sla book review: rounding the bases

rounding the bases

Reviewed by Brett Conway, Namseoul University, South Korea

OCTOBER 10, 2006 archive

Rounding the Bases

In late August 2006, the visiting New York Yankees swept a five game series against the Boston Red Sox in Fenway Park. The Pinstripes' victory pulled them seven games up of Boston, effectively ending the Sox's quest for the division title, one that seemed theirs for the taking earlier in the season. How could this happen again? Wasn't the Yankees' supremacy ove the Red Sox - namely the Curse of Ruth - ruled null and void in 2004 when the Beantown boys made their nearly unprecedented comeback against their tormentors, turning a 3-0 series deficit into a 4-3 win? The Yankee's sweep could lead to only one conclusion: the jinx was back! Although this leap of logic may have little to do with reason, a new book about religion and baseball blesses such a jump. As Joseph L. Price writes in his new book Rounding the Bases: Baseball and Religion in America, my saying the curse is back is no more than "attributing causation to correlation" (103). What's that? Although my faith can be put to a logical test and found fallible, I am, as Price points out through Christian philosopher Paul Tillich, in the grip of faith: "faith is the matter being grasped by an ultimate concern" (172). My thoughts transcend logic. Now that my infallible fallible logic has been proved sound and valid, let's play ball.

Rounding the Bases covers many points where baseball and religion intersect. From the outcry for and against it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the House of David, both a traveling baseball team, with players sporting messiah drag, long hair, and mosaic beards, and a religious cult with interesting sexual practices, to baseball's cosmology and curses and grip on the American psyche, and to fictional and personal narratives of baseball, Price offers a readable, usually interesting, and sometimes compelling portrait of this American game that often seems as much about unquestionable faith as about balls and strikes.

For the baseball fan and scholar, many interesting tidbits abound in this volume: the assertion from a Mississippi editor of a Baptist newspaper in the late nineteenth century that baseball is "murderous," "more brutal than a bull-fight, more reprehensible than a prize-fight, and more deadly than modern warfare" (16), the details of how deeply entrenched religion is in the clubhouse of contemporary baseball teams with "Clubhouse Worship Services" (29-30), and the idea that losing baseball teams reflect "great tenets of faith in established traditions, wherein the faithful gather hope for life or existence beyond the seemingly final defeat of death" (135) or as this Blue Jays fan yelled in mid-September, "wait 'til next year." Covering faith in baseball from the earthly to the ethereal, Price details the presence of religion both inside and outside the game. The clearest but most tantalizing chapter is chapter three, "The Pitcher's Mound as Cosmic Mountain." This chapter might change the way readers of this book watch the game. In it, Price outlines baseball as an enclosed universe. Its center, the pitcher's mound, is the navel of the world, a spot from which the pitcher begins time by throwing the baseball. Surrounded by the four points of the compass and facing the plate in the south, the pitcher must create with his pitch and defeat the force of destruction, the batter. The batter attempts to destroy the harmony of the world by blasting the ball (another sphere representing the world) out of the park. The binary of pitcher and batter find complements in others: safe or out, ball or strike, win or lose, foul or fair, fielding or batting and so on. With the shape of its playing field and the rules of the game, baseball, Price argues, doesn't need us to give it value. It is inherently worthwhile: it is its own field of dreams, an alpha and omega in itself. Or in other words, in the beginning was the pitch and the pitch was good. This chapter is a page turner, yet I wonder whether Price is putting too much of a wedge between the ideas of creation and destruction. After all, the batter is trying to "create" a chance for runners to score and the pitcher is trying to "destroy" the batter, by putting him "out." William Blake once said that John Milton writing Paradise Lost was on the side of Satan whose transgressive actions made all that is human, so I would like to think that offense also adds something positive to the game. Babe Ruth, after all, saved baseball from the taint of the Black Sox scandal by hitting home runs. This criticism does not take away from the terrific chapter, but I wonder where Price would have taken his argument had he considered this idea.

Price has a lot of information in this volume and in order to make his case of the connection between religion and baseball, he sometimes fails to consider the ramifications of his material. For example, he talks of "baseball team owners … turning to prayer as a market opportunity" (42). This seems to undermine the pure relationship between religion and baseball and make it instead something imposed, but Price doesn't look at this. He also quotes a sports columnist to argue that baseball doesn't change its rules. But hasn't Price heard of the DH rule, inter-league play, and pitcher's mound - the navel itself - moving closer to the earth? Given his uncritical stance, it is fitting that one of Price's last examples is from the Hollywood movie, The Fan. In the film, the main character played by Robert De Niro says, "baseball is better than life. It's fair." Of course, the De Niro character is a stalker trying to help his hero, the baseball player played by Wesley Snipes, to be the best he can be and using whatever means he can - foul or fair - to achieve this end. He murders a teammate and a home plate umpire in the process. This example shows that Price too often accepts baseball as a force of good and that he often ducks distracting issues, such as saying something is "fair" when it is in fact "unfair." In fact, the American Game has never really been fair. It has had its share of cheats and crooks. It endures steroid scandals, rumors of juiced balls, and players being called before congressional hearings. It suffers many dark clouds occluding the success of its best players: Pete Rose, Barry Bonds, and now Roger Clemens. I would like to know how faith in baseball erases these problems. Does faith conquer all? Or for all its purity, does baseball (from its roots, through the Black Sox, until now and beyond) also represent sin?

These convergences of American baseball and religion with issues of capitalism, crime, guilt, greed, and sin should be examined. Price's book does not looked at these issues, but it is well researched, fun to read, and a great starting point for anyone hoping to work on such a project. This book may not hit a homerun, but it should still be cheered - as one would a stand up double.

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