How I Found Religion at a Baseball Game
by Robert A. Fink
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I always sit four rows up, directly behind home plate. It’s important to be in position to see the whole picture. I discovered this spot several years ago when I recognized the invisible line connecting home plate to the pitching rubber, to second base, to the middle of the twenty-foot green monster wall in dead center. This is the line dividing the playing field into halves resembling angels’ wings. The line originates at my fourth-row position.
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The poet Theodore Roethke is supposed to have said he never realized he could think until he turned forty. There’s something to this. The view from forty is similar to my fourth-row vantage point. It’s more of an introspective look at what’s happening around me, and I’m not as important to the picture as I used to think, and this doesn’t bother me as much as I expected. My past begins to look like design, not mine. It’s more like religion. Not a bad place to be on a sunny, March afternoon in West Texas, the temperature in the high 70s, the flag at ease above the center field wall. This is the kind of day you would select if you knew something extraordinary was about to happen.
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I recognized the mood because I had felt it seven months earlier. My wife, two teenage sons, and I had spent the summer at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, where my sons took coursework, and I taught a couple of classes. It was the evening before we were to start back to Texas early the next morning. We were rushing around packing the car and cleaning up the house we had stayed in for the summer. Just outside out back door was the school’s baseball field. This was not your ordinary ballpark. First of all, it really was a field. When we arrived in June, the outfield grass was higher than our ankles and so thick that until you took off after a fly ball in the gap between right and center, you wouldn’t notice the ground had never been leveled but rose and fell like the undulations of waves twelve miles out in the ocean. There were no fences, the outfield rising toward the distant tennis courts. Five hundred feet out in the center, a solitary grandfather oak had been left for aesthetics or possibly as a reminder that the focal point of the picture had always been nature. Instead of dugouts for each team, two green benches had been placed along the first-base foul lines. There were no bleachers for the fans. I watched most of the American Legion games played on the field that summer, and the moms and dads, the girlfriends and younger brothers of the ballplayers brought folding lawn chairs or stretched out on the grassy slope running the length of the right field foul line. I preferred to lie back and shut my eyes, taking in the sounds of the game, especially the players’ chatter, soothing as surf rolling into shore.
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Wednesday afternoons, a couple of my friends and I would meet on the field and throw the ball around. We had grown up playing baseball, and the poet-in-residence had even spent several years in the Phillies’ minor-league system. When the word got around, other middle-aged faculty started showing up with gloves no one would believe existed, much less still had some magic in the pocket. We took turns lobbing batting practice fast balls to each other, and every now and then someone would slip in what he announced was a curve. The rest of us would fan out across the outfield, often gathering in clusters of two and three to visit but always with an eye on the batter, always ready to call out “Mine” or “I got it” and amble off after a can of corn, working hard to make the catch look routine, then rainbow the ball back to toward the pitcher's mound. When we took our turn at bat, every hit was a rope, every fly outta here or at least deep enough to have easily scored a runner tagging at third.
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A light rain was falling our last afternoon at Andover. The car was pretty much packed, and my wife and my sons were checking the house for any items we had overlooked. It was about 7:00 P.M., and as I squeezed my glove into a corner of our Honda Civic’s trunk, I decided to walk down to the baseball field. Fog had started to settle around the tennis courts, and the oak in center seemed diaphanous as a vision. I sat down on the visitors’ bench, leaned back and pulled the bill of my shapeless Washington Senators cap lower across my eyes; the rain had become a steady drizzle. I couldn't say how long I sat there staring at the field, at all that green. I don't remember thinking or feeling anything. I couldn't move, didn't want to. It was almost like 1973 on a Santa Monica beach when I lay back in the sand and for a moment couldn't recall what day it was or what I had to do tomorrow. The Andover field was a holy place. Had I been able, I would have removed my shoes. When I could rise from the bench, I had to rediscover my limbs, slowly recognize that I was walking back to the house, my family asking where I had been; why I was soaked to the skin.
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On that occasion I didn’t feel particularly wise, just peaceful: but on a March afternoon, fourth—row up behind home plate, the president of our university sitting beside me, I recalled Herman Melville’s statement that we can’t know greatness until we’ve failed. I had just finished grading a set of freshman poetry explications of Sylvia Plath’s “Metaphors.” The essays had been much better than I expected, and several of the interpretations had bordered on brilliant. One twenty-six-year-old mother of a couple of preschoolers had even argued that the poem’s last line—"Boarded the train there's no getting off"— didn't mean the speaker of the poem, a pregnant woman, was depressed about becoming a mother. On this day I needed to believe her and didn't write in the margin of the essay —"Then how do you explain Plath's love affair with Death, her later suicide?" I needed the wife in the poem to affirm the life within her, growing larger day by day. I left my third-floor office and walked over to the baseball stadium to take in the first game of a doubleheader.
