Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

by John Sexton

  “I don’t think you can stump me,” said Kissinger in his uniquely deep and gravelly voice. “Let’s see you try.”

  I launched into the Stottlemyre question. Kissinger and Wilpon wrestled with it until I finally revealed the answer. In an instant, Kissinger reminded me that in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, he had filmed a commercial to boost New York City tourism that featured his lifelong dream coming true. (“Everybody has a New York dream, come find yours” was the tag line.) His dream: hitting an inside-the-park home run at Yankee Stadium. “They actually made me hit the ball, but thank God they didn’t have me run the bases,” he said. Instead they used a double.

  Then I dazzled them with the Wilhelm question. Kissinger conceded: “I would not have believed that, in all the games that have been played, there would be things that have happened only once.”

  Meanwhile, the game started to get more interesting. Down 3–1 to the Colorado Rockies in the bottom of the sixth, the Mets rallied and scored two runs. The score remained 3–3 until the bottom of the eighth, when Fernando Tatis, in the twilight of a journeyman career, hit what turned out to be a game-winning grand slam home run for New York. The Mets won 7–3.

  As we headed down in the elevator with a group of jubilant fans, I decided to give Tippy, who was picking me up after the game, a quick call to tell him I was coming. Reliable as always, he produced another interesting “fact,” which I shared with Kissinger, Fred, and the captive audience of twenty or so people who were jammed in the elevator with us.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” I intoned, “did you know that there is only one player in the history of baseball who has hit two grand slam home runs in the same inning?” Silence. Not a guess. A chorus, led by Kissinger, of “Who was it?”

  “That person,” I said, “was Fernando Tatis, the man we saw hit the game-winning grand slam tonight.” They were genuflecting as I walked toward the car, where Tippy, the man behind the curtain to whom I never gave credit for the trivia, waited eagerly to discuss the game.

  It took another two weeks before my certitude was shaken. This time I was at a game in Yankee Stadium with my friend Jay Furman and his son, Jesse. The game was slow, so out came the Stottlemyre question.

  Jesse, a pugnacious Yale Law School graduate who since has become a federal judge after a career as a prosecutor, challenged me right away. “That can’t be true,” he said. I assured him that it was, invoked my stature as a university president and a scholar-fan, and quietly bristled at his doubt.

  Within an inning, Jesse, using his BlackBerry, had discovered a list of forty players, Stottlemyre barely noticeable among them, who had hit an inside-the-park grand slam since 1950. Eight had done it since 1990. Roberto Clemente once ended a game that way, and Brooklyn’s Jimmy Sheckard did it in consecutive games in 1901. In the face of this overwhelming evidence, my first response (echoing many religious leaders past) was to deny the evidence and to affirm what I believed: “The Internet is full of misinformation,” I said—unconvincingly, even to me.

  After the game, I confronted Tippy. He reacted as have true believers through the centuries. “If that bastard Jesse Furman hadn’t looked that up, you and I would have gone to our graves thinking that Stottlemyre was the only one to do it. And we’d be a lot better off.” Then he added, “The amazing thing is you’ve told hundreds of people, and I’ve told hundreds of people, and nobody has ever denied it.” Everyone had accepted what they were told as fact even though, by the law of averages, at least a few of the folks we told likely would have seen one of the home runs hit since 1990 on TV or even in person.

  Tippy may still have been certain, but I was not. Like many over the centuries whose faith has been challenged by doubt, I started to consider the logical extension of what had just happened and asked, “If what you told me about Stottlemyre wasn’t true, how could I believe what you told me about Wilhelm?” I had begun to doubt. Tippy responded with a reaffirmation of infallibility worthy of a pope or a shaman who had forecast rain on a dry day or an apocalyptic leader who foresaw the end of the world on a date now passed: “You can take everything else that I’ve told you to the bank; I guarantee it.”

  And so I rested…until my son called shortly thereafter to report more trouble (or should I say new knowledge): Wilhelm had hit a home run in his first at-bat; in his second time up, he grounded out to the pitcher. He had five other hits (all singles) during his first year in the majors. The triple didn’t come for another year. And, yes, he never hit another home run or triple after those first ones.

