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Cover
story Baseball is linked to history, religion, professor
asserts
By PAMELA SCHAEFFER
NCR Staff
It was a redemptive, celebratory moment, a return to innocence,
wiping clean for one joyous moment our nations slate of sins: the
tawdriness of this seasons politics, the competition, divisions,
xenophobia and greed that mar our national experience. When St. Louis Cardinal
Mark McGwires 62nd home run streaked over the left field wall, it was
liturgy erupting into euphoria, the sometimes interminable drone of baseball
lifting us into epiphanies of joy.
The redheaded folk hero with the Irish name veritably levitated
around the field and, during an 11-minute spontaneous party in the park,
hoisted Sammy Sosa, competitor for the home run title, off the ground in
exuberant embrace.
For Robert Elias, the excitement and symbols of this season will
add gloss to a semester-long program at the University of San Francisco, where
he teaches American politics.
With enviable foresight, Professor Elias had proposed baseball as
the topic of the prestigious annual Davies Forum focusing on values and
leadership in American life. To his surprise, The committee liked
it, he said. Hes calling the series The National Pastime and
the American Dream: Baseball as Cultural Mirror.
Baseball allows us to examine important aspects of American
life and culture, said Elias, who grew up in the 1950s heyday of New York
baseball, Exciting times, he said, when the Yankees, the Dodgers
and the Giants were all part of the scene. Baseball, he said, reflects
things such as labor-management struggles, how we organize our economy ... race
relations.
Even more, For a lot of people, baseball is a kind of
religion, he said. Like faith, it is passed from generation to generation
and tends to breed fanatics, he said. Elias is collecting quotes comparing
baseball and religion (see box, page 3) and keeping track of religious
references by the players themselves.
During his forum, plays, movies, panel discussions, and talks by
sportscasters, former managers and players will examine the parallels between
baseballs history and our own.
The parallels include:
- Periodic power struggles between owners and players, reflecting
labors battles nationally. Among victories for players was the death of
the reserve clause in 1976, allowing free agency for players and
ending virtual wage slavery, Elias said. The latest chapter in
those struggles was the strike that cut short the 1994 season.
- The crack in the major league color barrier in 1947, with the
signing of Jackie Robinson, grandson of a slave, to the Brooklyn Dodgers. The
breakthrough -- accompanied by Robinsons promise to ignore racial
epithets -- is widely regarded as the most significant event marking the
progress of racial equality between the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement
of the 1960s.
- The westward and southward geographical movement of baseball
during the 1950s and 60s, reflecting shifts in the broader
population.
- A change in the nature of the game from early in the century,
when scratch-it-out scores were valued over the home run hit, which was seen
as kind of grotesque, Elias said, to a new admiration for spectacle
and power. Elias speculates that the change reflects our 20th-century
aspirations to transcend national borders, even to conquer space.
- A shift in our favored heroic type from the aggressive and
ill-tempered Ty Cobb, a virulent racist who slept with a revolver, to the
ebullient Babe Ruth, renowned as a boozer and philanderer, to the sensitive and
fitness-conscious McGwire, gentle giant of the 90s.
McGwire and Sosas emotional embrace will linger for many as
a memorable snapshot, a triumph of friendship and good will over the me-first
spirit that cynics associate with the American way of life. Sosa, right fielder
for the Chicago Cubs, is a former shoeshine boy from San Pedro de Macoris in
the Dominican Republic, notable for producing more major league players per
capita than any city in the world. Sosas role in the seasons
excitement boosts not only the image of baseball but, some suggest, may serve
to boost the image of American Hispanics nationally. Though well represented in
baseball, Spanish-speaking Americans remain, like African-Americans, on the
sidelines of American life.
It isnt hard to wax theological about baseball in a nation
so historically inclined to intertwine theology with national myth. Surely
those wild 11 post-home run minutes on Sept. 8 -- exultant images beamed by
satellite to more than 100 nations -- fulfilled, however briefly, the Puritan
fathers dream of a city on a hill, a light to the nations.
How grand for us -- could it even have been divinely inspired --
that McGwires record-breaking moment came in one of our darkest hours as
a nation, turning disillusionment to faith and offering respite from the Bill
Clinton-Monica Lewinsky debacle, international terrorism and skittering global
economics.
Much about this season has been redemptive for the sport itself,
reconciling teams and fans after the past four post-strike seasons of declining
attendance and gloomy predictions for baseballs future.
