Those who know me well—and probably even some who don’t—are aware that baseball is a big part of my life. I was a huge fan of the game growing up, and many of my favorite childhood memories involve America’s National Pastime, ranging from movies that I can recite nearly word-for-word (e.g., The Natural, Major League) to sports moments that I’ll never forget (e.g., Kirk Gibson’s improbable home run in the 1988 World Series, Kirby Puckett’s run-saving catch in the 1991 World Series). For a kid who was thrown into a number of difficult circumstances at a young age, baseball was a consistent source of happiness—a game that managed to combine a panoply of engaging personalities with the placidity of mathematics.
I was a pretty good player too—or at least I thought so at the time. Truth is, I loved baseball more than I loved working at it. In middle school, I would ride my Schwinn 10 Speed from my childhood home in the Edgewood neighborhood of Homewood, Alabama, then traverse the ever-perilous Green Springs Highway, pass under the rumbling I-65 flyover, ditch my bike behind a garden shed, and finally jump over a subdivision fence to West Homewood Park—the location of the Homewood city baseball complex. I could spend half a day out there, even in the summer heat, hitting bucket after bucket of baseballs.
And yet, the tedious effort that separates great players from good players—the long hours in the weight room, not to mention daily mobility work and speed training—that part I took for granted. I finished high school a skinny 6’2” 175 pound first baseman who, on the one hand, played competitive American Legion ball in the summer and almost set the school record for batting average my senior year but, on the other hand, didn’t possess what scouts call “pull side juice” or the raw skillset to switch to a middle infield position. So, even though I eventually collected some high-school awards and a few junior-college offers/small-college looks, I gave up baseball after high school. I distinctly remember crying after our high school’s end-of-season banquet. I felt like I had lost a friend.
For the next several years, I mostly put baseball out of my mind. I’d always played basketball too, and now I started making pick-up basketball a priority. In undergraduate school, if I wasn’t studying, I could be found at the legendarily combative Bell Gym playing hoops. Various graduate school stints followed, and I played a lot of pick-up/men’s league basketball wherever I went—the Washington, D.C. area, Chicago, Philadelphia, even Oxford. It was my main sports outlet. I managed to keep up with baseball through fantasy leagues and periodic visits to MLB stadiums, but the game was no longer a passion. If anything, it was more like a memory—akin to an old flame—of something that I once loved but no longer had a connection to. To dredge it up would hurt too badly. Better to leave it alone.
Then I became a father, and baseball thrust itself back into my life. First, there was my oldest son, who showed a knack for the game at a young age. Alas, our move to Philadelphia derailed his interest in the sport. He was just nine years old at the time—an impressionable age—and almost all of his new friends played either basketball or lacrosse. He soon gave up baseball to play basketball, and eventually he would play boys volleyball as well. Still, baseball was not done with me yet: my two younger sons were already gravitating towards the game. I got them involved as early as possible, hoping that they would make friends in the sport. That turned out to be a good decision. They progressed through the usual ranks—tee ball, “coach pitch,” “kid pitch,” little league, and, now, travel and high school ball. The older of the two is now in 11th grade; the younger is in 9th grade—and they are both running me ragged with baseball responsibilities.
Needless to say, a practical corollary of this development is that I watch a lot of baseball. I’ve observed games/showcases in just about every state east of the Mississippi River: Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia (more times than I can count), Florida (ditto), Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. It’s an interesting subculture to say the least, and I have more than a few opinions about the pros and cons of what I like to call “The Baseball-Industrial Complex.” But one constant, no matter the state or the event, is parental angst. While players are on the field, ostensibly pursuing their dreams, parents are on the sidelines—worrying about their child’s performance, worrying about how much work they’re missing, worrying about how much it all costs.
But profound questions underlie these mundane concerns. To cite but one example: I was recently at a game where a parent commented (joked?) that his son was having a bad game because he (the parent) wasn’t standing in the right place. I would love to chuckle at such a sentiment, but I’ve had similar feelings myself. Some games, even some weeks, everything seems to go right. But the flip-side can also be true. There are stretches where everything seems to go wrong—an umpire blows a call (or ten), a ball is hammered right at the opposing player, a rain shower begins just as one takes the mound. How to understand such occurrences? Where do they come from? And for what reason? Is it possible that some players—some people—are simply ill-starred? Coaches often say “control what you can control,” and that is good advice. But it also raises a disquieting specter: who is controlling what one can’t control?
