Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

by John Sexton

  When Pirates fans congregate at the remaining piece of the Forbes Field wall, they see the monument as more than slabs of brick, and they arouse the deeper perception that religious man has brought to sacred spaces through the ages. The piece of wall may appear to be just that; but in reality it can be so much more.

  Mircea Eliade’s extensive studies of religion over millennia reveal that we always have elevated particular places to special (in some cases, sacred) status. Any place can create this sharp divergence from the ordinary to the sacred. This is hierophany: a touching of the transcendent plane. “Where the sacred manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself,” Eliade wrote. And that sacred space, deeply personal to each individual, may seem quite ordinary to others.

  Present a stranger with pictures of a Lutheran church, Catholic basilica, mosque, and baseball field, and then ask which does not belong with the others. Just about everybody would single out the stadium. Eliade’s point is that while this is the right answer for most, for others it is not. A universe of possibilities can stir a sense of the sacred; and yes, the special places of baseball can be such a catalyst. If we understand his point, we learn something about the nature of religion.

  Baseball also has its sacred times. Times experienced by parent and child, brother and brother, friend and friend—whether sitting at a ballpark, following a broadcast (for many, ball games provide the soundtrack to summer), or deciphering a box score the day after a game.

  By its very nature and rules, baseball operates outside of ordinary time; in fact, timelessness is at its essence. The length of an inning or game is not set by a clock; it shares the boundless framework of Eliade’s sacred time: It is not linear, with a simple past, present, and future; it is cyclical, building and building again toward certain, quintessential moments.

  For the religious, this cyclical liturgical time is marked by ritual and ceremony. The experience thus evoked is elevating, transporting the believer back to the original moment that is his spiritual root—in illo tempore (literally “in that time” that is revered). The customs and practices of almost every religious tradition reveal such moments—from the Advent and Lent of Christianity to the Jewish High Holy Days to Ramadan in Islam. As Eliade wrote, “Just as a church constitutes a break in plane in the profane space of a modern city, the service celebrated inside it marks a break in profane temporal duration.”

  For many fans, the most sacred times are Opening Day and the World Series. As the Hall of Fame infielder Rogers Hornsby said, “People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”

  Each spring, just before Easter and Passover, baseball elicits a sense of renewal. The cry “Wait’ll next year” is prologue, replaced by hope. As Joe DiMaggio once said, “You always get a special kick on Opening Day, no matter how many you go through. You look forward to it like a birthday party when you’re a kid. You think something wonderful is going to happen.” The anticipation that has built during the off-season ends as the players finally take the field: The wait is over; the slate is clean. No matter last season’s record, all now are tied at zero wins and zero losses, and even last year’s most moribund squad can dream of being champion (and as the 1991 Atlanta Braves and Minnesota Twins attest, that dream can become reality).

  For the first game of the season, ballparks often are dressed in red, white, and blue bunting. Sometimes the President of the United States appears, venturing to the pitcher’s mound to toss a ceremonial first pitch, bringing baseball back to life. The long, dark nights of winter are over.

  In Cincinnati, Opening Day is especially important. That city fielded the first all-professional team in 1869, and to honor that generative move, baseball’s rulers have scheduled the Reds’ first game at home each season for 124 years, two forgettable exceptions notwithstanding. Dormant for months, the streets surrounding the Great American Ball Park come alive, bustling with vendors hawking hot dogs, peanuts, and Cracker Jacks. Father and son, mother and daughter walk hand in hand through a sea of red.

  Inside, before the game begins, players and coaches assemble on each foul line and, according to baseball custom, are introduced one by one in order of the numbers stitched to the back of their uniforms (this does not happen again during the regular season). Heroes of the past are honored, and if five months earlier the home team won a championship, that pennant is raised to mark the achievement. A color guard marches onto the field carrying another pennant, the star-spangled one, and the national anthem is played. Then military jets often fly over the field, signaling the end of the pregame festival. At this point, all heads turn in unison toward home plate as the umpire dons his mask, points at the pitcher, and says: “Play ball!”

  Opening Day is about more than pomp and circumstance. As Thomas Boswell put it in an essay titled Why Time Begins on Opening Day: “We know that something fine, almost wonderful, is about to begin, but we can’t quite say why baseball seems so valuable, almost indispensable, to us. The game, which remains one of our broadest sources of metaphor, changes with our angle of vision, our mood; there seems to be no end to our succession of lucky discoveries. When Opening Day arrives, think how many baseball worlds begin revolving for seven months.”

  The repeated rituals of Opening Day suggest a “new beginning,” an anticipation of the story to be told in the coming season, a story brimming with optimism and hope. And in those months that follow, with the long (but not nearly long enough) march through the dog days of summer, the game is there, day in and day out, in any place marked by the distinct diamond design of a baseball field. And with each ball game, its intricacies, from the double switch to the sacrifice fly to the suicide squeeze, appear in countless combinations—with no two plays ever exactly the same.