  So Tippy’s “dogma” could be restated (in full conformity with the newly discovered facts) as follows: There is only one person in the history of baseball who hit a homer in his first at-bat and a triple the following year, and who over a career of at least ten years (Wilhelm played for twenty) never hit a home run or triple again. The Hall of Fame and the magnificent knuckleball could still be tantalizing clues.

  I suggested this to Tippy; but as before, he was uninterested in the revised story, faithful as it was to the facts.

  Tippy faced his moral crisis of faith and made his choice, but I had a choice to make as well. Over the years, violating all academic rules of attribution, I had presented myself (not Tippy) to my companions (now including Henry Kissinger) as the knowing source. I had accepted their plaudits like a keeper of Gnostic truths. Should I now reveal to those I had misinformed over the years that neither Stottlemyre nor Wilhelm stood alone in history, as I had claimed? In particular, should I tell Kissinger, who (I was pretty certain) was likely appropriating the information as his own, thereby putting a reputation far more important than mine at stake?

  As I said to Tippy, “It’s one thing if my reputation is ruined. With Henry Kissinger, world peace is at stake!” To this day, I have not told Secretary Kissinger.

  Tippy’s tale reveals the perils of hubris and certitude, unleavened by doubt. And it displays the ways those who claim the Truth with a capital T—religious or otherwise, from popes to drivers—react when science (the advancement of what we know) throws into question the basis of belief. Tippy simply would not let the facts get in the way.

  Of course, though facts may not capture the ineffable truths, they do yield truth. And it is up to people of faith to resolve conflicts between religion and science. As Chet Raymo put it: “Science cannot resolve the conflict between science and faith; science must go wherever it is led by the empirical method, peeling away the veils in which nature hides. If the conflict between science and religion is to be resolved, it is up to persons of faith to modify their (tenets), and indeed this has been happening since the beginning of human history. Most Catholics, for example, no longer talk about banishing unbaptized babies to Limbo or believe Genesis offers a literal account of creation. The Index of Forbidden Books is gone, Galileo has been rehabilitated…. And when all the magical thinking is gone, what are we left with? With plenty. Faith communities at their best add immeasurably to the storehouse of human well-being.”

  So it is that even for those who delight in the great gifts of science, faith sometimes arises to conquer doubt. When it comes varies and often is unknown. After the Minnesota Twins won the 1991 World Series (the only one in history played between the two teams that had finished last the year before), in extra innings, pitcher Jack Morris revealed how, before Game Seven, “a total peace” had washed over him—instilling a complete confidence that with the ball in his hand, the Twins would be world champions. “I knew I could not lose,” Morris remembers. He pitched a ten-inning shutout and the Twins won, 1–0.

  That same inner confidence had sustained another brash pitcher, Johnny Podres of the Brooklyn Dodgers, as he prepared to face the favored Yankees in Game Seven of the Series in 1955. Barely twenty-three, Podres knew about the Dodgers’ long string of agonizing disappointments, but he did not feel their oppressive weight. Simple faith swallowed the doubts of history. On the team bus ride to Yankee Stadium, a tightly wound Podres paced the aisle, exhorting his teamma
tes to just score one run, saying that was all he needed. As it turned out, they scored twice; but like Morris, Podres only needed one to win the game that gave Brooklyn its only World Series.

  With doubt and faith inextricably intertwined, how does belief arise? For many believers, as my journalist pals say of some tales, the facts are too good to check out. But that belittles faith.

  It sometimes may be acceptable to sustain doubt even where it could be resolved. Such is the case for me with my “original 1955 Jackie Robinson glove,” or for baseball with its umpires largely unsupported by instant replay. These are style choices, not faith.

  On other occasions, the seeds of doubt are dubiously sown—and we must be doubtful about the doubt itself. This is especially the case in the age of the Internet, when anyone can say anything and anything can achieve wide distribution, and the casting of aspersions has become as simple as a click of the “send” button on a computer screen. Doubt is then created, even if virtually out of thin air.