At NCRs press time, among numerous 1998 highlights
firing up the fans, Sosa remained a challenger to McGwires new title, the
Yankees were closing in on the record of 116 wins in a single season, set by
the Chicago Cubs in 1906, and the Cubs, characteristically bottom feeders by
this time in the season, were contending for a wild card spot in the
playoffs.
Elias is in good company, of course, when he raises baseball to
the level of mythic Americana. In 1994, producer Ken Burns, best known for the
epic television series The Civil War, delivered an 18-hour
documentary on baseball, calling it a window on the American
soul.
For author Tom Boswell, baseball is a metaphor for nothing less
than the cycle of life itself, a secular triduum. In his book Why Time
Begins on Opening Day, he proclaimed that life begins anew, not with a
glimpse of a robin on the lawn, not with the vernal equinox, but with the
seasons first pitch.
Similarly, for Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post,
the void is not the overwhelming sense of divine mystery of which
the mystics sometimes speak, but the time between the last pitch of the World
Series and the next seasons opening day.
Theres the stuff of legend, too, a death-to-resurrection
myth, in the 34-year-old McGwires personal history. According to a
profile in the August issue of Sport magazine, fellow players thought his
career was over, washed up, in 1991 when he was 27.
Ill never forget them trying to trade him, said
former teammate Dave Stewart, now pitching coach for the San Diego Padres.
They couldnt give him away.
McGwire had physical problems -- terrible eyesight (20-500
vision), heel injuries and back pain, personal problems related to a
much-publicized divorce and unresolved psychological issues deriving from what
he said was lack of self-knowledge. After a promising start in the major
leagues -- 49 home runs in his first season in Oakland in 1987 -- his numbers
plummeted by 1991 to 22 homers and a low .201 average.
Contact lenses, counseling and an interlude for healing brought
liberation.
The forced opportunity to watch rather than play helped him
understand both himself and the game better, he told writer Barry M. Bloom of
Sport magazine. I didnt know what I liked, disliked, he said.
I didnt know much about me. ... I dont know if I was
confused. I just didnt think. I didnt confront things.
Then, in 1996, demoralized by another foot injury, he thought
about retirement. Needless to say, hes glad he stayed with the game and
glad, too, for the friends who talked him out of giving up. Not
quitting, he said, was the best move Ive ever made.
No wonder, then, in light of all that went before, that McGwire,
in summing up the season that made him a national hero, gives credit to a
great script written by the man upstairs.
No wonder, too, given the frequency with which McGwire alludes to
a divine plan, that Elias is taking note this year not only of mythic overtones
but of players references to religion on the field.
McGwire, for example, has alluded to the afterlife and to his
expectation that he will someday meet his predecessors, those great sluggers of
old. Meanwhile, those men are like empowering spirits. Two hours before his
history-making home run, McGwire held Roger Maris bat to his heart -- and
knew, then, he said, with a certainty born of faith, that the torch was being
passed.
Elias also notes that many players, including Sosa, cross
themselves when they go to bat.
Stretching the religious connections a little more, Elias finds it
possible even to link Catholicism to soaring hits. Is there something about
being nurtured by the ancient faith that makes it possible for a guy to smack
the hell out of a ball?
Look at the facts. Babe Ruth, single-season record-setter with 60
home runs in 1927, was reared in a Catholic orphanage. Roger Maris, going Ruth
one better in 1961, was a devout Catholic who indulged autograph-seekers even
at Mass. McGwire is a graduate of Damien Catholic High School in La Verne,
Calif., a private all-boys school reputed for excellence in both academics and
sports.
There was something in the season for the socially conscious
Catholic, too. McGwire, whose latest contract guarantees him $28.5 million over
three years, has promised $1 million annually for victims of child abuse.
Then, as home run fever reached unprecedented heights in early
September, an anonymous donor offered to pay $1 million to the fan who caught
the seasons record-breaking ball. According to news reports, his motive
was to publicize the murder of the three nuns and a laywoman in El Salvador in
1980 and the continuing search for justice.
As it turned out, Edenic innocence, selfless generosity in an era
noted for shameless self-aggrandizement, held the day in Busch Stadium. Tim
Forneris, 22, -- himself a graduate of Althoff Catholic High School in
Belleville, Ill., and the Jesuit-run St. Louis University -- retrieved the ball
and gave it to McGwire, who turned it over to the Baseball Hall of Fame in
Cooperstown, N.Y.
Schaeffer, a native of St. Louis and former reporter for
the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is a lifelong Cardinals fan.
National Catholic Reporter, September 18,
1998
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