  Midseason brings a weekend in a Cooperstown, the upstate New York village and mythical but not actual birthplace of the game, where new heroes are elevated to sit alongside those from the past—an enactment of what Eliade called the Myth of the Eternal Return, a “revolt against concrete, historical time, their nostalgia for a periodical return to the mythical time of the beginning of things, to the ‘Great Time.’”

  Autumn brings baseball’s high holy days: the post season and occasionally that holiest of holy days, a seventh game of the World Series, where some of baseball’s stories are seared in collective memory.

  Among the banners displayed high above center field in the ballpark once known as SkyDome, there is one honoring the 1992 Toronto Blue Jays. That banner commemorates more than a team; it marks and resurrects a singular, transformational moment for the franchise, for Canada. Its royal-blue and white trim—the inverse colors of all flags raised to the rafters before it—calls upon fans to look, remember, and return. And just a few feet away hangs a banner bearing the only number retired by the Blue Jays, the number worn by the player whose heroics for Blue Jays fans established that sacred moment in 1992, apart from all others.

  It took nine years for the newly created Toronto franchise to reach the playoffs (1985). Once this initial success whet fans’ appetites for more, they got less: A string of stunning pennant race collapses and postseason disappointments began that year and continued for the next six seasons. Leads were lost; great hitters slumped; star pitchers faltered: In three playoff series, Toronto’s record was a dismal 5-12. It was not the Dodgers or Cubs or Red Sox, but for newly initiated Canadians, it was a test of faith.

  The 1992 playoffs at first seemed to be a repeat of this theme. In Game Four of the American League Championship Series, the Oakland Athletics took a two-run lead into the top of the ninth inning, with the soon-to-be-named league’s Most Valuable Player and Cy Young Award winner, Dennis Eckersley, on the mound, poised to even the series at two games apiece. And Toronto fans knew (or thought they knew) where things would go from there.

  But with one man on base, Roberto Alomar (in the prime of a Hall of Fame career) connected with a fastball, hitting a line drive t
oward right field that carried and carried until it finally disappeared over the wall. Images of Alomar barely out of the batter’s box, arms raised and index fingers pointing skyward, instantly became the team’s defining image. The Blue Jays never looked back, winning the pennant, then the World Series, and doing it again the following year (with slugger Joe Carter playing the role of Bill Mazeroski, hitting a Series-winning home run in Game Six). It was the first time a team had won back-to-back titles since the Yankees in the late seventies.

  Alomar’s home run did not simply change the narrative; it was a mold breaker, a clue that the future might be different. Its elements are familiar: the heightening of sensitivity that stirs inside the fan during the late innings of an important game, building until the entire season hangs in the balance of a single pitch. There are Toronto fans today who would list that moment in 1992 among the most memorable and satisfying in their lives. So each year as the cycle begins anew, the 1992 banner flies, calling Blue Jays fans to return to that mystical time—in illo tempore.

  Some sacred moments occur when “time is out” and the game is halted. So it was on September 6, 1995, when the crowd inside Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards erupted into a twenty-two-minute ovation in honor of Cal Ripken Jr. after the fifth inning in a game against the California Angels.

  The game had just then become “official,” and it therefore also was official that Ripken had played in his 2,131st consecutive game, breaking what was once thought to be baseball’s most unassailable record. As the cheering crowd rose in awe, Ripken circled not the bases but the entire ballpark, stopping frequently to shake hands with fans along the rails. The effect was as magical as it was celebratory. In their book All Things Shining, philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly describe how, in such moments, “something overwhelming occurs.” As they put it, the cheering crowd “wells up and carries you along as on a powerful wave. The wave metaphor is crucial here. When a wave is at its most powerful, it is a solid foundation that can support as many riders as will fit upon it. It can even sweep up more as it runs along. But when the wave passes, nothing but its memory survives. Try to stand upon the still water and you’ll find that the supporting foundation is gone. Those moments of sport are like that. When you are in the midst of them, riding the wave, they carry you along and give meaning to life.”

  The outpouring of emotion for Ripken was simultaneously a nod to the quiet dignity of Lou Gehrig, the previous record holder—an example of baseball’s intertwining of past and present. The sanctity of Gehrig and his record formed a halo upon Ripken as he broke it; the two were united as one.

  It had been almost six decades since Gehrig uttered legendary words in his farewell address at Yankee Stadium, a farewell forced by the terminal illness that eventually bore his name: “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth…. I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for.” To this day, Gehrig is celebrated on the anniversary of the speech—the Fourth of July—by the Yankees each year they are home (making an already sacred time that much more meaningful), and on one occasion (2009, the seventieth anniversary) by all of baseball, as the speech was recited, word for word, by representatives of every home team in the major leagues. In this and many other ways, baseball creates and lives the cyclical, repetitive liturgy and sacramental time of religion.