  Consider a case involving Gil Hodges, the iconic first baseman of the Brooklyn Dodgers, beloved to this day forty years following his death way too young at forty-seven, who was the manager of the Miracle Mets team that won the World Series in 1969. In the climactic fifth game, an incident occurred that still stirs arguments. With the Mets trailing 3–0, the Baltimore Oriole pitcher, Dave McNally, threw a very low pitch to the Mets hitter, Cleon Jones. When the ball landed, it then made a sharp turn and bounced all the way into the Mets’ dugout. The only question was whether it hit Jones’s foot (the rules say you are awarded first base whether you are hit on the bounce or on the fly); despite Jones’s protestations, home plate umpire Lou DiMuro called the pitch a ball.

  Within seconds, however, Hodges appeared at home plate to show DiMuro a baseball, and spotting a black mark indicating shoe polish, the umpire overruled himself and awarded Jones first base. (Knowledgeable fans quickly remembered a similar incident that turned around a pivotal game in the 1957 World Series involving Yankee pitcher Tommy Byrne and a Milwaukee Braves pinch hitter, Nippy Jones.) The next batter, Donn Clendenon, hit a home run off the possibly unsettled McNally, igniting a Mets comeback that won the game and thus the Series a few innings later.

  Forty years passed, until at a Mets reunion their pitching star that day, Jerry Koosman, told reporters a fresh tale: When the ball bounced into the Mets’ dugout right to him, Hodges quickly told him to rub it on his shoe and hand it back, an underhanded maneuver if ever there was one. If true, the tale would tarnish Hodges’s impeccable reputation, hard won over the years. Koosman’s claim, however, never got much traction until it was revived and passed on uncritically in a new Hodges biography published in 2012 and then repeated in book reviews.

  But there’s a reason it had never received much traction to begin with: There was absolutely no evidence to support it. For one thing, no less than Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver, also in the dugout that day, reminded inquiring reporters that Koosman (a well-spoken farm boy from rural Minnesota) had a deserved reputation as both a practical joker and a teller of tall tales. For still another, the batter, Cleon Jones, angrily protested that it was inconceivable Hodges could have thought of such a trick and had it executed in a split second.

  Further muddying the waters, retired Mets outfielder Ron Swoboda has still another recollection of the incident. According to Swoboda, the ball in question had actually bounced onto a bag of baseballs stored in the dugout, and in his haste to get to home plate Hodges had by chance picked up a ball with a mark on it.

  That’s four different stories from four people who were there that day. If nothing else, this story is a useful reminder about the lives of the saints; no saint would claim perfection and no saint would have others claim it on his behalf. Hodges, a devout Catholic, would surely agree.

  However, it is not acceptable as a general matter to resist the investigations and discovery that translates what today is unknown into what tomorrow (or a hundred years from now) will be known. And this is not the role of faith, for genuine faith is not calculated to avoid inconvenient truths or prolong ignorance.

  The moral of these tales is that doubt matters and often matters greatly. One of its synonyms is skepticism, a word often linked in its positive connotations with the adjective healthy in the most demanding intellectual circles. Through the centuries, the power of doubt and healthy skepticism has often been trained on world religions and their faithful. And given the horrors wreaked by the armies who carried Truth into battle or invoked it in the persecution of others, such criticism is justified. In the secular domain, moreover, doubt is part of the foundation of the scientific method in particular and of most serious inquiry in general. It is doubt that drives the expansion of the reality of what we know and the reduction of the realm of the unknown. The warning that certitude sounds, whether in religion or in science, should trigger it.

  On the other hand, doubt needs a rational foundation, a solid logical or factual basis. It should not be idle or mischievous, the simplistic act of casting aspersions—like the mere tossing of a pebble into still water to observe the rippling result. It is no accident that in the legal community the adjective most often associated with doubt is the properly demanding word reasonable.

  Then there is the ineffable, the unknowable, where doubt also resides. Here, only faith can fill the emptiness.

  In the end, there is, however, one absolute truth, one certitude that admits no doubt: Fernando Tatis is the only player in the history of baseball to hit two grand slams in the same inning. You can take it to the bank; I guarantee it. Don’t even bother to look it up.

