wore Ruth’s antique hat for all of one inning before manager Joe Torre ordered him to remove it and fined him. The official reason: a breach of league rules (they call them uniforms for a reason). But to a traditionalist like Torre, wearing Babe Ruth’s hat was sacrilege. Wells, who had paid thirty-five thousand dollars to buy the hat, later sold it at auction. Throwback games, retired numbers, and the Wells episode illustrate how deeply we long for the past—not necessarily the past as it was; quite often, in fact, a romanticized version of it (the way that the Old West wasn’t actually the Wild West of John Wayne, with six-shooters and swinging saloon doors).

  As the author Stanley Cohen put it: “Baseball, almost alone among our sports, traffics unashamedly and gloriously in nostalgia, for only baseball understands time and treats it with respect. The history of other sports seems to begin anew with each generation, but baseball, that wondrous myth of twentieth century America, gets passed on like an inheritance.”

  Passed on and cherished; phrases like The Boys of Summer touch a warm, deep place, indescribable (ineffable) in its evocative power.

  Nostalgia permeates religious tradition as well. Mircea Eliade wrote that the “nostalgia for origins is equivalent to a religious nostalgia. Man desires to recover the active presence of the gods; he also desires to live in the world as it came from the Creator’s hands, fresh, pure, and strong.” This journey home (also baseball’s ultimate goal) is what Eliade called the myth of eternal return; an experience that goes beyond merely marking an event to reliving it.

  For religious man, the experience is traditionally evoked by ceremony (liturgy), often centered on food and drink. For Roman Catholics, the miracle of the Eucharist is transubstantiation: The “substance” of the bread and wine becomes the “substance” of the body and blood of Christ at the moment of consecration, even as the “accidents” (the appearance) of bread and wine remain. By doctrine, in the mass, the Last Supper and Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is made present, its memory is celebrated, and its saving power is applied. We return in illo tempore (to the special, sacred moment), transported existentially to another plane. The Last Supper, of course, was a Passover Seder, a focal point of the Hebrew calendar, itself rich in a ritual retelling—and reliving—of the story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, in part through the elements of food on the Seder plate. As Eliade put it: “Through the reactualization of his myths, religious man attempts to approach the gods and to participate in being.”

  Eliade’s extensive study of religion shows us how nostalgic ritual goes beyond memorializing sacred events to rekindle the powerful reality and experience embedded within the sacred myth, and by doing so provides a powerful bridge to the transcendent plane that was touched in the earlier time.

  In this spirit, novelist W. P. Kinsella depicted a mystical journey through time to shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, where his characters discover—what else?—the last Chicago Cubs team to have won the World Series, playing an epochal game against a local team.

  The journey of the main character, Gideon Clarke, actually begins when his father, Matthew, confronts a blinding flash of lightning (shades of Saul on the road to Damascus) while he and Gideon’s mother share their first kiss. The bolt imprints in Matthew’s memory all the box scores of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy and the story of a visit paid by the Cubs to play an exhibition doubleheader on July 4, 1908. The site of the game was an Iowa hamlet originally known as Big Inning (as in the biblical “in the beginning was the Word”), later as Onamata. The Cubs’ opponent was an All-Star team from the Iowa league.

  But there was a problem with what Gideon’s dad knew. The Cubs’ front office flatly denied the existence of the July 4 game, the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, and even the town; and there was no discoverable evidence that the game or the league ever existed. Matthew was certain he knew the truth, and he set out to prove he was correct. His certainty became an obsession, and the subject of his graduate school thesis (he wanted it to be in history, but university officials insisted it should be in fiction writing). His life ends in despair at a Milwaukee Braves game when he leans headfirst into a vicious line drive hit toward him in the stands. In that instant, his knowledge of the game and the league (and his obsession with both) are transmitted to his son, Gideon, who takes up his father’s quixotic cause.

  The most important twist in the story occurs when Gideon and his friend Stan Rogalski, armed with a revelation from a dying neighbor who had participated in the game, go to a section of a railroad track outside their town known as the Baseball Spur. There, they pass through space (and the intersection Eliade called axis mundi) and time to Big Inning, arriving at the 1908 game itself, which is played in a continual torrential rainstorm. The two apparently mismatched teams play a maddeningly close game and, because it is baseball, there is no clock. The first game of the doubleheader lasts a biblical forty days, through 2,614 delightfully tortuous innings. No second game was played.

  As they mine the past, not just pine for it, Gideon, Stan, and others resolve some of their real-life issues. Stan had always hoped for a shot at the majors; he plays in the game, acquits himself well, and gets an offer from the Cubs. Gideon has an unsatisfactory marriage; but in his 1908 world he finds a local girl, Sarah Swan, with whom he shares true love until, in a cruel twist of fate, she is killed in a car accident during a delay in the game.

  Kinsella’s magical storytelling pro
vides a wonderful metaphor. The Iowa All-Stars’ right fielder is a statue, the Black Angel of Death, who snares fly balls in her wings. The game is secretly manipulated by an ancient Native American, three hundred years old, who believes his late wife’s reincarnation is impossible unless the Iowa team wins (in the end, he engineers this result by hitting the game-winning home run).

  As the game proceeds, the Cubs’ bosses in Chicago try to halt it, aware that their regular season is in jeopardy; but the players refuse to stop. No less than Teddy Roosevelt suddenly appears and enters the game for Iowa, only to strike out. A huge balloon descends from the sky, occupied by none other than Leonardo da Vinci himself, who plausibly claims to have both invented baseball and designed the enchanting symmetry of the ball field. “Unfortunately,” he laments, “I lived in a nation of bocce players,” and by the time baseball became popular his connection to it had been lost to history.

  Above all, the hero of the novel is baseball itself. Gideon Clarke explains:

  “Why not baseball?” my father would say. “Name me a more perfect game! Name me a game with more possibilities for magic, wizardry, voodoo, hoodoo, enchantment, obsession, possession. There’s always time for daydreaming, time to create your own illusions at the ballpark. I bet there isn’t a magician anywhere who doesn’t love baseball. Take the layout. No mere mortal could have dreamed up the dimensions of a baseball field. No man could be that perfect….