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Bottom of the second inning, our university president came up the steps leading to the bleachers. He started down the walkway in front of the first row of seats. From the corner of my eye, I watched him wave to the three or four students on the third-base side; then he shook hands with one of the ballplayer's parents. Not many fans show up for Wednesday afternoon games. Our record was 3 and 17, but we weren't that bad; we started the season against the University of Texas, Texas A&M, Baylor, and Oklahoma. After each loss, the coach and the sportswriters emphasized our lack of pitching.
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I could tell the president was looking for someone, and that person had failed to show, so I waved and asked if he would like to join me. He sat down, inquired about the score and made a comment about the poor officiating we'd been having. He seemed eager to yell at “Blue” about his lack of good judgment. I grinned and pointed out the similarity between umpires and university presidents—how we needed to loudly shout their sins, a catharsis for fans and faculty members. He smiled and took off his coat, said he'd have to be going soon. He loosened his tie and yelled a word of encouragement to the batter quickly behind in the count, 0 and 2. The president had announced he would be stepping down from office at the end of the school year. After fourteen years, he wanted to concentrate on writing, maybe teach a class or two. When he arrived on campus he had a head of thick, black hair and often ran with students in SK races. Now what hair still ringed his crown was gray, and he had back problems. I was hired the same year he was, both of us just starting out.
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I was thinking about this connection when our catcher launched a light-stanchion-clearing shot down the left field line. The ball almost disappeared into the western sun but stayed fair by at least ten feet. Everyone but the umpire could see it was a home run. The pitcher knew it. He slammed his fist into his glove and stomped off the mound. Our on-deck batter leaped high and jabbed at the air; the rest of our players burst from the dugout as if a trumpet had sounded calling the dead from their graves. The batter was halfway to first base, easing into his victory trot, when the home plate umpire threw both arms to his left and shouted, “Foul Ball!”
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Our coach slammed his cap into the dirt and ran toward the umpire. Each time the ump turned his back, the coach would scoot around to keep his nose and his index finger about an inch in front of the umpire's face. The president jumped up and shouted “Blue!” as if this were the vilest of epithets. Our second baseman, the team captain, stepped in front of the coach and threw his glove against the umpire's shins. He said the call was “Tragic!” Having no comeback for such a word, the umpire aimed his arm at the bench and tossed our second baseman. The coach took up his cause. The president shouted "Blue! Blue!"
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We ended up losing the game by one run. Now we were 3 and 18, but everyone seemed more exhilarated by this loss than by the three wins. We had been robbed. We could glory in our defeat. We had a cause to champion over coffee in the faculty lounge. Our sports reporter would have a two-column diatribe for the school paper. The president could finally rage with us on an issue he had found a higher official to sacrifice on the altar of righteous indignation.
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What really amazed me was that while everyone was shouting and leaping and throwing equipment, I wasn’t. I did not feel superior to the participants in this dance; nor did I feel like the only one without a partner. I was thinking of a scene from the movie Meatballs where the summer-camp olympics team of klutzes is about to face the champion team from a rival camp. Bill Murray, one of the klutz team's camp counselors, fires up his enervated players by pulling them to their feet and leading a hand-clapping, tent-revival rally. By the end of the scene, all twenty-odd team members are snake dancing around the camp lodge, chanting with Murray, "It just doesn't matter! It just doesn't matter!" Unable to lift myself from my spot in the bleachers, I believed everything mattered. I believed nothing mattered. I was invigorated and exhausted. I somehow knew God had forgiven me for always demanding that things turn out right that, winning brings salvation.
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In seventh grade, my best friend and I spent hours perfecting our pitches on the narrow strip of lawn, west side of my house. Or we'd take the football and play kick over in the street in front of his house. Sometimes his dad would quarterback pass patterns with us. Sometimes we'd pitch a tent in his backyard and camp out overnight laughing at everything; if we got lucky and uncovered one of his older sister's dirty novels, we'd sneak it from her room to read the sex scenes, one of us turning the pages while the other held the flashlight. We were not as close in high school, and in college we only dropped each other a line once or twice a year. We sent invitations to our weddings, announcements when our first child was born.
