Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

by John Sexton

  Here, there is an interesting twist (in a way, a twist of the knife). For sure, my father had given me the Dodgers; but he also played a role in ushering in the O’Malley era. A Brooklyn political figure, he was among those who initially recommended a young O’Malley to the Dodgers after team officials sought his advice on hiring a new attorney. Thus was set in motion a chain of events I would later describe hyperbolically to my friends, “My father is responsible for the removal of the Dodgers from Brooklyn.” In a sense, by causing the delivery of my son into the ranks of the Yankee faithful, I carried on the Sexton tradition of betraying the Dodgers. I eventually compounded the sin by becoming a Yankees fan myself. In religion, we call this conversion.

  In the decades since that moment of truth, Jed, who was baptized, has been bar mitzvahed; he is Jewish today, the faith of my wife, our daughter, our daughter-in-law, and our three granddaughters (my Irish Catholic brother-in-law, my sister’s husband, likes to joke that “not since Abraham left Ur has a gentile begat as many Jews as John”). But the baseball faith that I conferred to my son has remained a constant throughout his entire life. He still roots for the New York Yankees.

  Jed’s faith was once a gift, or at least a bequest, from me. So it is for the vast majority of believers initially. What someone does with that gift, of course, is one of the central challenges of any life. A religious tradition, as well as love for a baseball team, must, as time passes, be tested and thus doubted. At some point reaffirmation is required. In some Christian traditions, this is what is meant by being born again; in others, particularly in the East, it is the very process of reexamination that is revered, especially in traditions where the uncritical acceptance of anything is seen as unworthy.

  In that spirit, as I began life as a professor of religion at St. Francis College, a Catholic school for commuter students from working-class families, I told a story one day in the fall of 1968. It was the kind of story they might have heard learning folk religion in the Catholic elementary and secondary schools; I was working hard to wean them from the simple pieties and blind acceptance of all that in order to experience the study of religion as an intellectual exercise—a real college course. My story was intended to be demonstrably false. And my strategy was to use the revelation of its falsehood in the next class (one week later) as a springboard for a discussion of the true nature of religion, misplaced certitude, and the power of true faith.

  It was the day of Game Five in the World Series between the Tigers and Cardinals, with St. Louis ahead three games to one and most fans believing the Series was all but over. But I told my students that I knew better. The Lady of Fatima had appeared before me the night before and predicted that Detroit would come back and beat the Cardinals. Naturally, they were skeptical. But incredibly, led by a portly, hypercompetitive pitcher, Mickey Lolich, the Tigers did precisely that—beating the Cardinals’ incomparable Bob Gibson in the seventh game.

  The following week, the students posted a copy of that week’s betting line for the upcoming National Football League games on the blackboard; they wanted to know what the Lady of Fatima had told me about the games. So I told them that she had appeared to me and given two more messages: one, that gambling was a sin; and two, that the then-mediocre New York Jets would go on to win Super Bowl III. Little did anyone—least of all me—expect what Joe Namath would do that January.

  I doubt I was taken literally by any of my students, but the legend started to grow: Fatima speaks to Sexton. My lesson had failed, in no small part because the pull of the Fatima story remains so powerful. It is based on an account by three young people in 1917 of an appearance by Mary in rural Portugal six times that year, during which three messages were given in secret and eventually written down by one of the children who later became a nun, Lucia Santos. Two of them were made public during World War II, with the third not released until nearly sixty years later.

  In popular retelling, it is often said that the secrets involved prophecies (eventually validated) about World War I and II, and even the assassination attempts on Pope John Paul II. In fact, the sister’s accounts are quite mystical in tone and not particularly specific with regard to future events, more allegory than prophecy. My very rare predictive success more than forty years ago was merely that; the Holy Mother played no role.

  The result of one’s spiritual journey and the reflection it entails is more consequential than such blind faith and more profound even than the hope born out of necessity that Tug McGraw and his teammates found when their backs were against the wall. At its best, a reflection upon one’s faith can reveal what Paul Tillich called “the ultimate concern,” that which motivates people day in and day out, perhaps leading to the complete emptying of self, as seen for example in a Buddhist monk.

  Whatever its particular manifestation, faith is an affirmation of something that cannot be expressed, for it is rooted in another domain of knowledge, one that is beyond what is knowable in scientific terms. There is much that is known today, and even more that is unknown today but will be known (perhaps even hundreds of years from now). Faith—true faith—deals with neither the known nor the unknown but knowable. It deals with that which is unknowable in the scientific sense but which the believer knows with all of his or her being (the way, in a wonderful marriage, love is known). This is the domain of faith. Therein lies the most powerful connection to baseball, its rhythms and patterns, astonishing feats and mystical charm; it is not necessary to elevate baseball to the level of ultimate concern to notice that, for the true fan, there is sometimes a touching of the ineffable that displays the qualities of a religious experience in the profound space of faith.

  As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.” That thought was echoed by William James: “The divine presence is known through experience. The turning to a higher plane is a distinct act of consciousness. It is not a vague, twilight or semi-conscious experience,” he wrote. “It is not a trance.”