Insofar as baseball is a game that “permits” a number of variables (weather, field dimensions, even the quality of the baseballs themselves), and insofar as baseball fails to reward raw size or strength in the manner of basketball or football, it is not hard to understand why baseball players are notoriously superstitious. To be sure, this is an aspect of the game that has been emphasized in various movies. In the 1988 sports “dramedy” Bull Durham, veteran minor league catcher “Crash” Davis (Kevin Costner) explains to young pitching phenom Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) that baseball success has as much to do with luck as with talent:
Yet, while Crash makes this point with almost tragic pathos, the 1989 sports comedy Major League takes a more lighthearted approach. Outfielder Pedro Cerrano (Dennis Haysbert) has an 80-grade power hitting tool, yet suffers from a major liability: he can’t hit curveballs. So persistent is this problem that Cerrano seeks divine intervention. A practitioner of a form of Vodou, Cerrano has dedicated a shrine in his locker to an lwa known as “Jobu.” Cerrano believes that, if he plies Jobu with cigars and rum, the spirit will eventually “take fear” from his bats:
Of course, not everyone shares the opinions of Crash and Cerrano. Though maturing, Nuke fails to grasp that baseball careers hinge on a seemingly infinitesimal number of minor moments, not just on raw ability. The latter is a necessary, but not sufficient, explanation for why some players make it to “The Show” and others don’t. Cerrano’s antagonist, on the other hand, is veteran pitcher Eddie Harris (Chelcie Ross), who misunderstands the nature of the outfielder’s problem. As an evangelical Christian, Harris assumes that Cerrano is seeking personal salvation. Yet, when Cerrano states that Jesus Christ is “no help with curveball,” Harris historicizes the matter: “You tryin’ to say Jesus Christ can’t hit a curveball?” This may be the funniest line in the history of baseball movies, but Harris still hasn’t addressed Cerrano’s question. It has nothing to do with Jesus’ hitting prowess (or lack thereof). At issue is how Cerrano should cope with his own challenges. If practice doesn’t help, how else is he supposed to remedy this apparent “curse”?
Incidentally, Crash and Cerrano lay out good cases for superstition. The game is random, fickle. Why not do something to gain a feeling of control? This is why Steven Streeter has argued that superstitious rituals and traditions actually improve on-field performance. If a player believes that a spirit such as Jobu helps him, he will be more confident, relaxed, and successful. “Attention to baseball superstition,” Streeter argues, “brings awareness and precise concentration, and these qualities produce quantifiable results.”
Still, even if it’s possible that superstitions and/or rituals can improve a player’s mental wellbeing, it would seem that they have no real bearing on the outcomes of games. A focused and relaxed player may indeed perform better, but excellent performance does not guarantee excellent results. After all, while a hitter may possess a great eye, impeccable timing, and a pure swing, he could nevertheless smash the ball right into the glove a fielder. Similarly, if a Philadelphia Phillies fan were to wear the same Chase Utley jersey to every home game, no one would infer that this routine influences the players on the field. The fan may enjoy this custom—it may even produce a certain confidence—but to suggest that the fan’s sense of familiarity and assurance can be telepathically transferred to players would be absurd. The same is true of other superstitions, including, alas, a mother standing in the same place during her son’s at-bats. No matter how such behaviors make one feel, the bottom line is that the causal factors at work in any one sequence of a baseball game outstrip facile explanation. The sport, like life itself, is a mystery. In the face of such uncertainty, one is seemingly left with the world-weary wisdom of Bob Dylan: “All you can do is do what you must.”
Yet, if baseball is a mystery, then are we to also conclude that it is little more than play of chaotic forces? The “swinging bunt,” the “Texas Leaguer,” the “Baltimore Chop”: such hits educe groans from the defensive side and shrugs from the offensive side. They act in accordance with the laws of physics but only in a cold, impersonal way. They are ostensible violations of any higher moral order, and yet they persist game after game, season after season:
The feelings are intensified, of course, when one has a personal stake in the action. Phillies fans will care little if an Atlanta Braves player experiences a run of bad luck, but it will be different if it involves one of their own. Needless to say, the family and friends of players will be even more tormented (or relieved) by such vicissitudes. A balanced, stoical attitude may provide some comfort—“control what you can control”—but it only defers the deeper questions.
