Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

by John Sexton

  “And the field runs to infinity,” he would shout, gesturing wildly. “You ever think of that, Gid? There’s no limit to how far a man might possibly hit a ball, and there’s no limit to how far a fleet outfielder might run to retrieve it. The foul lines run on forever, forever diverging. There’s no place in America that’s not part of a major league ball field.”

  As if to prove this point, one Confederation outfielder, William Stiff, chased a fly ball from Iowa all the way to New Mexico, his feet slashed by cacti and yucca plants.

  Inevitably, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy contains its share of interesting characters drawn from the annals of actual baseball history—for example, Cubs Hall of Fame pitcher Three Finger Brown (he actually had four fingers). Brown lost virtually all of the index finger on his pitching hand to a farm accident, but because his middle finger had been mangled in a fall and was essentially worthless to him, he had only three that worked. His real name was Mordecai Peter Centennial (he was born in 1876) Brown; he won 239 games, and his career earned run average of 2.06 is still the lowest ever for a pitcher who won more than 200 times (edging out Christy Mathewson). Imagine the discipline it took Brown to relearn how to throw a baseball, to generate enormous topspin from his unique grip, with the stub of his index finger against the ball. As a reward, his unique curveball broke down and away from right-handed hitters, producing thousands of harmless ground balls over the years.

  When Gideon and Stan return to their real lives, they are the better for their nostalgic journey. They have experienced existential return (the first assignment in my seminar asks students to offer a theory of connection between works by Eliade and Kinsella’s Iowa Baseball Confederacy.)

  Kinsella’s tale is fantasy, of course. But occasionally baseball literally mixes past and present—quite palpably in those powerful moments when an aging veteran puts an exclamation point on a great career by coming alive one last time. Baseball’s saints remain revered even in decline (witness the respect shown to Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth and to Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada in New York as their once towering hitting numbers faded).

  So thousands were thrilled when Ted Williams in 1960 hit his 521st and final home run in his very last at-bat as a major leaguer. At forty-two, and a veteran of two wars, his final season was one marvelously long good-bye—a home run on Opening Day, plus twenty-eight more that same year. The last scene was captured perfectly in the words of John Updike, who in an essay about that day in The New Yorker depicted a different Tao from what he had described four years earlier from his perch in the Yankee Stadium bleachers:

  Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

  And even today, many remember the day that Grover Cleveland Alexander, almost at the end of a twenty-year career that produced more pitching victories than all but two other players, walked slowly to the mound in Yankee Stadium as a thirty-nine-year-old Cardinal. It was the bottom of the seventh inning of Game Seven in the 1926 World Series. St. Louis was ahead, 3–2, but the Yankees loaded the bases with Hall-of-Famers-to-be Earle Combs, Ruth, and Gehrig; there were two outs, and a genuine clutch hitter, Tony Lazzeri, was at bat. Old Pete, as Alexander was known, had endured the horrors of combat in World War I and had battled booze in his great career, but he had one more grand performance in him, striking out Lazzeri and pitching hitless balls the rest of the way to preserve the Cardinals’ victory. Hollywood was of course watching, too, and Ronald Reagan would eventually play Old Pete in the movies.

  And then there was the day in 1984 when another thirty-nine-year-old, Tom Seaver, his glory years with the Mets behind him, was summoned by a young White Sox manager, Tony La Russa, for his first relief appearance in eight years because the team had no options left. It was the twenty-fifth inning of a 6–6 game against Milwaukee, and La Russa had run out of pitchers. Seaver would have to pitch, despite the fact that he was scheduled to start the very next game. Had he lost, it would have been his thirtieth loss in just over two years, double his number of victories.

  But he won. He retired the Brewers in order, including their slugger, Robin Yount, just before Harold Baines hit a home run to win the marathon game for Chicago. That evening, Seaver went out and pitched eight and one-third innings in yet another White Sox win.

  In his next start, he pitched a complete game.

  And in his start after that, he did it again.

  For two wonderful weeks, the baseball world lit up as Seaver reminded everyone how good he once had been. Those who witnessed this magnificent “return” experienced ineffable joy beyond expression. Heads shook in wonder and wide smiles filled faces. No words would do; none were needed.

  But words—some words, at least—were needed as postscript to the metaphysically thrilling Game Six of the 2011 World Series between the Texas Rangers and the St. Louis Cardinals. David Freese’s home run cleared the center field fence to give the Cardinals a come-from-behind-twice victory and force a Game Seven (which they won). As the ball settled on a grassy knoll behind the fence, broadcaster Joe Buck simply said: “We will see you tomorrow night.”

  Buck’s line was virtually the same as one that had been spoken spontaneously on the air twenty years and one day before—by his late father. It was another Game Six, this time in the thrilling Series between Atlanta and Minnesota, with the hometown Twins facing elimination. In the bottom of the eleventh inning, having already saved at least a run with a spectacular catch in center field, Kirby Puckett led off with a line drive that easily cleared the Plexiglas wall in left-center to win the game. As the ball disappeared, Jack Buck, the broadcaster on CBS, simply said: “And we’ll see you tomorrow night.”

