Many will argue the point – because other sports have more viewers – but there is something special about baseball that makes it the national sport.
Are there spiritual dimensions to baseball? Yes, claims John Sexton, long-time president of NYU, professor of comparative religions, and author of Baseball on the Road to God.
Sexton, a practicing Catholic, actually teaches a course at NYU on the spirituality of baseball, and his book – despite its somewhat grandiose title – is an elegant, enjoyable read, written with humility and yet packed with insight into the “values” one can derive from baseball – its sacred spaces and times, its saints and sinners, its miracles (plays or teams), its reverence for the past.
There is something about baseball that links generations in ways that other sports do not, with its traditions, continuity, and history. Indeed, no sport honors its past heroes with the reverence that baseball does. There is something about baseball that ingrained it in the American psyche, and in large part that is due to the “religious” patterns one finds in baseball.
The book provoked in me this thought: Is there any special Jewish resonance to baseball – any similarities or rhythms that link baseball to Judaism? Yes, several, and they might explain why immigrant Jews were taken with the game, why some prominent rabbis and roshei yeshiva have been big baseball fans (all in the right proportion, of course), and why even today there are more Jews playing professional baseball than any other sport.
The rhythms of life. The baseball season very closely parallels the Jewish holiday season. The first holiday of the Jewish year – Pesach – always falls close to or on Opening Day. And the season – both seasons – end around Sukkot, the holiday described by the Torah as being celebrated “as the year goes out.”
This association transcends mere calendrical coincidence. Pesach, “the festival of spring,” is synonymous with hope, excitement, and new beginnings. The connection of spring to redemption could not be clearer: “The buds have appeared on the grounds, the time for song [i.e., the chirping of birds] has come, and the sound of the turtle-dove can be heard in our land” (Shir Hashirim 2:5), all an allegory to the coming redemption. Springtime is the time for redemption – “in Nissan we were redeemed, in Nissan we will be redeemed” (Rosh Hashanah 11a).
L’havdil, but nonetheless, baseball is inherently connected to spring as well. The bitter cold of winter is tempered by the knowledge that spring training (note the reference to the season; the other major sports do not characterize their practice periods by the season) has started.
Sexton quotes the great Rogers Hornsby, he of the highest single season batting average (.424). Asked how he spent the winter “when there’s no baseball,” Hornsby responded: “I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”
That Pesach and baseball are both fixtures of spring is, of course, a coincidence, but in their own ways evoke similar feelings of anticipation and exhilaration, erasing the gloom of winter, which, for Jews, contains no biblical festivals.
At the other end of the year, the holidays of Tishrei, especially Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, coincide with the end of the baseball season. They (I mean the Jewish High Holidays, not the World Series) are times for reflection and introspection – necessary for individuals and the world but also for unsuccessful teams – with the days of reckoning, known as the World Series, looming for the successful ones.
Wistfulness and tension – even trepidation – accompany Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, as we account for our failures and disappointments, and search for areas that require reflection and improvement. That tension is mirrored for the participants in the playoffs and World Series, where one pitch or swing can win eternal fame or infamy for the player.
And with the end of the Series – and Sukkot – there is always a feeling of dejection at the approaching winter.
Baseball transcends time. Baseball is famous – irritating to some – for being the only major sport that does not have a clock. A baseball game does not end at a specific time but after nine innings if one team has more runs, and indefinitely until one team outscores the other.
Thus, no baseball team can ever run out the clock. Every pitch and every swing – even in a game that is otherwise a hopeless mismatch – counts. A hit is a hit is a hit, and the pitcher cannot hold the ball waiting for time to run out. Life is the same way; every day carries obligations. One cannot simply retire from Torah and abstain from divine service. The obligations are constant and God decrees when the “game” ends.
Notice how tefillah b’tzibur is analogous to baseball. Prayer is not guided by the clock (although there are certain times when different prayers are mandated – beginning and end times for Kriat Shema, Shacharit, Minchah, Maariv, etc.), notwithstanding the many minyanim, especially weekday morning, in which people insist on being finished by a certain time.
Tefillah, inherently, is the part of the day in which time is irrelevant. We don’t even have a clock in our main Sanctuary (not that that stops people from knowing what time it is); it is just that as the place for prayer is a holy space carved out from a profane world, so too the time for prayer is a holy moment carved out from our mundane day.
Notice how, similar to baseball’s efforts to speed up the game (it has gotten much longer in the last two decades, by almost 20-30 minutes, and more than an hour longer than the average game in the 1950s), there are incessant efforts to speed up the Shabbat service as well, cutting here, pruning there, with some congregations even regulating when different aspects of the service will start according to the ubiquitous and omnipotent clock.
Even conceding that good things can also sometimes go on for too long, the over-emphasis on the clock detracts from the tefillah – and that’s essentially football or basketball, not baseball. When the congregation tunes out the customary prayers after Mussaf, it is essentially running out the clock, and that is most unfortunate. (Better to leave early – a baseball tradition in parts of the country – than to stay and become disruptive.)
But there is a pace to davening (and to baseball), one that is not artificially regimented by a clock and that should be maintained. Sometimes the davening can flow smoothly and the service takes two hours or less; other times, there are delays, unforeseen celebrations, additional prayers (construe that as constant pitching changes or runners on base) or a more leisurely tempo that stretches the time to 2.5 hours (hopefully, never longer).
What is most important is that people depart with a sense of satisfaction and contentment, having touched an aspect of existence beyond themselves and come closer to the Source of Truth (that’s only tefillah, not baseball).
The contemplated life. Baseball’s pace, unlike the frenzied action in other sports, is geared to enable people to look around, absorb the surroundings, enjoy God’s creation of the natural order, talk to other human beings, and revel in each interaction. Sometimes our lives move so quickly that we are left gasping to enjoy it. We live in a rush to do whatever and then to do the next thing, and we are scarcely able to derive the full benefit or pleasure from having done even one of them.
There is something about baseball’s pastoral nature that also speaks to the Jewish soul, as opposed to, say, the inherent and brutish violence of football. (George Will once noted that football possesses some of the more execrable aspects of American life – brief spurts of violent interaction, each followed by a committee meeting.)
Even the successes in each sport are measured differently: in football one strives to reach the “end zone,” which should be enough to frighten away any sensible person (it has certainty frightened away Jets and Giants for several years now). But in baseball, one who scores comes “home,” to be welcomed by the loving embrace of family and the applause of friends. There is a lyrical quality to the experience. One sets out on a journey, helps others, is reliant on others to help him, and is rewarded by coming home.
Rav Soloveitchik envisioned repentance as a similar process – of embarking on an annual journey, being challenged and inspired along the way, and arriving home at year’s end to assess one’s progress.
Certainly one can make too much of this, but Sexton’s book is replete with analyses of human nature and man’s spiritual yearnings that will resonate with the spiritually sensitive, and perhaps even deepen our understanding of faith itself. In his words, “inside the game, the formative material of spirituality can be found.”
And if not, perhaps at least the umpire’s opening shout of “Play Ball” can be replaced by a klop followed by an impassioned “Nu!”
Then we would really feel at home.