  And psychiatrist Emanuel Tanay, a Holocaust survivor, also tells us that faith can spur feelings of confidence and optimism: “As your faith is strengthened you will find that…things will flow as they will, and that you will flow with them, to your great delight and benefit.”

  It took only a moment, but Derek Jeter’s words about the Yankee ghosts reached Aaron Boone with a sudden clarity that autumn night; delight and benefit followed.

  He didn’t “gotta,” but he believed.

  In 1966, the Boston Red Sox managed to lose ninety baseball games, one more than the then-floundering New York Yankees and more than any other team in the American League. That miserable performance climaxed more than a decade of decline and disappointment, and as far as the team and its fans were concerned, the past appeared likely to be but prologue.

  They did have a new manager in 1967, a former Red Sox player named Dick Williams. But the most he could promise was that the team, with a few new faces, would never stop hustling. And in a pledge that trumpeted its own limitations, Williams vowed that the team “will win more than we lose.” Sox fans were unconvinced. On Opening Day, a paltry 8,324 came to Fenway Park, the smallest crowd to see a home opener in fourteen years.

  But the team actually began the season the way Williams had promised, and game by improbable game the fans’ perceptions of the Red Sox and the team’s perception of its own capabilities began to change. They somehow survived the loss of a brilliant, young slugging outfielder, Tony Conigliaro, to a hideous beaning in August. And six weeks later—on the final day of the season no less—they won a four-way pennant race to produce the town’s first American League title in twenty-one years.

  That amazing turnaround season, which ended just one game short of a world championship when the Sox lost to the St. Louis Cardinals, was appropriately dubbed the Impossible Dream (Man of La Mancha was the hot Broadway musical then); it took only one season of hope (after the deep doubts built over fifteen years of failure) to change the atmosph
ere around Fenway Park utterly.

  The same thing happened in New York two years later. For the fledgling New York Mets, 1968 represented another year of miserable (though occasionally entertaining) baseball. They lost eighty-nine games; only the Houston Astros lost more (one more), in the entire National League. The Mets had finished last or next to last in the ten-team league each year of their existence.

  Their 1969 comeback was different from the steady climb of the Red Sox in 1967. For the first third of the season, the Mets were better—but they were barely winning more than they were losing. What made the Mets “Amazin’” were their winning streaks—eleven here, ten there. By Labor Day, they found themselves in contention for the pennant with the Chicago Cubs.

  “It built in such an improbable way,” said their popular right fielder Ron Swoboda, a decent hitter but a famously poor fielder (who nonetheless would make two spectacular run-saving catches in the World Series that fall). Reflecting the absence of optimism (the absence of faith) that flows from deep doubts grounded in experience, Swoboda said years later: “In 1969, I thought we would take the next step forward. I thought we’d be a little better than we were in ’68, around .500, a little above, a little below.”

  He was wrong. When a fly ball hit by Baltimore’s Davey Johnson rested in the glove of left fielder Cleon Jones, the Mets (who had won a hundred games during the regular season) were champions of the world.

  Strictly as baseball, the ’67 Red Sox and ’69 Mets make some sense. They each had a core of younger players and rookies who did not share the institutional memory of lousy seasons. The doubts about each team as their turnaround seasons began were probably excessive.

  But to the ballplayers and their fans, the two seasons were much more magical. In each case, the season began with fans doubting that they could win, ever. It was logical, fact-based doubt and it arose from considerable, painful experience. The teams had no expectations that the coming season would be appreciably different from the previous one, although their professional duty was to try nonetheless. Only after an unpredictable number of victories in single games did the players’ outlook, imperceptibly at first, start to move from doubt to hope and even faith, as they began to say, “We can do this.” Their faith was confirmed by what they were experiencing on the field—some would call it a miracle or gift—and experience overcame doubt. To theologians, this is a familiar process.

  Doubt is at the core of baseball, touching every player and every fan. And doubt is central to the religious experience. They are not separate, they coexist. In baseball as in religion, doubt and faith are intertwined.

  Some see doubt as the enemy of faith. The fifteen-volume Catholic Encyclopedia presents doubt and faith as antonyms, morally as well as literally, stating flatly that they cannot coexist: “It follows that doubt in regard to the Christian religion is equivalent to its total rejection.”

  But through the ages, while some have seen doubt in this way, many have not. Saint Augustine, early in the first millennium, wrote that “doubt is but another element of faith.” And sixteen centuries later, the theologian Paul Tillich wrote: “The doubt which is implicit in every act of faith is neither the methodological nor the skeptical doubt…it is the doubt of him who is ultimately concerned about a concrete content. One could call it the existential doubt, in contrast to the methodological and the skeptical doubt. It does not question whether a special proposition is true or false. It does not reject every concrete truth, but it is aware of the element of insecurity in every existential truth.” This type of doubt, he said, is implied in faith. The two concepts are the complementary ends of a tuning fork. The poet Robert Browning put it well: “You call for faith: I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists. The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say, if faith o’ercomes doubt.”

