Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

by John Sexton

  “Within seconds, a twenty-three-year odyssey, fraught with Sisyphean disappointment and Stygian gloom, came to an end,” wrote Mike, then thirty-one. “I was experiencing Nirvana. My life had come full circle…. Now, as autumn and winter approach, and I am confronted with the bewildering prospect of huddles, red dogs, game plans, the bomb, and the blitz, I can take solace in the white orb enthroned on my coffee table. When piercing gusts rattle windows and the whole world is gulping down martinis, scotch sours and the turbid, martial cant of football, I will curl up on the couch under a quilt, the ball ensconced safely in my hands, and dream the dreams of my youth.”

  Mike’s piece caught the eye of the commissioner of baseball, who quickly sent in tribute and gratitude another baseball—this one signed by all the living participants of the first All-Star Game in 1933. On my sixtieth birthday, in an act of extraordinary love and generosity, Mike gave me both baseballs.

  Stories of the ball abound. One collector, Seth Swirsky, used to own both the ball that went between Bill Buckner’s legs, costing the Red Sox Game Six of the 1986 World Series (Swirsky also owns a bottle of the champagne that on that fateful day was on ice in anticipation of the celebration that never occurred) and the ball that famously hit outfielder Jose Canseco on the head, bouncing past his outstretched glove into the stands for a home run.

  Even more bizarre is the story of a pair of game balls from a 2012 contest between the Atlanta Braves and the hometown Cincinnati Reds. Perfectly located in a left field seat, Reds fan Caleb Lloyd caught two home run balls hit in consecutive at-bats, only three pitches apart. The first he kept himself; indeed, since he knew it was Mike Leake’s first major league homer (Leake is a pitcher), he prevailed upon Leake to autograph it after the game. The second, a homer by Cincinnati shortstop Zack Cozart, he gave to the friend who had gotten the tickets for the game and who actually worked hard to convince Lloyd to attend. The Reds made Lloyd an honorary captain for the next day’s game and, as he took out the lineup card before the game, identified him on the scoreboard as a “professional home run ball catcher.”

  But nothing was quite like the scene one day in 1957 in Philadelphia’s Connie Mack Stadium, captured more than a half century later by journalist Bob Levin in the (Toronto) Globe and Mail: “Sometimes the trivial runs transcendent, in a moment so improbable that it endures as a metaphor for the vagaries of life…. The perp was the Phillies’ Richie Ashburn, a future Hall of Famer who slashed a foul [ball] into the stands that hit a fan, one Alice Roth, smack in the face, bloodying and busting her nose. Play was halted as medics worked on her (and her eight-year-old grandson, trying to fetch the offending ball, was told by the man who’d nabbed it, ‘Go to hell, kid’), then resumed as she was laid on a stretcher. On the next pitch, Ashburn slammed another foul—cracking Roth on the knee as she was carted out. What are the odds? Ashburn visited Roth in the hospital and they became friends, forever connected by the cruel whims of the baseball gods.”

  And then there is Leonard Kriegel’s story of his youth as a Bronx boy felled by polio during World War II, a particularly poignant account of a baseball’s sacred power. While languishing upstate in a rehabilitation hospital, his legs useless, his uncle Moe—seated in the Yankee Stadium bleachers one day in 1945—engaged a group of pitchers in the first-place Detroit Tigers’ bullpen about his disabled nephew’s condition. Moe extracted a promise: If the Tigers won the pennant, they would send a ball, autographed by the entire team, to the hospital. They did, on both counts.

  Kriegel credits that gift with prompting the first stirrings of the imagination that led him to a writing life. For him, “that ball simply embodied the idea of physical grace—a grace that had been ripped from my life by the virus.”

  The ball and his relationship to it carried him through the travails of a polio-afflicted childhood to maturity in his love both for baseball and for life. Kriegel held on to his ball, treasured it even, but in time came to feel that it was feeding not only his imagination but also his illusions about the world his condition prevented him from fully joining. One day, leaning against a parked car across the street from his building, Kriegel was playing catch with a friend when the ancient ball they were using simply fell apart. Remembering his autographed baseball, he told his friend to fetch it and, then, they put it in play—and in peril.

  “One by one, the names on the ball disappeared, chalked and cut and scuffed into oblivion by granite and brick and creosote. That baseball autographed by the entire Detroit Tigers team on the day they clinched the pennant in 1945 would never again feed my illusions. For one last time, it had rescued me from a bad day”—connecting him to something greater. So it has been for many over time.

  And so it is for us. Our liturgical stretch complete, the ball, sacred symbol and reality, remains in play for us as well as the game continues.

  For Damon Runyon, one of the most celebrated scribes ever to cover a baseball beat, the postgame hangout wasn’t far away, less than ten miles from all three New York City ballparks. The name of the place was Lindy’s.

  With his days chronicling the Giants daily now behind him after World War I, for the first time in years Runyon was able to watch games just for fun. And with no story to file, if traffic was light he could make it from his box seat to his booth in the restaurant in less than half an hour.

