NYU President John Sexton has written a book Baseball as a Road to God, based on a course he gives with the same title. He gave an NPR interview about his book on the Leonard Lopate Show.
To listen to it, visit
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/2013/mar/13/nyu-president-baseball-road-god/
Click on the (lower) "Listen", just above the photo of Busch Stadium.
Three things stood out for me:
1. You're born into a team, like a religion: "We're bequeathed our team." This was my experience, although in an unusual way. When I was 4 or going on 4, my oldest brother had me point at a list of teams in a newspaper, and, seeing which team I'd pointed at, declared that I was a Cincinnati Redlegs fan. And that was that. This is one of my earliest memories, I wasn't sure that it really happened until he confirmed it a few years ago.
Sexton adds that this early choice of a team is more important than the early choice of a religion, because the choice of a team is more likely to stick. Certainly true in my case. On a related note, he says: "It gets you when you're young, in which case it sticks, or not at all."
2. His most interesting statement, about what Americans, in particular the citizens of Brooklyn, learned in 1958:
"If the Dodgers could be taken from Brooklyn, there's no institution we can trust."
Historians see the New York Giants leaving for San Francisco and the Brooklyn Dodgers leaving for Los Angeles - both in 1958 - as an indicator of a turning point in 20th century US history.
3. Toward the end they mention Bart Giamatti, whom I knew at Yale before he became the President of Yale. Later he became the Commissioner of Baseball. He has written beautiful essays on the spiritual side of baseball, which were collected into a book Green Fields of the Mind, which is required reading for the course.
I have a Bart Giamatti story which captures (1) above, I'll save it for a live telling.
His only mention of God is in the context of prayer. He refers to a God within and unnamed Asian religions. About prayer: "Prayer changes the one who prays."
One for you Ted: He refers to an article that uses phenomenology to interpret the ritual of a baseball game as based on the ritual of a Mass.
Refers to John Updike's poem: Tao in the Yankee Stadium Bleachers.
Religious themes:
Fatih and doubt.
Faith: Tug McGraw's "You gotta believe" seemed to carry the underdog 1973 Mets to a World Series.
Doubt: "Baseball incarnates doubt."
Curses & Blessings:
blessing - a release from accursedness
Brooklyn Dodger fans responded to a curse with hope - "Wait Till Next Year", which finally arrived in 1955.
Cubs fans, who are still waiting, respond with humor "The Cubs just had an off century."
(Based on the cliche "The team just had an off day.")
Religions advise against hubris. So does baseball.
"In baseball, a player better have humility, or he will fail."
The sacred and the profane: the baseball - the sacred rock; the baseball stadium - the sacred shrine.
Things he doesn't mention:
In Bull Durham, Susan Sarandon played a woman who was very into 3 things: religion, baseball, and sex. She observed that the number of beads in a rosary is the same as the number of stitches in a baseball.
The Holy Trinity and baseball as the game of threes. Three strikes to an out, three outs to an inning, three innings for each of the three (beginning, middle, and end) parts of a game.
Also, quite remarkably, on average over time, a batter safely reaches base one in three times at bat, and a team scores a run (or more) in one of three innings.
This is the source of the statement "Failure is the norm" in baseball.