  Well, maybe you should.

  A dozen years before my son was born, the Dodgers left Brooklyn for California, breaking my heart but not my spirit.

  The betrayal of millions of devoted fans, especially the young ones like me who were experiencing adult misbehavior for the first time, produced myriad reactions. In my case, the last thing I would have expected in those dark days of 1958 was that I would end up rooting for the hated New York Yankees; but that is what happened.

  Just not at first. During the Dodgers’ early years in Los Angeles, some of their old Brooklyn fans gave up on baseball; some moved their allegiance (if not their love) to other teams; and some, like me, continued to follow the Dodgers from afar. I was as passionate about them as ever, tracking wins and losses painstakingly and calculating the statistics of my favorite players via the box scores printed in the late edition of the New York Daily Mirror. I was resolved not to abandon something that had been at the core of my identity since the first moment I experienced the green glory of Ebbets Field, watched Jackie Robinson patrolling the infield, and heard the mellifluous radio tones of first Red Barber and then Vin Scully.

  As I came of age, the Dodgers rewarded my continent-spanning devotion in at least one area where they had disappointed in Brooklyn—they won consistently. Indeed, in their first eight years after being kidnapped from Brooklyn, the Dodgers won the World Series three times. And often I could catch their games on TV, in part because of the national fascination with their stunning pitching staff—anchored by Don Drysdale, Claude Osteen, and Brooklyn’s own Sandy Koufax, the greatest of them all. In 1966, when they won yet another National League pennant, I joined a group of the Dodger diaspora in Baltimore to see the final two games of the World Series. They lost a pair of 1–0 contests, ending the Series on the wrong side of four maddening games. All the while it never occurred to me that I would soon be embracing another team. My faith remained strong.

  Jed changed everything. In addition to a name, a home, a family, and my love, I was determined to give my son a baseball team to enjoy. With the Dodgers a continent away, and the Mets too recently arrived, the Yankees and their great tradition beckoned. I could envision reliving the delight of a son and a father together at a ball game rooting for the same team, this time with me in the role of father.

  Initially, I continued to root for the Dodgers—quietly. Sure
, I’d root for the Yankees when I would take Jed to the Stadium, teaching him about their past and present and about the splendor of the game along the way; but I just couldn’t shake my memories of all the heart-wrenching defeats they handed to the Dodgers, 1955 notwithstanding. Given the firewall that separated the American and National Leagues at the time (it was still decades before the start of interleague play), I was never forced to make a true choice, and as a result, Jed was shielded from knowing anything of my dueling allegiances.

  The turning point came in 1977. The Yankees, having shaken off the cobwebs of a woeful decade, made it to their second straight World Series under new owner George Steinbrenner, who used the newly created tool of free agency to buy future Hall of Fame players Catfish Hunter and Reggie Jackson. In the 1977 World Series, the Yankees faced the Dodgers, who had stunned the powerhouse Cincinnati Reds in a divisional race and then beat a favored Philadelphia Phillies team to win the pennant.

  Jed was eight years old and a fully engaged fan. Remaining even a closet Dodgers fan would have pitted me against his hopes; that was unthinkable. And so it was that the first pitch of Game One from ex-Red-now-Yankee Don Gullett to Davey Lopes of the Dodgers amounted to something much more significant to me than the start of a series or even a World Series; it was my moment of conversion.

  When the same teams met again the following autumn, no personal conflict or dilemma or feeling of nostalgia urged me back toward the Dodgers. I had my new faith, and it remains with me today.

  My colleague Eric Klinenberg, a prolific author (most recently of the bestselling study of America’s social patterns, Going Solo), had a similar journey. As he put it in New York magazine in 2009:

  I grew up on the North Side of Chicago during the seventies and eighties and was raised to love the woeful Cubs. Spare me your pity. Sure, my team never came close to a pennant…. Sure, every year I dreamed of a championship, and every year those dreams were dashed. But my team had perfected the art of failure, and I never expected anything more.