  On any given night in the Roaring Twenties, Lindy’s hosted a dizzying mix of newspapermen, actors, and gamblers, each group staking a claim to its own section of the place, the cheesecake mecca of Manhattan. Legend holds that the famous recipe was held under lock and key, even decades after namesake Leo Lindermann had died and the delicatessen had closed its doors for good.

  Sometimes Runyon would venture across the room to hear the latest from his old pal Arnold Rothstein. To the untrained eye, Rothstein looked pretty much like the other customers—average height and build, hair carefully parted an inch or so from the center in the style of the time. He was impeccably dressed, usually in a perfectly knotted bow tie and a stylish three-piece, pin-striped suit (the kind that couldn’t be found on the racks at Wanamaker’s), the uniform of most of the men among the after-theater congregants. Rothstein simply was part of the scenery. He was there night after night—eating, drinking (always milk), cavorting, scheming, and above all taking and placing bets. Rothstein spent so much time at Lindy’s that after a while he started to call it “the office.”

  Almost everybody who entered the office had at some point heard the sensational story of how the World Series back in 1919 was fixed, with no less than eight Chicago players on the take or in the know. But few realized that the man sitting at the corner table—his back to the wall—holding court with the likes of Runyon and scores of other baseball fans, was the one who is believed to have actually done the fixing.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald based Meyer Wolfsheim, a character in his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, on Rothstein. After being introduced to him, the novel’s protagonist, Nick Carraway, reflects, “It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people.”

  Nearly a century after the scandal, baseball remains America’s faith—a civil religion. The game’s capacity to thrill, inspire, and galvanize the masses is undeniable.

  The term American civil religion was coined by sociologist Robert Bellah in the sixties. He used it to describe shared beliefs, symbols, values, and rituals, independent of—or parallel to—the explicitly religious traditions. As Bellah put it: “Although matters of personal religious belief, worship, and association are considered to be strictly private affairs, there are, at the same time, certain common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share. These have played a crucial role in the development of American institutions and still provide a religious dimension for the whole fabric of American life.”

  For the better part of two centuries, the national pastime has been an important thread in that fabric. From makeshift games on city streets to the gran
deur of the major leagues, baseball is one of the enduring symbols of Americana, so much so that a popular General Motors jingle made the claim:

  They go together in the good ole USA,

  Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.

  But if baseball is a secular institution that sometimes displays the elements of the classic religions, it is not just because it attracts committed (even fanatic) fans as religions attract ardent believers or because it builds ballparks as religions erect cathedrals. It is that baseball has the capacity to elevate and transform, that it has a power to bring people together in expanding levels of relationship: parent and child, neighbor and friend, community and city, state and the nation. On some majestic summer days, the many who assemble are one.

  Arguably the most beloved three hundred words ever spoken in a baseball park came from Lou Gehrig as the Yankee legend told a hushed, reverent stadium crowd on July 4, 1939, that he was leaving baseball to battle the condition that would kill him two years later. Scholars of rhetoric still study his simple address for its power, eloquence, and thematic unity as he spoke of the “bad break” that did not shake his conviction that he was “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” The packed stadium was church-quiet while this strong, stoic man spoke. The interruptions were not cheers but rolling rounds of applause—one lasted two full minutes. His words affected each person who heard them individually; and they stitched the crowd together in a wonderful, unified tapestry.

  In their book All Things Shining, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly wrote of the Gehrig story and how that moment and moments like it galvanize communities, uniting them in a sense that there is something beyond.

  “The sense that one is joined with one’s fellow human beings in the celebration of something great reinforces the sense that what one is celebrating really is great,” they wrote. “Moments like this take on greater meaning when they are shared with a community of like-minded folks who are experiencing the same kind of awe. Whether it is in the church or in the baseball stadium, the awesomeness of the moment is reinforced when it is felt as shared by others. When it is also shared that it is shared—when you all recognize together that you are sharing in the celebration of this great thing—then the awesomeness of the moment itself bursts forth and shines.”

  Even if baseball was not invented by Abner Doubleday in an upstate New York cow pasture in 1839 (a claim first made in 1907 but later convincingly refuted), the Cooperstown creation myth reveals how baseball reflects the American ethos: Doubleday, after all, was a major general in the Union army and a hero during the Civil War.

  “[Baseball] is to games what the Federalist Papers are to books: orderly, reasoned, judiciously balanced, incorporating segments of violence and collision in a larger plan of rationality, absolutely dependent on an interiorization of public rules,” wrote Michael Novak in The Joy of Sports. “Baseball is designed like a federal system of checks and balances.” It is no coincidence that for years the American and National League logos have been varying blends of bald eagles, stars, and stripes.

  At the root of American civil religion, Bellah explained, is the notion of American exceptionalism, not exactly the slogan shouted by politicians, but the real thing: “Behind the civil religion at every point lie biblical archetypes: Exodus, Chosen People, Promised Land, New Jerusalem, and Sacrificial Death and Rebirth. But it is also genuinely American and genuinely new. It has its own prophets and its own martyrs, its own sacred events and sacred places, its own solemn rituals and symbols. It is concerned that America be a society as perfectly in accord with the will of God as men can make it, and a light to all nations.”