  Joe Buck said after the 2011 game that he had not scripted any words in advance of Game Six’s climax, aware of the dangers of canned material in a live broadcast. The touching symmetry was highlighted when his mother called him in the broadcast booth shortly after the game ended.

  There are very few high-stakes games that have ended the way the two games in Minneapolis and St. Louis did, with so-called walk-off home runs, hits that literally win a game. Through 2012, only fourteen others have been hit in the long history of the World Series. Indeed, there had not been a single walk-off home run in the Series until Game One in 1949, when the Yankees’ Tommy Henrich led off the ninth inning by putting one in the right-field seats off the Dodgers’ Don Newcombe to break a scoreless tie.

  Only two of these sixteen home runs have ended a World Series—the Bill Mazeroski blast in the ninth inning that ended Game Seven against the Yankees in 1960 and Joe Carter’s three-run blast against the Phillies in a 1993 Game Six win that produced the Blue Jays’ second consecutive championship. That Carter home run, moreover, is only the second walk-off home run (the term did not come into use until the nineties) that not only won a World Series game but also erased a deficit, the other being the heroic hit by the injured Kirk Gibson in 1988.

  Fortunately, none of the walk-off home runs in the World Series was cheap. Mazeroski’s answer to Yankee Ralph Terry’s second pitch was never in doubt as it sailed over the left-center field fence. Carlton Fisk’s towering treatment of Pat Darcy’s second pitch was clearly gone, the only question being whether it would drift foul as the Red Sox catcher famously waved his arms, urging it toward fair territory; and Freese’s home run in 2011 was a vicious line drive to straightaway center field, on a full count against Ranger reliever Mark Lowe, which simply kept rising toward that welcoming patch of grass.

  It is impossible for fans with a sense of history to think of one of these home runs without stirring memories of the others. Each shares an excruciating intensity,
a heightened sensitivity, and an attention to detail that combine to produce the ineffable experience that unites baseball and religion. Modern television, with its multiple cameras and crowd close-ups, did not record the faces of those present for Mazeroski’s shot in 1960; still, many who were not in the ballpark can attest to the deep intensity of the moment and to the movement of the experience from concentration to amazement and, finally, to awe. Today, as the experience builds, television reveals to millions clearly the faces of those involved—eyes burning, more than one pair watching the action through spread fingers. For fans and players, time slows and the moment builds within, a blend of nervous tension and sharpened focus, odds and tactics changing pitch-to-pitch, situation-to-situation, with the infinite possibilities of the game. Then, finally, ultimate release; ecstasy or agony, home run or strikeout. In those moments, bonds are forged, memories are made, and the game’s revelatory capacity appears in powerful form as player and fan transcend the profane and meet the sacred. And in those moments lie experiences and lessons familiar to religious man.

  In religious traditions, ritual and nostalgia merge, conjuring the long-ago event in sacred time. In secular affairs, memory is central. Sometimes it comes in a flash; often it is cultivated and preserved by families, friends, even societies. The past and present are more clearly linked, one enhancing and informing the experience of the other. The observation near the beginning of Ecclesiastes that nothing is new under the sun may not be quite true, but the dialogue between present and past often is inexhaustible, even as it causes us to touch a spot deep within ourselves.

  In 2011, tens of millions of people shook their heads in amazement when Freese put a huge exclamation point on the Cardinals’ comeback victory. But for those who truly see the game, Freese was not simply channeling Mazeroski, Fisk, Gibson, or Puckett; for thousands of baseball fans he was re-creating their magic. In a way, Freese was Fisk. The nostalgia of baseball, the timeless sport, evokes always the eternal return. The ghosts that Derek Jeter murmured about to Aaron Boone just before yet another miracle in 2003 are always close at hand—thank God.

  For those who love gospel music—and what sentient human being doesn’t—there is an especially wonderful tune, beloved by God-fearing baseball lovers.

  “Life Is a Ball Game” was first introduced in the early fifties by a legend, Sister Wynona Carr. In addition to performing and recording, her duties included directing the choir at New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit, where the Reverend C. L. Franklin, Aretha’s father, preached.

  In her foot-stomping classic, first base is temptation, second base is sin, and third is tribulation. But, of course, “Jesus is standing at the home plate, he’s waiting for you there.”

  The pitcher is Satan, Solomon is the umpire, and the leadoff man is Daniel, who gets the first hit. The game’s home run is hit by Job, wielding the “strong bat” of prayer. The chorus ends with a rousing “Life is a ball game, but you’ve got to play it fair.”

  These metaphors and symbols are powerful. They unite baseball and God. By contrast, there will be no song based upon the material from my class at NYU. In our work, we have fixed on lessons at once more theoretical and ecumenical. We focus on two words, one an adjective, the other a noun, each written on the blackboard in the opening moments of the first day of class and each connecting the worlds of baseball and religion.

  The adjective: ineffable. That which we know through experience rather than through study, that which ultimately is indescribable in words yet is palpable and real. The word signifies the truths known in the soul.

