Anyone who has been around me for more than one day probably knows this: I love baseball. My wife would say that’s an understatement. It’s been a lifelong flame that still burns bright but is also an agent God used to get me off the farm in northeast Georgia, into journalism, and later into ministry. The providential dots all connect back to my love for baseball, but that’s another story for another time.
By the time you read this, another season will have begun — commencing seven months of days and nights filled with the crack of the bat, the pop of the catcher’s mitt, the roar of the crowd as a walk off homer climbs the sky toward the distant bleachers.
I love baseball because it is a highly democratic game; little men flourish in it, as do big men: Jose Altuve and Aaron Judge, or from my childhood era Joe Morgan and Dave Winfield. Pitchers who throw 88 mph can be in the hall of fame (Greg Maddux, anyone?) as can those with howitzer arms (Nolan Ryan: boy, was he ever a man!). Cooperstown embraces singles hitters like Tony Gwynn and sluggers like Babe Ruth and every type of hitter in between. Many of the players look like regular people — unlike pro football and basketball where everybody is super-sized.
Baseball games are won by a million small things; a runner breaks up a double-play at second base to avoid an inning-ending double play, and the next batter hammers a game-winning double. A sacrifice bunt in the third inning moves a runner to third, and he scores the only run on a sacrifice fly in a 1-0 game.
Isn’t that like life? The outcome of our days and seasons are determined by tiny, even imperceptible, occurrences. Of course, as Christians we know the million tiny realities all are under the meticulous providential command of the living God — even those moments when a small thing costs our favorite team a win over a bitter rival. It will help my sanctification to remember that next time my Georgia Bulldogs lose to Alabama in football.
I love baseball because it’s a lot like life, like the Christian life; one serves as an apt analogy for the other.
Baseball is an exercise in managing failure. Such is life, even for Christians moving through a fallen world: good doesn’t always win; there’s not always a happy ending; second chances elude us. The boy doesn’t always get the girl. Yet we tend to live out of the convenient fantasy that if we just try hard enough, work hard enough, believe strongly enough, things will work out just the way we want. But the real world quickly explodes that notion, and sports fans see that on the field and in rooting for their favorite teams.
That’s particularly true in baseball. The greatest hitter of all-time, Ted Williams, had a lifetime batting average of .344, meaning, for every 100 times he came to the plate, the Splendid Splinter failed 65 times. Life under the sun — as the Preacher of Ecclesiastes terms it — is full of adversity and disappointment, except Christians are privileged to trust God with what they deem as failures, confident that the One who once had His disciples pick up 12 baskets of leftovers after feeding 5,000 doesn’t waste anything. He is working all things together for our good (Rom. 8:28) moment by moment, even when it appears to us — and the world — as failure.
Because of all the failure, baseball teaches the one virtue every Christian should desire: humility. At its most basic point, baseball is batter versus pitcher. Somebody is going to lose — usually the hitter. A batter can’t throw a tantrum every time he strikes out. And we can’t lose our minds every time things don’t go our way in life. Psalm 112:6b-7 is handy here: “For the righteous will never be moved. … He is not afraid of bad news; his heart is firm, trusting in the Lord.”
When a fielder makes an error, every watching eye sees it, and it’s written on the scoreboard: E4 or E6 or E9 or whatever number corresponds to the position (one through nine) the errant player happens to be occupying. There’s nowhere to hide. You goofed. You know it and every onlooker knows it. You must own it. Vow not to do it again.
It’s the same with our sins. We must own them, confess them, seek grace to turn from them. But the big difference between baseball and the Christian life is this: When we do confess our blunders, our sins, a loving God erases them as if they never happened because the sinless Son sacrificed His life to pay for our errors.
Justice is virtually an omnipresent word in our cultural parlance these days, but perfect justice will never happen in this fallen cosmos. All of us, as image-bearers of God, crave justice but live in a world that so often never gives it. Baseball and sports in general afford many occasions to cope with this reality. This dark side of sports has given me opportunity to prepare my two athlete sons for the brutal disappointments they’ll face in life.
Last year, Arizona won the National League pennant over the far-superior Braves and Dodgers. No one would argue the D-backs were the best NL team. The better team doesn’t always win. This should brace us as believers as we contend for the faith in a fallen world. Solomon put it this way: “Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all” (Eccles. 9:11).
Indeed, we do all things to the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31) and leave the results up to Him. In God’s economy, He often uses a David to bring down Goliath in accomplishing His purposes. Irony underlies so much of baseball, and it underlies so much of the Christian life.
There are many more parallels between baseball and our walk with God, and if I know me, there’ll be more to come in future columns, especially in April, as the buds blossom on a new season.