The Church of Baseball
I have been at UMass Amherst this past week where I have been working a conference, so I have not had time to write a new essay.
However, I do have the text for a talk that I recently gave at Duke Divinity School, as part of a course that I am co-teaching with Professor Kate Bowler. The subject of the course is on the persistence of mental magic and self-help ideology in American religion, and I chose to focus my part of the lecture on the way that baseball can incarnate a kind of religious sensibility, but also that is has something to teach those of us who are Christians too.
It was good timing, for I'm a Dodger fan and they just won the world series in rather dramatic fashion--including a walk-off grand slam in game 1 (my apologies to those of you who might be Yankees fans).
The title of the talk, "The Church of Baseball," I took from the movie Bull Durham.
American Pastime
“The future ain't what it used to be.”
So said Yogi Berra, Hall of Fame catcher for the New York Yankees.
While baseball was his great talent, Berra is remembered as a distinctly American kind of sage. In fact, he was two stereotypes rolled into one: a worldly, midwestern wise-man with only a middle school education, while at the same time a pugnacious New York Italian, the son of immigrants from the Old Country.
Berra’s quips are both funny and confounding—a mix between insight and malapropism. Think of some of his more famous lines:
“It gets late early out there.”
Or, “It’s deja vu all over again.”
Or, perhaps most well known, “It ain’t over ‘till it’s over.”
His line about the future, however, taps into a deeply felt American sensibility. Let’s think about it for a second. The future ain’t what it used to be. What does that mean?
A sense of decline has always been a part of American psychology. Charles Dickens noted this in the 19th century. As he wrote in Martin Chuzzlewit, “If [America’s] individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.”
This sense is evident now as it was then. Terminal, perpetual, inevitable decline. Things feel—and often are—bad. Recall what Professor Bowler said earlier today: the average American has less than 8 thousand in savings. Less than ten thousand in retirement. Total student debt has reached beyond 1.7 trillion dollars. Inflation skyrocketed in 2022.
As Yogi Berra said, “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”
In this age of precarity, uncertainty, and instability (which is to say, in this age which is like all other ages), it would be surprising if religion disappeared. After all, there is a deep human need for spiritual succor in times of crisis. And it is always a time of crisis.
Religion And Spirituality
What’s different, right now, seems to be the kind of religion that Americans are turning to. There is no third great awakening. No vast revival (not yet, anyway). Instead, there is a focus on what is variously called spirituality, metaphysics, New Age, and more. Religious practice seems to have been channeled into other avenues: fandoms and entertainment mythologies (Star Wars? Marvel?), politics (shudder), or—yes—sports.
Football is of course the most popular American sport right now. But baseball still has its special place as the “American pastime.” It is an odd and eccentric game—where the defense has the ball, where the field is irregularly shaped, where failure 70% of the time is considered a staggering success worthy of immortality.
It is also evidence of the persistence of religious consciousness.
It has its mythology—the genesis narrative when the game was invented by Civil War hero Abner Doubleday.
It has its romantic evangelist in Walt Whitman, for whom baseball, America, and democracy were fused as the song of the Republic. “Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs,” wrote Whitman. “Let us leave our close rooms…. The game of ball is glorious.”
It has its legendary heroes and prophets.
Think of Babe Ruth—a man of mysterious birth and uncertain age, abandoned by his father at an orphanage—calling his shot in the 1932 world series. He sees the future, he knows he’ll hit a home run, he raises his finger to point over the outfield fence—and the prophecy is fulfilled.
Think of Jackie Robinson, the Dodgers’ second baseman who broke the color barrier. Why Robinson? Well, partly because he was Methodist. The team’s General Manager, Branch Rickey (who was so Methodist his first name was Wesley), thought Robinson the candidate because of his faith. “He’s a Methodist,” said Rickey in the movie 42, “I’m a Methodist. God’s a Methodist.” And in faith Robinson endured unimaginable abuse and carried a cross for the nation’s sins, only to come out the other side with a Rookie of the Year, MVP, and World Series title.
Think of Lou Gehrig, the Iron Horse who never missed a game, who stood on the field of his early retirement as ALS was ruining his body, and said, “For the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
Think of Sandy Koufax, the southpaw pitcher who refused to play the first two games of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur. Judaism gets a nod here too. Recall in The Big Lebowski when John Goodman’s character describes the religion as “3,000 years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax.”
We can find religion deep within the marrow of baseball—and, as a result, in the marrow of America.
Theology and “Metaphysics”
But it’s not just institutional religion. The other kind of American spirituality, the kind we’ve been discussing today, also manifests (pun intended) itself in and through baseball. It is full of mind power, metaphysics, and mental magic. A game in which most of the players stand around waiting for action, in which the central conflict is a chess match between pitcher and batter, is a game in which the mind must predominate.
Hence Yogi Berra’s line, “Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.”
Maybe you’ve seen the movie Bull Durham. It should be required viewing for Duke students, since it’s set here.
"I believe in the Church of Baseball,” says Susan Sarandon in the beginning of the film. “I've tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones. I've worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball.”
(Incidentally–it was 108 years between the Chicago Cubs’ world series victories in 1908 and 2016–coincidence?)