  Alan Watts, who fifty years ago helped to popularize the religions of the Far East in the United States and whose works on Taoism, Buddhism, and Zen are still classics, put it this way: Trying to capture these truths through logic alone involves trying “to speak the unspeakable, scrute the inscrutable, and eff the ineffable.”

  Stories are better. For example, Derek Jeter flipping that ball sideways to Jorge Posada during the 2001 playoffs or Sandy Amoros sprinting toward that fly ball hit by Yogi Berra in 1955 or the catch you had with your father, or mother, or brother, or sister, or best friend.

  The noun: hierophany. Mircea Eliade’s term, derived from the Greek for a manifestation of the sacred or holy. A hierophany produces a moment of spiritual epiphany and connection to a transcendent plane. A heightened sensitivity opens us to this manifestation of the sacred in ordinary life. There is, in these hierophanic moments, a sharp divergence in feeling and awareness, space and time, from our profane experiences.

  Eliade used hierophany as a companion to the word theophany—a manifestation of what most religious people label God. Hierophany is a broader term, encompassing what we might consider the spiritual, as opposed to a more specific and, in some traditions, more personal (and anthropomorphic) word God. It points to the experience of being transformed and elevated, going beyond self and the physical world—what William James pondered in much of his work as he tried, in his words, to “reduce religion to its lowest admissible terms, to that minimum, free from individualistic excrescences, which all religions contain at their nucleus.”

  And herein lies the point: The deeply profound experience captured by the words ineffable and hierophany is not the exclusive province of organized religion. For some, indeed, for a great many, it can be evoked at mass; but for others, the spark can be a Beethoven symphony; for others still, a Sandy Koufax breaking ball. As James Joyce wrote in Ulysses, “Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.” Any stone, as Eliade taught, can be a sacred stone.

  Many students of religion and the game have attempted to connect Eliade’s concept of the sacred stone with baseball’s “rock.” Such attempts have produced some memorable writing, for example this over-the-top description of baseball offered by theologian David Bentley Hart in his essay “A Perfect Game”:

  I know there are those who will accuse me of exaggeration when I say this, but until baseball appeared, humans were a sad and benighted lot, lost in the labyrinth of matter, dimly and achingly aware of something incandescently beautiful and unattainable, something infinitely desirable shining up above in the empyrean of the ideas….

  Part of the deeper excitement of the game is following how the strategy is progressively altered, from pitch to pitch, cumulatively and prospectively, in accordance both with the situation of the inning and the balance of the game. There is nothing else like it, for sheer progressive intricacy, in all of sport. Comparing baseball to even the most complex versions of the oblong game [football] is like comparing chess to tiddlywinks.

  And surely some account has to be given of the drama of baseball: the way it reaches down into the soul’s abysses with its fluid alterations of prolonged suspense and shocking urgency, its mounting rallies, its thwarted ventures, its intolerable tensions, its suddenly exhilarating or devastating peripeties…. And because, until the final out is recorded, no loss is an absolute fait accompli, the torment of hope never relents. Victory may or may not come in a blaze of glorious elation, but every defeat, when it comes, is sublime. The oblong game is war, but baseball is Attic [Greek] tragedy.

  All of this, it seems to me, points beyond the game’s physical dimensions and toward its immense spiritual horizons.

  No one has described the profound dimensions of baseball better, or with more eloquence and insight, than the late Bart Giamatti—Renaissance man, scholar, university president (at Yale), devoted family man (his son is the actor Paul Giamatti), and, finally commissioner of baseball, the one time we’ve had a commissioner who loved the game more than the business, who emphasized stewardship rather than ownership. After his premature death in 1989 at age fifty-one, friends put together a collection of his baseball writings and speeches and called it A Great and Glorious Game.

  It is a great and glorious volume, beginning with a keen observation about baseball’s almost casually cruel arithmetic: “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your
heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.” Giamatti wrote that it “keeps time fat and slow and lazy.” As he noted correctly, “In 1839, the rule became fixed that one runs [the bases] counterclockwise. Time does not matter in baseball.”

  Giamatti was writing after his beloved Red Sox had just missed in another pennant race, but his wistful words mask an abiding hope for the next spring and the profound optimism it will bring: “I was counting on the game’s deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight.” A continual theme in Giamatti’s prose concerns the importance of the concept of home in baseball, especially in a nation as peripatetically bustling as America. He summed up his inspiring worldview in an essay about the Sox–Yankees playoff game in 1978, which featured a wonderful analogy: Each batter, for him, is Odysseus.

  Baseball is about homecoming. It is a journey by theft and strength, guile and speed, out around first to the far island of second, where foes lurk in the reefs and the green sea suddenly grows deeper, then to turn sharply, skimming the shallows, making for a shore that will show a friendly face, a color, a familiar language and, at third, to proceed, no longer by paths indirect but straight, to home.

  Baseball is about going home, and how hard it is to get there and how driven is our need. It tells us how good home is. Its wisdom says you can go home again but that you cannot stay. The journey must always start once more, the bat an oar over the shoulder, until there is an end to all journeying. Nostos; the going home; the game of nostalgia, so apt an image for our hunger that it hurts.