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I admit it – I am a baseball addict. I played in college, have rooted for the Baltimore Orioles forever and ever, and even umpired Little League for eight years through high school and college. It’s a game I love – and one that has all sorts of interesting connections to the Catholic Faith.
For example, did you know that Babe Ruth learned to play baseball from a religious brother? Brother Matthias Boutlier, a member of the Xaverian religious congregation, was the Dean of Discipline in the orphanage where Ruth received his education, and Ruth learned about the sport from this father-figure who saw raw talent in the rough kid. For Ruth, his time at the school deeply cemented his Catholicism – he became a Knight of Columbus later in life and, despite his sometimes-wild ways, died a good Catholic.
Former Kansas City Royal catcher/first baseman Mike Sweeney, now retired, spends his summers running a Catholic Baseball Camp that he founded in Joliet, Illinois, which combines the fun of baseball with helping kids encounter a living relationship with Jesus Christ. Boy, if there was a camp I wish I went to when I was younger…!
There has been only one major league player to become a priest, and it is an odd story. In 1912, Ty Cobb found himself suspended due to a brawl where he beat up a fan who had been heckling him. His Detroit Tigers teammates, in support, went on strike until Cobb was reinstated. But the owner of the Tigers, not to be cowed by the striking players, ordered the team manager to find replacement players. Hence, a 20-year-old man named Allan Travers, who had never played professional baseball before, ended up starting the game. He actually set an MLB record for the most runs and hits given up in a game (he pitched 8 innings, giving up 24 runs – 14 earned – and 26 hits, along with 7 walks…and one strikeout). This was his only appearance in the majors, and a few years later, became a Jesuit priest and teacher in Philadelphia.
But Catholicism and Baseball don’t just share common adherents – there is a common philosophy, too. A couple of years ago, a Catholic writer named John Allen Jr. wrote an excellent article about baseball and Catholicism, which I quote here in its entirety:
I’ll roll out my personal list of the ‘Top Nine Reasons why Baseball is to Sports what Catholicism is to Religion.’ Why nine? It’s a key number in both traditions — nine players on a diamond, nine innings in a game, and nine days to a novena.” The following are nine reasons why Catholicism and baseball are, quite literally, a match made in Heaven:
1. Both baseball and Catholicism venerate the past. Both have a Communion of Saints, all the way down to popular shrines and holy cards.
2. Both feature obscure rules that make sense only to initiates. (Think the Infield Fly rule for baseball fans and the Pauline privilege for Catholics.)
3. Both have a keen sense of ritual, in which pace is critically important. (As a footnote, that’s why basketball is more akin to Pentecostalism; both are breathless affairs premised largely on ecstatic experience.)
4. Both generate oceans of statistics, arcana, and lore. For entry-level examples, try: Who has the highest lifetime batting average, with a minimum of 1,000 at-bats? (Ty Cobb). Which popes had the longest and the shortest reigns? (Pius IX and Urban VII).
5. In both baseball and Catholicism, you can dip in and out, but for serious devotees the liturgy is a daily affair.
6. Both are global games which are especially big right now in Latin America. (Though I’m principally a Yankees fan, I live in Denver, where the Rockies’ starting rotation is composed of two pitchers from the Dominican Republic, a Venezuelan, a Mexican, and a guy from South Carolina. In a lot of dioceses, that’s not unlike the makeup of the presbyterate these days.)
7. Both baseball and Catholicism have been badly tainted by scandal, with the legacies of erstwhile superstars utterly ruined. Yet both have proved surprisingly resilient — perhaps demonstrating that the game is great enough to survive even the best efforts of those in charge at any given moment to ruin it.
8. Both have a complex farm system, and fans love to speculate about who the next hot commodity will be in “The Show.”
9. Both reward patience. If you’re the kind of person who needs immediate results, neither baseball nor Catholicism is really your game.
I’ll add another of my own: both have as their goal, reaching home safely!
Play ball!
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