Sarandon continues: “When I heard that I gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn't work out between us. The Lord laid too much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology… I've tried 'em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul is the Church of Baseball."
No guilt, no theology—all pragmatism and thought-power. That’s baseball. That’s American religion.
The centrality of the mind, the ability to think oneself to success, the power of the mind to make reality and bring it into existence—to manifest it, the absolute importance of positive thinking—this is something shared in sports and in contemporary American spirituality. It is contemporary American spirituality.
Take the following self-help advice from Mets’ outfielder Mookie Wilson. “When I’m in a slump, I comfort myself by saying that if I believe in dinosaurs, then somewhere, they must be believing in me. And if they believe in me, then I can believe in me. Then I bust out.”Now, this quote is actually too good to be true. It’s a parody from the Village Voice that often gets mistaken for a real quote. But, is it really that far off from the kind of thing one might get in a mind-focused self-help book? Is it really so strange to think dinosaurs might believe in you—if it works?
When you’re struggling with your homework…
When you’re drowning in debt…
When you are waiting for that special someone to text you…
Somewhere, dinosaurs believe in you. So, you can believe in you.
You just have to, as the Captain says in Cool Hand Luke, “get your mind right.”
Perfection and Failure
We’ve talked a bit about the dark side of this mindset. If success is contingent upon one’s mind, on positive thinking, on willing good things into being—then how do you explain failure?
It’s your fault—that’s how.
When you peruse the offerings of figures like Norman Vincent Peale, as you did today, you see this echo quite often. You have the power already, you have everything you need. If you are not healthy, wealthy, and wise—then it’s because you have not invited those things into your life. Russell Conwell said we have a divine duty to get rich. Joel Osteen says that you can make every day a Friday with the right attitude. And if you don’t, well, you don’t have anyone to blame but yourself.
But maybe baseball can help here.
Sure, it can form a substitute religion. And it might show how Americans are actually still very religious despite declining church attendance. It also contains elements of metaphysical woo that are seemingly at odds with Christian spirituality.
But I think there is a deeper truth to be gleaned out of it. The game is, in the end, about failure. Futility. The inevitability of aging and decline. It is a stark counterpoint to the quest for endless perfection.
Consider the way the game works and how bleak its outcomes really are. You start at home. You are by yourself. The whole field—the entire universe—is against you. The other team, the defense, they’re all just standing there, waiting for you to mess up. If, against all odds, you swing and manage to connect your bat with a fastball (arguably the hardest thing to do in all team sports), they’re ready to spring into action and get you out.
Even the judges seem to be against you. It is a time-honored tradition to doubt the wisdom of the umpires. It’s not for nothing that, in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, when the knights learn how to play baseball, the first thing they try to do is literally hang the umpire.
If you can manage to survive all this and get on base, you are a real wonder. The absolute best players—the ones with plaques in Cooperstown and who kids everywhere aspire to be—they will do this, at most, 3 out of 10 times. (Or 4 out of 10 if you’re Ted Williams and a god).
Perfection is impossible. Moreover, it isn’t desirable. For what would the game be like with perfection? Where would we get the drama? The intrigue? The passion? The joy? The heartbreak? The euphoria? There would be none.
“[Baseball] breaks your heart,” wrote Bart Giamatti, who had a unique career as both Yale English Professor and Commissioner of Major League Baseball. “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 all alone.”
Baseball may have perfect games, but it is a game that denies perfection.
Yogi Berra understood this. "If the world were perfect,” he once said, “it wouldn't be."
We have to keep this in mind in our era of endless self-promotion, of the self-as-brand, of Instagram “reality” and social media presence. Everyone’s having a great time. Everyone’s traveling. Everyone’s fulfilling their dreams. Perfection is possible—you just have to think your way there.
“If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.”
Resurrection and Hope
There is something deeply Christian in this. The story of humanity that the faith tells is one of our fallibility and brokenness. There was always the option for us to make the wrong choice, to listen to the serpent, to take and eat of the fruit. This contingency means that the Fall was always a possibility.
But this fall is not one we have to face alone. The contingency that made decline and collapse and pain and suffering possible—it’s the same thing that makes love and hope and beauty possible. It is the reason the world is not full of perfect automatons but instead flesh and blood humans with foibles and faults and yet also nobility and grandeur.
The fall isn’t the end of the story, it’s only the beginning. Spring—resurrection—will come again. This is the way that creation is made, the way love is realized, the only way—perhaps—that it could exist.
“If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.”
So we continue to struggle and toil. The game is hard. Faith is hard. Life is hard. It’s tempting to try to control reality with a flight to positive thinking, and it’s equally tempting to throw up our hands at the impossibility of it all. But if there’s one thing that both baseball and Christianity teach us, it’s that the future is not set in stone, that repentance, redemption, and resurrection are all realities of Christian life.
Perhaps, if Yogi Berra were a disciple on that dark Saturday between Good Friday and Easter, he might have had some wise counsel for the others; something that isn’t positive thinking or mental magic, but a hard-won mindset of hope against hopelessness.
“It ain’t over till it’s over.”