By Adam Thomas

Long before I realized the sacredness of the altar or the font or the Gospel book with its gilded edges, my contact with the holy happened twenty yards due north of second base. The play-by-play guys and color commentators speak of the “baseball gods,” but I can forgive their polytheism, for they must not have heard the good news that the Almighty God of heaven and earth became the God of baseball around 1912. Of course, half a lifetime ago, I didn’t realize that. All I knew was that centerfield was, somehow, holy.

I lived to play defense—my hitting and striking out and stealing bases and popping out to the first baseman and scoring from second were dry toast. Catching fly balls and cutting off balls hit in the gap were pizza and hamburgers. I relished being a member of the home team because it meant wallowing in the purgatorial dugout was delayed half an inning. I sprinted out to centerfield, my cleats enduring a few mouthfuls of dusty clay before clamping their teeth into the damp, tussock-strewn earth of the outfield.

It had rained that morning—not hard, but the ground had drank in the drizzle for the same several hours that I sat around my house hoping the coach wouldn’t call with bad news. Any ball that bounced would be wet, making it harder to throw accurately. I would be slower by the third inning, after my cleats and socks each added a pound or two of mud and water. The rain had stopped, but the clouds still muffled the late-spring twilight. The sky was the color of a scuffed baseball, which, of course, made the actual scuffed baseballs that would soon be arcing toward me quite difficult to see.

I sprinted all the way to the chain-link fence that bounded the field. Faded, plywood advertisements for local car dealers and Baptist churches adorned the fence, which was polka-dotted with pockets of rust. The top of the fence was just out of my leaping reach, since I hadn’t hit my growth spurt yet. With my gloved right hand, I tapped the chain-links with all the reverence of crossing myself with holy water. Then I squelched back to continue my ritual north-northwest of the pitcher’s mound.

As a centerfielder, I never stood perfectly in the center of the field, else the pitcher would obscure my view of the batter. Instead, I let my internal dowsing rod lead me to the patch of ground four or five steps to the shortstop side of second base, the better to get the jump on balls batted by right-handed hitters. This spot was the spring at the center of my fiefdom, a territory it was my duty to protect from incoming mortar fire. I dug my cleats into the spot, creating a shallow foxhole. This was my land, and it was holy, and I soaked up its sacredness through my cleated feet.

As the leadoff batter walked toward home plate, the field’s lights hiccupped and hummed to life. But there was already electricity in the air, and the aftertaste of bubble gum mixed with the mint chocolate flavor of exhilaration in my mouth. The banks of lights cast four shadows, and they swirled around me like Busby Berkeley’s dancers. The familiar, but always surprising, feeling of anticipation hiccupped and hummed to life in my bowels.

The batter kicked his heals into the clay. The pitcher gripped the ball in his glove. I punched my glove and paced my foxhole. As the pitcher went into his windup, the organs south of my lungs declared war and started marching north. Strike One. My stomach occupied the region around my larynx. Ball One. My heart beat a double time cadence. Crack. I took a step back and moved to my right. The ball hurtled into the air, past the artificial horizon where the sloping roof of the concession stand met the sky. I took four more steps to my right and waited, while in my mind the thousands of ways I could fail tried to smother the single way I could succeed. For half a second, I wondered if Ashlee were in the bleachers. I waited as the ball reached its peak and fell back to earth, towards my land. Finally, after three and a half seconds of forever, the ball sailed into my glove and made the satisfying SWAPTH sound that I lived for. My sacred ground remained undefiled, and I could breathe again.

I tossed the ball to the shortstop, marched back to my foxhole, and the warring organs broke their ceasefires. Would that be my only catch of game? Or would I have a busy night patrolling my fiefdom? There was no way to know. So I stared down the batter on each pitch, flinched reflexively on each swing, and waited in anticipation, my feet poised on holy ground, connected to something that brought out the best in me and that called to me from the scuffed baseball sky and the fence and my foxhole. That something – I wouldn’t have known to call it God then – that something called to me, speaking the grace needed to taste the mint chocolate flavor of exhilaration, speaking the devotion that enabled me to move with purpose each time ball and bat connected, speaking the love that kept me returning again and again to the ballpark in rain or shine, speaking my very life into being.

The Rev. Adam Thomas, one of the first Millennials to be ordained priest, is the assistant to the rector at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Cohasset, Mass. He blogs at wherethewind.com.

By Sam Candler

It’s time for baseball again.

This is the time of year I make my formal apology to non-sports fans everywhere, as I take the time to rejoice in the ritual of baseball’s spring training. I suppose I must also apologize to the fans of other sports, those sports which are ever so noble but regrettably inferior to baseball.