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I never believed my friend would die, not from bone cancer, not at twenty-seven, his dad staying at his side the last weeks in the hospital, twice a day lifting his son from the bed and hugging him close, stumbling around the room in a pantomime of exercise. My friend wrote he was running down-and-out pass patterns, juking' the plastic hospital chairs. He swore he was getting better; I didn't need to leave my graduate studies, my wife and my new-born twins, and fly to see him. I was relieved. I mailed him a funny greeting card every day. His wife called to talk after the funeral. She said he had looked forward to the cards.
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The year I was in Vietnam, the Marines were packing to leave. Nobody was supposed to die; our operations were designed to show discretion, not valor. Everybody died. The first was one of the guys from my Officer Candidate School platoon. He casually opened the door of a village hut. I remembered his having to stand in front of our OCS platoon of recent college graduates and sing, "I'm a little teapot, short and stout. Here is my handle. Here is my spout.” Our platoon sergeant was displeased with him for failing to shine the coffee urn in the officers' lounge. Now he was dead, like the lance corporal who just happened to walk into the Military Police office at the same instant one of his buddies forgot to eject the ammo clip from his 45 automatic, chambering a round instead of clearing the pistol. When the slide shot home, the gun discharged its bullet into the forehead of lance corporal.
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During a two-week period, five helicopters from Marine Air Group 16 disappeared for no good reason—four exploding in mid-air, one vanishing over the China Sea. A sixth had a steel cable snap extracting a recon unit out of triple-canopy jungle north of Da Nang. Four of the team were safe in the chopper when the cable broke and the lieutenant, who was almost close enough for the door gunner to touch, fell a hundred feet back into the canopy, the cable trailing from his waist like an umbilical cord.
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The night the Viet Cong finally got lucky and hit the fuel dump at the Da Nang Air Base, one of their rockets fell short and exploded in MAG-11. I had the duty at First Marine Air Wing. I waited at our helicopter landing zone for the evacuation chopper called in to rush the seriously wounded to the battalion hospital. When the first ambulance from MAG-11 arrived, the young Marine tucked under the clean sheet didn't look injured at all. I had been expecting blood and gaping wounds; all I saw was a teenager with the whitest face I had seen in my six months in 'Nam. The corpsmen didn't speak. One of them handed me an IV bottle, then each grabbed an end of the stretcher and rushed toward the chopper. I held the bottle high and jogged along beside the stretcher. Keeping my head ducked to try and avoid the helicopter's rotor wash, I looked directly into the boy's eyes. He was scared, so I shouted that he would be all right. I believed it. No blood. He was dead before the chopper reached the hospital. The corpsmen told me the boy was scheduled to rotate back to the states that morning. Things like that didn't happen. Things like that always happened.
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Like my poetry-writing student who told me she had asthma, trained for marathons, and taught aerobic dance at the Y three times a week. She was always bringing cookies to class to share with the writing workshop members. Her face looked like a skull, her arms and legs little more than bones. Everyone but me knew she was anorexic. Everyone but me knew not to push her to stop writing about birds and flowers, knew not to insist she revise the three-page, incoherent poem about the high school cheerleader who found her father's body in his Cadillac idling in the closed garage. Everyone but me understood she wasn't taking the course to improve her writing.
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I always believed in winning. A good loser was still a loser. All you'd learn from losing was why you didn't win. I was wrong. Nobody needs to learn from winning. Failure tempers us for tomorrow; this must be why Jesus warned his followers to concern themselves only with the sufficient evil of each day and offered forgiveness for yesterday's failures.
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No theologian understands this better than baseball people; that's why coaches schedule as many games as possible each week, sometimes even slipping in a doubleheader. Should you go 0 for 3 at the plate and make two run-scoring errors in the field, you can turn your shame around in the next game. Coaches are fond of saying that if you screw up in the field, make up for it with your bat; if you couldn't hit a beach ball floated to the plate, then look flashy at third. Baseball is religion because it admonishes its converts to accept a second chance, taking comfort in the knowledge that everyone expects you to fail at least seven out of ten times at bat. You can always rely on drawing the farsighted umpire, on getting the bad hop, on having to play the sun field. Gravity is always pulling at your bones.
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On that sunny March afternoon in the bleachers, I understood. God expected Adam and Eve to eat the apple.
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Reprinted by permission from the author, Robert Fink, 2018.
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