Book Review by David Ensign - "Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game" Alban Weekly for Monday, 31 March 2014

Book Review by David Ensign - "Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game" Alban Weekly for Monday, 31 March 2014
"Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game" by JOHN SEXTON with Thomas Oliphant and Peter J. Schwartz - Gotham, 2013 
In October of 2012, I stood with my 13-year-old daughter in the upper deck of Nationals Park in DC as the hometown Nats built an early lead in the deciding game of the team's first playoff series since baseball returned to the nation's capital in 2005.
We watched as the game slowed to an agonizing pace. But the Nats still led when, finally, close to midnight, the game stood one slim strike from completion.
I leaned in and over the din shouted to my daughter, "I've waited my entire baseball-rooting life to be in the stadium when my team celebrated on the field after a playoff series win."
As every Washington fan knows, I'm still waiting.
Perhaps that's why John Sexton's thoroughly enjoyable Baseball As a Road to God doesn't quite resonate fully with me. There is much to commend in the book which Sexton wrote with Thomas Oliphant and Peter J. Schwartz.
The authorial voice they combine to create brings together the storytelling at the heart of the experience of loving baseball with the scholarly appreciation of the study of religion. Starting with Mircea Eliade's observation that "Where the sacred manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself," Sexton takes seriously both the game and religious experience though he holds on throughout to the voice of a lifelong fan of the game.
However, Sexton approaches baseball through the eyes of a Yankees fan and God through the eyes of a university president. Baseball looks different when your team has won 27 championships than it does when your team occupies less lofty places in the standings. God looks different in the barrio than God looks in the corner office.
Nowhere in the book does that distinction come into clearer focus than when Sexton fondly recalls Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun's 1972 opinion in Flood v. Kuhn. The court ruled against former St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood's challenge to a clause in baseball's standard contract that severely limited players' mobility. Blackmun wrote for the majority that "The game is on higher ground; it behooves everyone to keep it there" and went on to include a list of great players who occupied that lofty ground. Sexton praises the fan in the justice without ever calling into question the lack of justice in the decision.
The book opens with the experience that I did not quite have last fall: the ecstasy of the moment when your team--in Sexton's case, the great Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s--finally scales the mountaintop to capture a championship. Growing up a Braves fan in the late 60s through the 70s, that's an experience I never had.
On the other hand, I also never had to experience the kind of abandonment that Brooklyn's Dodger fans went through when the team decamped to Los Angeles in 1958. My teams never left me; I left them.
Hop-scotching around the country for education and opportunity is more common these days than spending a lifetime mostly in a single metropolitan area, as Sexton has. We are a nation of restless energy and restless hearts searching for a true home and for that sense of belonging that comes, as Augustine knew, when our hearts rest in God. In a nation where people and teams move constantly, we understand the road both concretely and metaphorically. Baseball as a road to God works as well as any other road, especially if the destination we yearn for is some sense of "home."
Thus there's plenty of material to use within that frame, and Sexton takes advantage of the obvious structure to pursue nine innings (plus a seventh-inning stretch) worth of topics in 10 chapters. He touches on an array of religious concerns ranging from time and space to faith and doubt, with miracles, blessings, curses, and conversion tossed in as well. Though the religious experiences reflect predominantly the perspectives of Christian and Jewish theologians, Sexton makes a reasonably good-faith effort at being more broadly inclusive.
At his best, Sexton has a winning way of bringing baseball voices into conversation with scholars. For example, he quotes Yankee Hall of Famer Yogi Berra's remark that "it is tough to make predictions, especially about the future," and notes that nuclear physicist Neils Bohr made essentially the same observation. Throughout, Sexton drives home the basic point that, as with faith, one "can learn, through baseball, to experience life more deeply." A book group that includes baseball fans interested in religion could enjoy this read as much as an afternoon at a ballgame.
Another baseball book I read during the off-season, different in scope and purpose, is rewarding for those who sit in the bleachers and enjoys the slow unfolding of baseball.
Baseball's single games and its long season invite depth and Dan Barry's rich, deep Bottom of the 33rd delivers. As its subtitle--Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game--indicates, Barry goes far beyond nine innings to explore essentially religious themes in telling the story of a minor league game played into the wee hours of Easter morning, 1981, in a down-and-out New England mill town.
These works are as distinct as the view from the owner's box at Yankee Stadium is from that of the bleachers in Pawtucket. And that's baseball. Salvation is experienced in the lofty, privileged perch of the owners' box and to those still waiting in the bleachers.
David Ensign has served as pastor of Clarendon Presbyterian Church, in Arlington, VA, for 10 years and serves on the board of People of Faith for Equality in Virginia.
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