As our winter takes another chilly turn, baseball players gather in Florida and Arizona for spring training. Seasoned veterans and raw rookies all have hope in their veins. They will make the team this year, after years of “almost.” All the batters believe that batting .300 is achievable. All the pitchers believe 15 wins or 20 saves is achievable. Everyone’s home team has a chance to win the pennant. All baseball fans, from the wisest newspaper writers to the most naïve local fans, take a renewed interest in the home team. Baseball in the spring is the very definition of “hope springs eternal.”

Hope and endurance are the foundations of success in baseball. Baseball is the sport for those who can endure, and hope is source of that endurance. Baseball is the sport of endurance. First off, of course, is the sheer length of its incessant schedule. Even the worst professional team will play 162 games this year. The difference between a first place team and a second place may turn out to be one game among those 162.

Baseball is the sport of humble aspirations. By “humble,” I mean down-to-earth. There will be no such thing as a team that wins every game, or even a batter who gets a hit in every game. In fact, the expectations are much more “down-to-earth,” “humble.” A successful batter needs to get a hit only 30% of the time. A player’s inner hope and emotional endurance will inspire him to return to the batters’ box after he has made seven outs in a row. After all, three successive hits in a row would then give him that ongoing .300 batting average.

Baseball will test the endurance of fans, too. It takes a lot of time to appreciate and enjoy the art of baseball. Fewer and fewer of us tend to devote much time to anything these days. We prefer the quick e-mail message, the short phone call, the casual glance at the newspaper or the television news. The game of baseball introduces long periods of no action into the game. A play itself lasts only twenty seconds; and then we all wait two or three minutes for the next play. By then, many of us have changed the channel.

But the art of baseball lies in appreciating those moments between the actual plays. For the game of baseball is the thinking and strategizing over how that play will develop. How do the fielders position themselves? What pitch does the pitcher throw? What will the batter anticipate? Who is scheduled to bat next inning? Who is warming up in the bullpen? The play itself is quick; the art—the discipline—takes a lifetime.

I could go on, just like baseball goes on and on. But if you’ve read this far, you deserve the closing Christian analogy. The analogy is that we all need Spring Training. We all need to get our muscles and training routines back into shape. We all need a review of techniques and strategies. We all need to work on what we are supposed to meditate on “between plays,” or between crises. We all need to renew our hope and our endurance.

In the church, we have another name for this Spring Training. We call it Lent. It’s time to get our aching prayer routines back into shape. It’s time to renew our hope. It’s time to focus on what God really wants us to do in this life. We call it Lent. It is the intentional training of our spiritual lives, so that we can succeed in the long season of resurrection life.

The Very Rev. Sam Candler is dean of St. Philip's Cathedral in Atlanta. He helped start that city’s interfaith group, and leads regular community bible studies. His sermons and reflections on “Good Faith and Common Good” can be found on the Cathedral web site.

By Heidi Shott

On Friday afternoon my family and I make the three-hour trip to Fenway Park. As always, we stop at the Kennebunkport rest stop so my husband Scott, who would sooner jump into a leech-infested lake than get behind the wheel in Boston, can hand over the keys. Before long we find our worn, wooden seats along the third baseline and settle in for the evening.

As we munch our Fenway franks, sip our Sam Adams and juggle our stuff every few minutes to allow someone in or out, we let the pleasure of being at Fenway again sink into our bones.

“Welcome to America’s best-loved ballpark!”

What I find telling is that the announcer, in greeting the crowd, doesn’t say, “Welcome to the home of America’s best-loved ball team.” Fenway Park, and the game that’s been played there for 95 seasons, is what New England fans love. Except for the nasty year of the strike, fans have trusted that a bunch of guys wearing Red Sox jerseys will take to the field at 7:05 p.m. and play baseball.

Here’s the thing, though. It’s not always the same bunch of guys. Sure, we have our saints…down in the box in front of us I spy an old duffer wearing a Carlton Fisk jersey…and last year I saw a sad-looking woolen Yastrzemski jersey on a fellow whose face looked like he’d never quite gotten over Bucky Dent’s homer or the horror of watching the ball go between Bill Buckner’s legs. I’m not quite over them myself.

When I left the staff of the Diocese of Maine last year to downshift to a consulting role, our Canon to the Ordinary – to make me feel rotten – started addressing me as Pedro and signing her emails as Manny, a nod to Pedro Martinez’s departure to the Mets and the loss felt by his friend and countryman Manny Ramirez still in Boston. Players come and players go, but we fans love the game and we love the Red Sox beyond the individuals, even when they’re stars like Pedro or Nomar. It’s the game, it’s the team, it’s the park…and somehow the magic works even if you’ve never seen a game at Fenway.