  The ancient traditions of the East have long taught: “Great doubt, great awakening; little doubt, little awakening; no doubt, no awakening.” The Mahabharata, the Indian epic almost ten times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey combined, is the story of a family feud between the Pandavas and Kauravas that ends in a horrific war. The Pandavas have been cheated out of their kingdom, have seen one of their female members, Draupadi, defiled in public, have wandered in the forests for twelve years, and have now returned to recover their lands in a bargain with their rivals. But the Kauravas renege, setting the stage for the epic battle. With thousands of war elephants and war chariots ready to go and conches trumpeting the advent of the fight, Arjuna, a prince of the Pandavas, has his charioteer drive him to the center of the battlefield. Looking at his relatives and their allies (including some of his former teachers) across the field, Arjuna has doubts—not about his ability as Kshatriya, or warrior, but about the morality of his undertaking. He sets aside his bow and declares that he will not fight his family and teachers because it is against his religious training to do so.

  Arjuna’s charioteer is the god Krishna, and over the next eighty pages of the epic, Krishna persuades Arjuna that it is his duty to fight. This story, initiated by Arjuna’s doubt, is known as the Bhagavad Gita, by itself one of the world’s great spiritual books. Interestingly, if ironically, to help himself through some doubting moments that plagued even him, the pacifist Mahatma Gandhi carried with him a copy of this story of war.

  Doubt, in other words, is neither limited by geography nor sectarian dogma; the faithful live with doubt, saints included. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, in one of the letters published after her death, wrote openly of her doubt: “Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.”

  Even Christ had doubts. In the Gospel of Matthew, as his crucifixion drew near, Jesus fell to the ground and said, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.”

  And the Apostle Thomas (through the years since known as both Doubting Thomas and Thomas the Believer) famously doubted his leader following the resurrection.

  The faith that confronts such doubt is not the same thing as certitude. It goes beyond reason and resists reducing the world to our terms, categories, and propositions. As Rabbi Heschel observed: “This does not reflect a process of thinking that is neatly arranged in the order of doubt first and faith second; first the question, then the answer. It reflects a situation in which the mind stands face to face with the mystery rather than its own concepts.” Faith and doubt, in religion and in baseball, are companions.

  This eternally vexing topic was on the mind of a wise, if fictional, priest from the Yankees’ neighborhood, the Bronx, as he began to speak at Sunday mass. “Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty,” Father Brendan Flynn, a central character in a riveting Pulitzer Prize–winning play by John Patrick Shanley, Doubt: A Parable, explains from the pulpit of his parish. Accused of child abuse by a determined nun who was certain he was guilty, his intense byplay with her is unsettlingly provocative, illustrating the dangers of certainty and the role of doubt.

  The character’s words still resonated in my head when I held a dinner for Shanley (an NYU graduate) after Doubt won the Tony Award for Best Play. The gathering was intimate, no more than twenty people, many of whom wanted to know if Hollywood had come knocking (it had) and whether Shanley planned to once again occupy the director’s chair after a film absence of nearly two decades (he did, for Meryl Streep no less). But I was more interested in the story he had just finished telling, which illustrated that doubt is no enemy of faith.

  As I remember Shanley telling it, the muse that inspired the play was none other than the tough Bronx streets of his youth. It’s no coincidence that Father Flynn’s church is set in the very same place. In this side story, Shanley was around thirteen years old and already knew his friends were rough and capable of teenage cruelty. But what he witnessed, repeatedly, was the most horrible of cruelties. So much so that he still carries the images with him today.

  Shanley’s f
riends would often surround a neighborhood kid, let’s call him Louie, who at the age of eighteen had contracted polio and was confined to a wheelchair. They would poke his legs with sticks; then they would taunt him, call him names like “cripple” and “gimp.” The teenagers would even make fun of Louie’s arms, which grew disproportionately large from navigating his wheelchair around the crowded city streets every day. “Come on,” they’d say after prodding him. “If you’re so strong, why can’t you catch us?” The indignity went on for another eight years.

  That’s when Louie, now twenty-six, after one more jab in the leg, sprang from his wheelchair, ran down the block, tackled his assailant, and delivered blow after blow until the astonished onlookers gathered enough of their senses to peel Louie off his now bloodied former tormentor.

  It was a painstakingly orchestrated charade, perpetuated over his eight years of military eligibility and designed to keep Louie out of the draft and nine thousand miles from the jungles of Vietnam. “I knew I could never tell the good guys from the bad guys again,” Shanley said, revealing the source of Doubt.

  For more than a year, this story stayed with me. Then one May, when Shanley and I were together for the processional walk at the university’s commencement ceremony in Yankee Stadium, where I would present him with an honorary degree, I pulled him aside. “John, I’m just haunted by that story,” I said. “But it occurs to me, I don’t know if it’s true.” Shanley looked at me, paused, and simply said, “You never will.” I let it rest there, even though I could have pressed him and he would have told me.

  Each of us consciously or unconsciously decides how much doubt we will tolerate; sometimes there is a delight to maintaining doubt, even where we could choose certitude. On occasion, I myself have made this choice.