The Peripatetic Preacher Baseball

One of the more distressing things about the COVID-19 pandemic is the loss of crowd-driven sporting events. I know that sounds like the pathetic whine of a privileged soul, and I agree that it is. There are far more distressing things like: tragic and mounting sickness and deaths, monumental job loss, family disruptions of all sorts, deep loneliness and heart-breaking separations. But there remains, among those of us who set our calendars by the seasons of sports, a sad sense of disruption, a sort of lurking agitation that has us longing for the old dependable cycles of life we have long known and trusted. I know for many of you that may be college football, the fall spectacle that brings with it those Saturday afternoon memories of 20-year old madness, painted faces, shouting until hoarse, excess beer. Or some of you are anxious for the NFL to begin, with its Thursday night, Sunday all day, Monday night craziness, filling the TV screen with long runs, bone-shattering hits, and screaming insane fans. The NBA apparently hopes to restart its season in the Florida Walt Disney bubble of ESPN-land, though the virus may still have its say about that. The golf tour has begun, without fans, as has NASCAR without Confederate flags, at least on the cars. WNBA? Maybe.

And then there is baseball, my beloved baseball, a sport that has been a fixed part of me for almost 70 years. The advent of Spring Training in late February, with the report of pitchers and catchers, signaling the beginning of the long run toward the October World Series and a preceding spring and summer filled with great catches, magnificent pitching performances, home runs aplenty, and the inevitable demise of my favorite team despite the grand hopes of March. For me, there is nothing like baseball. I know all too well that it used to be called “America’s Pastime,” but now it has fallen behind both the NFL and the NBA in every conceivable category of sports’ fandom. I can only agree that baseball has failed to retain the generational connections that it once had, that sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters are not wedded to the seasonal cycles that made baseball the warp and woof of sports in the USA. The fact that baseball is no longer the quintessential sport of the US says as much about the US as it does about baseball.

Baseball is played by men who are in stature very much like me. Two of the greatest stars in the game’s history were no bigger than I am, Willie Mays (in my judgment, and the judgment of many others, the game’s greatest star) and Hank Aaron, the actual Home Run champion, despite Barry Bonds steroid-fueled exploits. Both Mays and Aaron are about 5’11” tall and weighed in their playing days about 170 pounds. Of course, their athletic gifts far outstripped my very limited ones, but they were average- sized men with fabulously outsized talents. I played some baseball growing up, spending most of my time as a mediocre catcher, but when I listened to and watched Willie Mays, I heard and saw a person with whom I could identify, one if I ever met I could look straight in the eye.

This is hardly the case with those who play football and basketball. Those who play these games are supermen, outsized giants of whom I can only stand in awe. My 5’10” and 190 pounds ruled me out of both sports from the start, though I played a smattering of both as a kid. 300-pound linemen, 6’5” quarterbacks, muscled workout fanatics all, make football only a spectator sport for us average types. 6’7” basketball point guards, flanked by 6’10” forwards and 7’ centers make basketball literally out of reach for the fan, rendering us spectators only, gapers at the prowess of giants in the earth. It is for me telling that the NFL and the NBA have become the go to games of 21stcentury America. We have become a nation of watchers, far more than a nation of doers. We would far rather watch our chosen behemoths match their skills than employing our own skills to play one game or the other. Is this one key to rising obesity, increased diabetes, vast intakes of junk and snack food in the land? I plead guilty myself in this regard; I weigh too much and exercise too little, much preferring my favorite gladiators to do all that for me.

When baseball ruled the land, we might all play the game as well as watch it, because it was playable for us. We could get a glove and play catch with Dad or Mom or sister or brother before and after watching those who could perform the demands of the sport on a far higher level than we. However, that did not in any way deter the game of catch, because we could in fact catch and throw the sphere still, knowing we had mastered two of the games important skills.

Many Americans now think that baseball is too slow for their tastes. It has no giants butting heads and crushing bodies, no towering figures rising high to stuff the ball violently threw the rim. What baseball does have is a timelessness, no clock telling us to hurry up, no timekeeper to warn us we better get the ball across the line before the whistle blows. Baseball also offers time between the actions of the game to talk about the game, to compare this catch and that throw, to wonder at that homerun that reminds us of another we once saw or heard of, to compare a catch made with a catch we recall. And the dimensions of the playing field are just right: 90’ between bases, 60’6” from pitching rubber to home plate, about 320’ down the two lines in left and right field, and some 400’ to dead center. There really is nothing quite like one’s first glimpse of a beautifully manicured baseball field as one enters from anyone of many possible locations. It is a place of summer dreams, of triumphs and tragedies, of hot dogs and popcorn and 7thinning stretches to the accompaniment of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

Now, in 2020, we face a year with no baseball at all. Yes, billionaire owners are struggling with millionaire players and agents over how many games can be played and how and where they might be played in the midst of a pandemic that has failed to loosen its deadly grip. It is hardly the first time that owners and players have threatened the game. At the turn of the 20th century, owners balked at paying players too much money ($2000 was thought to be outlandish!) and later in the century, the core of an entire team was bribed to throw a World Series in order to earn a few extra dollars. Baseball has long been plagued by greed and cheating of many sorts. I frankly hope that no games are played this year, and that in 2021 we can start the glorious cycle again, essentially free of the virus, and move through the spring and summer with a full complement of games, a rich and exciting playoff, and a nail-biting World Series.

You, of course, know that baseball is mentioned in the very first sentence of the Bible, where it announces clearly “In the Big Inning, God created skies and earth.” Indeed! God did act in the big inning, the start of all things, the promise of an equitable game of life, available to all equally and fairly, played in a world sustained and made livable by the God who surely must love baseball. The crack of the bat, the thud of ball in leather glove, the pounding of the spikes on dirt, the loud call of the umpire, all these are the sounds of the game I love. Those of you who find it too slow do not know the game, cannot love the game, have not been captured by its memories, its lore, its idiosyncrasies its wonders. I really am sorry for you, and I give you over to the punishments of football and the acrobatics of basketball. For me, there is nothing like baseball, and I long for its simplicity, its craziness, its sheer fun, reminding me one more time that I too caught and threw the ball, that I too hit it and ran toward it to catch it, that I too romped in the sunshine, glove on hand, playing a game I could play. I think we need baseball; I know I do. It really is our game, a game played by humans like us, from Japan to Korea to Puerto Rico to the Dominican Republic to Venezuela, a game of hit, run, throw, and catch, where we try to avoid other players, not destroy them, where the defense has the ball, where running without the ball is the point, where size and height and strength are not the determining factor of winning or losing, where little people can still excel. This, to me, is the essence of what it means to be human, where all can play. It also happens to be a summary of the gospel of God where all are included. See? I told you God must love baseball!

(Images from Wikimedia Commons)