With the Red Sox seven games ahead of both the New York Yankees and the Baltimore Orioles, whom we’re playing, I luxuriate in being able to enjoy the game without feeling like every pitch matters. Our American League East lead slows everything down. There is no rush; there is no pressure. The pleasure of being in the park on a lovely Spring evening with my husband and sons and with no drunken fans in close proximity is a gift. We lose, 6-3, our boys can’t hit the ball worth beans and the terrific fielding of the Orioles’ shortstop nixes a few promising opportunities. But so what? We’re in it for the long haul, both the 2007 season and for the rest of our lives.

One gorgeous spring morning nine years ago I sat on a hard pew in the nave of St. Luke’s Cathedral in Portland, Maine. A priest from Chicago named Chilton Knudsen was about to be consecrated Bishop. As one of our retired bishops passed the row in the processional, my neighbor, whom I’d met a few minutes before, whispered, “That’s my bishop.”

“What? Are you nuts?” I wanted to hiss back. “You can muster loyalty to only one bishop over the course of your whole life? Give her a chance! She doesn’t even have the mitre on her head yet and you already prefer a bishop who retired 13 years ago?”

That comment still worries me because the future of Christendom, specifically our Anglican brand, cannot depend on superstars or even supervillains. It should not depend on individuals at any level. The Body of Christ depends on people coming in and sitting on the same worn, wooden seats every Sunday – seats, like those at Fenway, that have borne witness to moments of profound joy and deep sadness; good singing and bad singing; restless children and restless souls.

As years pass, the priests, the altar guild ladies, the choir members, the acolytes and even the bishops enter and depart. The Church depends on our enduring and often exhausting faithfulness to Christ’s charge to love God with all of our hearts, minds, bodies and souls and to love those we encounter with the great passion and intensity we usually reserve for our lovers and our children and ourselves.

The demands of really living this kind of life…of really doing the work of the Gospel day in and day out… rarely allow us to luxuriate in the mystery of the liturgy or the beauty of the prayerbook language. How important it is to remember what a rare and magnificent thing it is to be a part of a vast and loving community that existed long before us and will extend far beyond us. If only we could keep such a vision before us.

At Fenway Park, that kind of crazy thinking is what makes the people over in the left field bleachers start a wave.

What could it do in the Episcopal Church? It’s impossible to say.

Heidi Shott is communications director of the Genesis Fund, a revolving loan fund that provides expertise and low-interest loans to nonprofits engaged in community development. Her essays about trying to live a life of faith may be found at Heidoville.

--------------------------------------------------
Reminder: At Episcopal Café, we hope to establish an ethic of transparency by requiring all contributors and commentators to make submissions under their real names. For more details see our Feedback Policy.

Sixty years ago tomorrow, Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color barrier.

You can visit Jackie's Hall of Fame page, read some of The New York Times' coverage of Robinson's career or peruse the package that MLB.com has put together for your edification.

The Philadelphia Daily News has a nice piece on Robinson's relationship with Brooklyn Dodgers' president Branch Rickey. But the best treatment I've read of Robinson's story is Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy by Jules Tygiel. Among its many strengths is Tygiel's understanding that the integration of baseball was the culmination of a lengthy campaign that involved not just Robinson, Rickey and some now-legendary black sportswriters, but black players and fans in minor league cities throughout the country. He's particularly good at illustrating the ways in which the struggle to integrate Major League Baseball served as a tactical trial run for the civil rights movement.

Updated: Nats lose 9-2, two starters injured. I think I've come up with this season's marketing campaign: Root for the Nats, because Lent just isn't long enough.

The Nats take on the Marlins this afternoon at RFK Stadium. John Patterson v. Dontrelle Willis. I will be on hand to make sure no spiritually or ecclesiastically significant developments go unnoticed.

As visitors to this site are no doubt aware, something entirely momentous will transpire next week.

Say the magic words:

Pitchers and catchers report.

Have a look at the countdown clock: 3 days, 18 hours and 27 minutes as I post. There's more news here. And all right-thinking people will want to catch up with the Sawx and the Nats.

Hat tip to AndrewPlus, another Sox fan, for the idea

Hall of Fame balloting results are in.