  By the late 1880s, baseball’s popularity across different social classes was embedding it in the DNA of the America Bellah described. As Mark Twain said at the time, “Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive, and push, and rush, and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming 19th century!” Christopher Evans, coeditor of The Faith of 50 Million, wrote of the early game: “In the eyes of its prognosticators, the game balanced rugged manliness and athletic acumen with social acceptability.”

  At the turn of the century, immigrant communities began to notice the central place of baseball in American life, embracing the message that was stated clearly half a century later by French historian Jacques Barzun, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game.” This view of America endures. Just four years ago, a young Korean woman in my NYU class explained that she had taken the course “because the two most important things to understand about America are baseball and religion.”

  Abe Cahan, as the editor of The Jewish Daily Forward, recognized that what was quickly becoming the national game could be a vehicle for assimilation; so he began, in editorials as early as 1903, to urge his readers—largely first-generation immigrants from Europe—to allow their boys to play baseball. “Let us not so raise the children to grow up foreigners in their own birthplace,” he wrote pointedly. Indeed, for Americans baseball became a birthright; more than a few fathers have described placing gloves inside their child’s crib in infancy (and at least one of those glove-toting toddlers, Curt Schilling, grew up to be the Most Valuable Player of the World Series).

  Ethnic groups started gravitating toward stars who were of and from their community, ranging from “The Flying Dutchman” Honus Wagner (“Dutchman” as in Deutsch, since his heritage was actually German) and “Germany” Joe Schultz to “Bocci” Ernie Lombardi. Nearly a dozen big league ballplayers have been nicknamed “Irish.” But in the days before Jackie Robinson changed everything, no single ballplayer represented as much to a single segment of the population as Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg did to Jewish Americans.

  With Greenberg’s Detroit Tigers competing for their first pennant in a quarter century in 1934 and the High Holy Days fast approaching, the first baseman was forced to make a choice. Greenberg was so anguished by the decision that he sought the advice of a rabbi, who through a creative interpretation of biblical text justified—even encouraged—his playing on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. And so he did just that, hitting two home runs in a 2–1 victory over the Boston Red Sox and, in the process, helping the Tigers to extend their lead to four and a half games. They clinched the pennant twelve days later.

  Henry Ford, a notorious anti-Semite, probably gasped when he picked up the next morning’s Detroit Free Press to see bold Hebrew script staring back at him; “Happy New Year” it exclaimed in translation. A few days later, as the regular season was ending, Greenberg decided not to play on Yom Kippur, his religion’s day of repentance and most solemn time of the year, and instead went to synagogue to pray. He received a standing ovation the moment he walked into the sanctuary. Greenberg’s decision foreshadowed a nearly identical one three decades later, when Dodgers ace pitcher Sandy Koufax sat out the first game of the World Series against the Minnesota Twins on Yom Kippur, giving a new generation of Jewish baseball fans another hero.

  An ode to Greenberg appeared in the newspaper on Yom Kippur, written by Edgar A. Guest, who would later become Michigan’s first—and to date only—poet laureate. It ended with a flourish:

  We shall miss him on the infield and shall miss him at the bat,

  But he’s true to his religion—and I honour him for that!

  While the Tigers were winning the ’34 pennant, philosopher John Dewey was giving a series of lectures at Yale, which later gained widespread distribution in published form as A Common Faith. In them, he justified faith as something dynamic and evolving in an age of social and scientific progress, describing the essence of religious experience as too full of awe to be captured in doctrine. “Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying, and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure,” Dewey concluded. “Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to
sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind.”

  The traditions and elements of baseball fit nicely with Dewey’s idea. From its huge fan population to its collection of rituals to its tall tales and homespun charm, the game’s lore is carefully passed down and then built upon, from one generation to the next. And while pockets of fans may choose to root solely for one of their own, the joys of experiencing baseball often extend much farther, its common faith accessible to anyone who simply revels in the beauty and gifts of the game.

  Baseball had become so ingrained in the national consciousness by World War II that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote what became known in baseball circles as the “Green Light Letter” to Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis less than six weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor: “I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going…. Here is another way of looking at it—if 300 teams use 5,000 or 6,000 players, these players are a definite recreational asset to at least 20,000,000 of the fellow citizens—and that in my judgment is thoroughly worthwhile.”

  Shortly after Roosevelt wrote his letter, the St. Louis Cardinals started sending a baseball cap to pilots of the US Marines’ famous Black Sheep Squadron for every Japanese aircraft they shot down. A photograph of twenty aviators wearing Cards caps continues to hang today in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, just steps from the Capitol. And baseball sent more than caps. Many ballplayers, including stars like Greenberg, Boston’s Ted Williams, and Cleveland’s Bob Feller answered the call to duty (much as Christy Mathewson and others did during World War I). The national pastime became intertwined with national service.