Over the years, I’ve often wondered to what extent the Christian doctrine of providence can shed metaphysical light on this problem, if only to avoid lapsing into a blunt spirituality of resignation. Here I will survey the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) as a case in point. Thomas treats God’s providence in the First Part (Prima Pars) of the Summa, which begins with a lengthy analysis of God’s nature. For Thomas, the topic of divine providence entails a consideration of God’s will. Insofar as God possesses intellect, he must also possess will. In knowing what is good, God therefore wills the good as an expression of his own perfect goodness (ST I, Q 19, A 1). This congruity between intellect, will, and goodness is immutable, since God himself is immutable.
But herein lies an apparent stumbling block. If God only wills the good, then why do bad or absurd things happen? Why, in other words, does a Texas Leaguer drop into shallow right field, costing your team a win in the process? The answer, according to Thomas, is that God’s goodness wills into existence some things that can be otherwise:
Since then the divine will is perfectly efficacious, it follows not only that things are done, which God wills to be done, but also that they are done in the way that He wills. Now God wills some things to be done necessarily, some contingently, to the right ordering of things, for the building up of the universe. Therefore to some effects He has attached necessary causes, that cannot fail; but to others defectible and contingent causes, from which arise contingent effects (ST I, Q 19, A 8).
Thus Thomas concludes that, among other things, God wills Texas Leaguers. Indeed, to put it in broader terms, we might say that God wills that we do not live in a world of sheer inevitability. Sure, Phillies fans might wish that the Fightins would go 162-0 every season, and fathers might wish that their sons would get a hit in every at-bat, but baseball belongs to a class of contingent, non-necessary goods. If baseball were to become inevitable, it would cease to exist. So bearing with contingency is a part of the game and, in turn, a part of acquiescing to God’s will.
This argument may sound agreeable in the abstract, but it can also be painful, even offensive. It is one thing to accept a few bad breaks over the course of a long season—hard as that can be!—but it’s something else to endure injustice in the game. On a lower level, such injustice may involve a lucky hit or a bad call, but, on a higher level, it would have to do with corrupt umpires, career-ending injuries, or the success of vicious players. Are we to believe that these sorts of contingencies are actually good? This question leads into Thomas’ treatment of God’s providence per se. First, Thomas points out that God cannot will evil as such, insofar as God is unchangeably good. And yet, it also has to be said that God permits evil to happen, precisely because he wills the good of contingency. Hence, if an umpire were to choose to unjustly favor one team over another, God not only permits this to happen but, in fact, views the umpire’s freedom as a greater good, however distorted or misused. This is a bitter pill, to be sure, but Thomas asks fans people to trust in God’s providence. He starts by citing a passage from the deuterocanonical Book of Wisdom:
Someone preparing to embark on a voyage through turbulent waves
invokes a piece of wood more frail than the ship that carries him.
It was desire for profit that devised that vessel,
and Wisdom was the shipwright that built it.
However, O Father, your providence guides it,
since you have provided it with a pathway through the sea
and with a safe passage through the waves. (Wis 14:1-3)
With this in mind, Thomas explains that providence is God’s eternal plan to which all creatures are subject, “not only in general, but even in their own individual selves” (ST I, Q 22, A 2). Thus the Texas Leaguer and the umpire’s malfeasance are, as it were, blips on the radar, subordinate to God’s ultimate plan for created beings. Indeed, as the first efficient cause of all things, even contingent events can be traced back to God’s prior willing of contingency. Nothing, then, falls outside of the scope of God’s providence, which ever bends towards “the ‘reason of order’” (ST I, Q 22, A 1), slowly but surely producing justice from injustice, mercy from pain.
It is not easy being a baseball fan, much less a baseball player. The season is long and grueling—a “grind,” as they say. Moreover, as noted at the outset, the game itself invites more contingency than other major sports. To love this sport is to subject oneself to a countless number of chance events and purposeful transgressions. And yet, if we could sit in the bleachers with Thomas, perhaps enjoying a few cold beers to boot, I suspect that he would say that baseball is good practice—an exercise in learning how to see God’s providence at work in the world. It can even convert the tears of a former high school player into the hard-won joys of a “baseball dad.”