  Inti Raymi, the Incan Festival of the Sun, celebrates the winter solstice by honoring the god Inti, with hopes of a good harvest in the coming year. In recent years, the ceremony (their Opening Day) has gained a measure of renown through a historical reconstruction, held in Cusco, Peru, as a weeklong ode to its heritage. But before it was suppressed by the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, the Inti Raymi was a deeply pious affair and is said to have been marked by precise execution of rituals (some gruesome) in the same manner and location each year. Thousands of Inca convened, often after journeying hundreds of miles, usually on foot, in the hope of touching a higher spiritual plane while reliving their mythical story of origin, together. And over millennia, such sacramental moments have been part of humankind’s effort to touch the deepest plane of existence. This is the power of myth.

  Today, especially in the West, that word, myth, too often is used as a synonym for falsehood. The Greek word mythos originally meant a truth that is experienced, an awareness that lies beyond words. As theologian Karen Armstrong wrote, “A myth was never intended as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that had in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time.”

  Mythos takes us to sacred places and sacred times—spaces and times beyond. To places revered for their mystical power, evoking an ineffable feeling of connection to something greater like Newgrange, Stonehenge, Uluru, and Easter Island. And to sacred times like Easter, Yom Kippur, Ramadan, and the Inti Raymi festival, or to a ball field on Opening Day.

  In the decades since C. P. Snow decried the split between science and religion in his seminal lecture, The Two Cultures, the chasm between the two has widened. Today, skeptics often use science to mock religion, typically by dismissing the anthropomorphic God of the simplest forms of theism. And sometimes they dismiss the religious dimension altogether. This is a mistake. In fact, we humans can go beyond science even as we embrace it and its wonderful gifts.

  Albert Einstein once said: “As the circle of light increases, so does the circumference of darkness around it.” Sometimes that darkness awaits additional light, light that will transform the unknown into the known. But sometimes, as Einstein himself attested, the darkness represents the unknowable, the ineffable. Thus, the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal on Christmas Day, 1851:

  I, standing twenty miles off, see a crimson cloud in the horizon. You tell me it is a mass of vapor which absorbs all other rays and reflects the red, but that is nothing to the purpose, for this red vision excites me, stirs my blood, makes my thoughts flow, and I have new and indescribable fancies, and you have not touched the secret of that influence. If there is not something mystical in your explanation, something unexplainable to the understanding, some elements of mystery, it is quite insufficient. If there is nothing in it which speaks to my imagination, what boots it? What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination?

  Thoreau was pointing to Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Meaning can be found beyond what we can capture rationally (including what we capture in the dogmatic trappings of religion), whether it is evoked by music, art, or nature.

  Or baseball.

  It was just one short phrase, possibly uttered in jest, but it came to epitomize as improbable a season as there has ever been in the major leagues. “Ya gotta believe” was what relief pitcher Tug McGraw yelled at his New York Mets teammates early in July of 1973.

  The Mets had little to sustain them at the time, mired as they were at the bottom of their division in the National League, well below .500. They seemed a mediocre team in a crowded, mediocre division, distinguished only by their marvelous pitching (anchored by starters Tom Seaver, Jon Matlack, and Jerry Koosman and by a bullpen led by the suddenly blooming, if odd, McGraw); they did at least have a bit of nostalgia about them (with Willie Mays returning to New York to play his final season, and with Yogi Berra having come crosstown to manage the hapless team). On offense, they were batting a hideous .238.

  But a month later, as they started to make their move, McGraw’s exclamation became a rallying cry, first for the team, then for all New York.

  On September 21, the Mets, sporting a .500 record, stumbled into first place; and they went on to win their division with only three more victories than defeats. Then, miraculously, they beat the nascent Big Red Machine in Cincinnati to get into the World Series with what remains the lowest winning percentage in major league history. Only a loss in Game Seven to the mighty Oakland Athletics kept them from a world championship.

  On that day in July
when something moved McGraw to speak, the team’s lousy record had prompted a clubhouse lecture from board chairman M. Donald Grant, which the irrepressible McGraw interrupted with his shout. Having done so, he was so worried that Grant might think he was mocking the owner’s rah-rah rant that he spoke to the boss afterward to assure him he was serious.

  Sincere or not, “Ya gotta believe” survives in baseball lore because it was just about all the team had. If there is a case for the importance of what are called intangibles in baseball, the 1973 Mets are prime evidence.

  Baseball is a game of infinite variation and possibility. As Bob Lemon of the Cleveland Indians observed after he had stopped playing and started managing, “I don’t care how long you’ve been around, you’ll never see it all.” So faith that the seemingly impossible might occur is part of the game.

  Faith does not have to be loud or full of swagger, as it was for McGraw. It often is private. It can be bestowed by a parent or it can be acquired one element at a time. It can come in a flash or very slowly, even painfully. And faith is not certainty; it is a special kind of confidence.

  A leap of faith, after all, is an embrace of feeling over logic, a willingness to loosen one’s dependence on the purely rational. Thomas Aquinas said, “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” That is because faith is anchored in deeply personal, experienced truths. The theologian Karen Armstrong wrote that “one of the conditions of enlightenment has always been a willingness to let go of what we thought we knew in order to appreciate truths we had never dreamed of”—an opening of oneself to mystery.