SERMONS 

Fathers and Baseball: Where Memory Gathers

Perhaps you think it’s a little odd for me to take baseball as my topic on Father’s Day. I resist Father’s day and Mother’s day in part because of all the tempting stereotypes. This time, I decided to just give in to one of them. Happily I’m rebelling a bit against the stereotype, though, being a woman and all. As some of you know I’ve loved baseball for sometime. I loved it even before coach-pitch. Before I got to watch my husband and my son play catch, and bond in new and wonderful ways. Before my son starting asking for the paper every morning so he could check the scores. Now there is no hope for me! Now I love baseball in a way that makes it possible for me to believe I can preach a sermon about it…

I’m guessing you didn’t know that a Unitarian figures prominently in our little theme this morning! A prominent Unitarian no less. That’s right. It was none other than William Howard Taft, President William Howard Taft (in case you’d forgotten), who was a Unitarian, who instituted the tradition of the presidential first pitch. It was April 14, 1910 at a game between the Washington Senators and the Philadelphia Athletics. (I, by the way, have actually seen the Washington Senators play…before they became the Texas Rangers.) Anyway, Taft was there at that game and when the umpire handed him the ball and suggested he throw it over home plate he went along. As has every president since…except, sadly, Jimmy Carter.

Taft may have been the first President to throw out the first pitch—but I dare say I was the first newly called Unitarian Universalist minister to have the honor. It was August 1997. A muggy night at Greer Stadium. The Sounds were playing…some other team. My son was two and a half years old at the time—he didn’t understand the significance of what we were doing—I had to convince him to go down to the field with me! It gave me some comfort, though, to have him in my arms as I joined the cadre of eleven and twelve year olds who shared the honor of first “pitches.” (I don’t always tell that part. Especially not to colleagues who also love baseball and are very jealous of your generous tradition of going to a game with me every summer!)

Some say President Taft was responsible for another great baseball tradition. At that very game, in fact, the legend has it that fans took advantage, for the first time, of the seventh inning stretch. The story goes that Taft, who was a large man, was, by the seventh inning, quite exhausted from his little bench seat and needed to take a break to stretch his legs. Seeing the President stand, others followed suit to show their respect. They stood, apparently waiting for him to take his leave. He did walk awhile but returned to his seat after a few minutes. When he returned, the fans took their seats as well.

I like the other legend I found for the origin of the seventh inning stretch better. It’s got a religious connection! Brother Jasper was the coach of the first baseball team at Manhattan College in the late 1800’s. He was also the Prefect of Discipline at the college and so had the additional responsibility of keeping an eye on the behavior of the fans during the home games. At a particularly hot and muggy game Brother Jasper could see the young fans were getting restless. He called a time out and invited everyone to stand up and just take a break. It worked very well and so he made it a regular feature of Manhattan College’s home games, including an exhibition with the New York Giants, who took the tradition to the Majors. (There is actually evidence of seventh inning stretches before either of these stories happened. But what is baseball if not legend!)

Okay, I know, some of you came this morning with at least slim hopes of leaving with something more than the legends of baseball. Something spiritually challenging, even? It’s a reasonable hope, even in the summer. And with baseball as our theme—how could we go wrong? In a brief search on the web I found several religious communities offering services on the theme of baseball and one orthodox Jewish congregation in Norfolk, Virginia that was offering a series of adult education classes on baseball and spirituality.

There are several ways we could go with this. If I were preaching this at a Presbyterian church, I might be inclined to preach about the evils of believing in free agency. Or if I were wanting to inspire confidence in the myth of progress and promote an unforgiving evolutionary process, I might preach about the evils of the designated hitter. If I were not enjoying the season quite so much, I might preach about the money and the greed.

Another approach would be to focus on the spiritual teachings of Yogi Berra. Seriously. “You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going because you might not get there.” In his own startling way, the man made a lot of sense. My personal favorite: “If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.” That, my friends, is profound spiritual teaching. That works for baseball and for life, of course. And oddly enough, it can lead us to hope, which is, afterall, what baseball is all about.

Burton Carley reminds us of the Hope that is inherent in Opening Day. But remember, it is hope in the context of overwhelming failure. The only kind of hope that stands up in the real world. Do you realize that failing at only seven out of ten at bats makes you a huge success in major-league baseball, even a hero?!?

In his wonderful book about baseball (based on the PBS series), Ken Burns notes that baseball begins with the expectancy of springtime and ends with the hard facts of autumn. Baseball holds the difficult and beautiful paradox of our lives: “If life were perfect, it wouldn’t be.” Our hope for and our striving towards perfection is a drive we cannot resist. And must not. So we live with a springtime hope. Opening Day dreams. And with each day we move closer and closer to the “hard facts of autumn.” It is a blessing that our lives, like a baseball season, go around and come around. So we see the hope again. And again it is tempered by the reality of loss.

Baseball follows the cycle, not only of the seasons, but of our lives. Stephen Jay Gould, the popular paleontologist who scandalized both the creationists and the evolutionists with his theories on evolution, described Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak as cheating death—at least for awhile.

Joe DiMaggio's record 56-game hitting streak in 1941] is the finest of legitimate legends, because it embodies the essence of the battle that truly defines our lives. DiMaggio activated the greatest and most unattainable dream of all humanity, the hope and chimera of all sages and shamans: he cheated death, at least for a while. (NYReview of Books, August 18, 1988)

In addition to pointing to the paradox of our need to strive for perfection as imperfect beings, baseball also embodies the tension inherent in our lives as individuals who live in community. Baseball is a very individual team sport. More so than any other team sport, really. And more than any other team sport, baseball also offers us a glimpse at immortality. Not for any one of us. Not even for the greats who set records that stand for years. All of these will fall. The hope rests in the collective. As poet Donald Hall has written: “Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers.” No wonder some are said to believe in the “Church of Baseball.”

So baseball fills out its religious repertoire with memory. Baseball has grown into an institution that offers memory and hope. I have often said that is what is important about religious community. It holds us in time, and beyond time, with memory and hope. It offers us the stories, the memories, of those who came before. Those whose lives, of triumph and defeat, have shaped our own lives. They remind us of our own responsibility to our time and future time. And the memory offers us hope—hope that our own lives will have meaning. We are held as well by those who will follow us. Our time is given meaning by the dream of them. And our hope is renewed by their promise.

Coming to church isn’t really much at all like going to the ballpark. And yet in both communities of spirit true believers find themselves, place themselves in the larger context of space and time, joining with what transcends space and transcends time. Here we do that by lifting up the ultimate values that inspire us, whether we call them God, Spirit of Life, the laws of the universe, or baseball. Here we are reminded that we are more than we are. (That wasn’t Yogi Berra!)

This, of course, is also our connection with father’s day, with family. It is a deep human need to find for our flawed, striving individual selves a place to belong. The best of families manage to offer a sense of this to children. Because there is never a perfect sense of it, we have religious communities. Because we don’t ever get it just right, there is baseball.