As some visitors know, I trod that well-worn career path from covering Major League Baseball to working for the Episcopal Church. With a few stops in between. One of those stops was at Beliefnet, where I wrote the column below on the theological significance of the 2000 World Series--the Subway Series, in which the New York Yankees played the New York Mets. As those two teams may meet once again this October, I thought I'd trot this piece out for another spin around the track. It begins:

All right-thinking individuals will acknowledge that the meeting of the Yankees and the Mets in the 2000 World Series was ordained by God before the dawn of time. Indeed, the game of baseball, the New York City transit system, and Bob Costas--though they have served well in other, unrelated capacities--were called into being solely to play their parts in the grand allegory that unfolded in the last ten days.

Click to keep reading.

Read more »

My 15-year-old son is a counselor at a wonderful baseball camp featured this morning on NPR.

One of the things I like most about this camp is that its director, John McCarthy, has proven that sports can be a vehicle for mission. Have a look at Beisbol y libros.

Expect only light percipitation over the holiday weekend.

... for Peter Gammons. He is a real gentleman, and a tender heart in a tough business.

Twenty years ago I covered the New York Mets for the Daily News in New York. They won the World Series that year, and 21-year-old Dwight "Doc" Gooden was the toast of the town, as he had been the previous season when he became the youngest person ever to win the Cy Young Award, going 24-4 with an earned run average of 1.53, 268 strike outs, 16 complete games and eight shutouts.

Gooden is in jail in Florida now, and as this heartbreaking if overwrought story in The New York Post makes clear, he is haunted by regret.

"I kept looking back to the day I got drafted out of high school [in 1982] and remembering all the joy," Gooden said. "Now I'm in this little box where two people couldn't fit in there. You keep asking yourself, 'What went wrong? What went wrong?' "

For me, his story, even more than that of his friend and former teammates Darryl Strawberry, is the ultimate cautionary tale of what can happen when life seemingly blesses you with too much, too soon. Those of us who covered him thought of Gooden as baseball's Mozart, because he was so gifted, and had seemingly harnessed his gifts at such an early age. (He went 17-9 with a 2.60 ERA and 276 strikeouts at the age of 19.)

But he was a shy kid who once told me that the first time the Mets flew him to New York (just after the 1982 draft, I think) he was so frightened by the big city that he stayed in his room at a hotel near LaGuarida Airport and peered out the fish eye in his door for a good long time even before admitting the waiters who were bringing him his room service meals. No matter how fast he threw the ball, or how sharply his curve broke, or how much poise he showed on the mound, he wasn't ready to be the most famous athlete in the largest media market in the country. And like many people who find themselves traveling extensively at a young age, he wasn't ready for life on the road.

Gooden was on the cover of Time during the week that the season opened in April of 1986. But there were already signs that something was going wrong. He missed a spring training game because of a fender bender. Later, he and his girlfriend got into a spat with a clerk while returning a rental car. And though he was the starting pitcher in the All-Star game that season, he didn’t look like the same pitcher. The numbers were still very good—17-6, 2.84 ERA, 12 complete games—but sports editors around town began urging their reporters to find out what we could about Gooden’s personal life. I can remember sitting in various bars, known as players’ hangouts, wondering if he would come in, but he seldom did. If you hung around the Mets that season, you had a sense that maybe Strawberry’s ability to suck down gin and tonics deep enough to drown in might land him in trouble. But Gooden, despite the off-the-field dust-ups, always seemed as though he were more under control, and that he learned a lesson from that pair of highly publicized run-ins. (I can remember, after the rent-a-car thing, him saying that he felt like he needed to move all of his furniture into the clubhouse and just live there.)

As it turns out, Gooden didn’t begin using cocaine until after the ’86 season. Had that not happened, I think the conversation about his decline as a pitcher would have focused on whether he had pitched too many innings at too young an age—834 before his 22d birthday. Perhaps something could have been done about that.

As it was, he tested positive for cocaine before the 1987 season and entered rehab. I had moved to Washington by then, so I don’t know what he was like when he came back to the game. Despite everything he and early fame did to him, he still had a remarkable career, but a miserable life, and this most recent chapter just breaks your heart if you knew him when he was barely out of high school and had New York City at this feet.

Click if you'd like to read a piece I wrote for The Washington Post when he went into rehab.

Read more »

Those of you who have followed the Apostle Paul and set your mind on higher things may already be aware that the Washington Nationals returned to RFK Stadium tonight. Sure it was only an exhibition game, and sure they lost 9-6 to a team wearing uniforms that made them look like cheese puffs with racing stripes (the Baltimore Orioles) but baseball is back. And, regardless of the litiurgical season, that deserves an Alleluia.