Baseball is back! It is perhaps appropriate that a column on the topic should come out on April Fools’ Day, because Major League Baseball has of late made a bit of a mockery of its traditional April beginning. This year, the season began in Tokyo on the absurdly early day of March 18, an abomination to traditionalists but a boon to baseball’s bottom line: Over 25 million Japanese fans—a fifth of the country’s population—tuned in to watch Shohei Ohtani and my Los Angeles Dodgers rough up the Chicago Cubs.
Starting the season so early can have difficult consequences for everyone—not least due to the arctic-level temperatures experienced at many stadiums this time of year. But the return of baseball is also a harbinger of so much that is good: longer days, better weather, new hopes in the hearts of diehard fans everywhere. Is this the year?!? That was the case last year for Dodger fans, from Opening Day through the World Series; and no, I wasn’t a jerk about it at all.
America’s editorial offices are traditionally no hotbed of sports talk—the leading entry in our March Madness pool this year is a 23-year-old woman who titled her bracket “What is Basketball”—but the editors over the years have made an exception in our pages for baseball. Former editors in chief like George W. Hunt, S.J., Matt Malone and Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J., were all devotees of the national pastime.
Father O’Hare used to tell of a trip to Yankee Stadium with Cardinal Maria Martini, S.J., the famous Italian biblical scholar and archbishop of Milan from 1980 to 2004. After observing the game in silence for many innings, Cardinal Martini turned to O’Hare and said: “Now I see. Most games center on the question of time; yours here centers on the question of space.”
Another longtime contributor to America, James “Deej” DiGiacomo, S.J., actually taught his high school students to sing “Meet the Mets” in Latin: “Occurrite Mettibus, occurrite Mettibus/ Veniamus, occurramus Mettibus,” etc.
Perhaps my favorite baseball reference in America comes from the magazine’s early years. In a 1926 compendium of advice for clergy, the famed “Hollywood Priest,” Daniel A. Lord, S.J., wrote that it was okay to be good-looking, but not overmuch:
Of course the minister should be attractive. But if he attracts them to himself and not to Christ, he may as well be a popular movie-star or Babe Ruth fresh from a home run.
In 1992, the Rev. Clyde F. Crews penned an essay for America on “The Metaphysics of Baseball,” the sort of think-piece that only a Catholic could write. A priest and a theology professor from Bellarmine College (now Bellarmine University) in Louisville, Ky., Father Crews noted the importance of Opening Day as a quasi-sacramental moment in our civic life:
Everywhere the ancient rites of spring are being enacted: Americans line up at tax preparation centers; suburban power-mower blades are honed to a fine sharpness, and the crack of the bat is heard throughout the American land. Baseball season is upon us. The “national pastime” has occasioned more intellectual rumination than any other athletic endeavor in American—perhaps even world—history. Intellectuals and sports writers have turned the metaphysical implications of the game into something of a cottage industry.
Baseball may no longer have much credibility when it claims to be the national pastime—it seems that football and caring about Taylor Swift have stolen that crown—but it’s still a part of our DNA. In fact, as Father Crews pointed out, “no less a personage than Herbert Hoover pontificated that ‘next to religion, baseball has furnished a greater impact on American life than any other institution.’” And who has anything bad to say about Herbert Hoover?
No one waxed poetic on the topic of baseball in America’s pages more or better than George W. Hunt, S.J. (well, maybe his friends Bart Giamatti and Fay Vincent, both America contributors and the last two real commissioners of the sport). Father Hunt began a 1982 omnibus review of 13 books (that’s not a typo) on baseball with the following:
In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of baseball. True, by mid-September all passionate investment either has gone unrequited or has issued in recrimination and regret. No matter. Every bartender knows that only baseball and love are eternal, that talk is of the essence of both, as is the virtue of hope.
The review is full of other bon mots, some spicier than others. Of the endless Yankee dramas of the 1970s and 1980s among George Steinbrenner, Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin, “hardly colossi on the world’s stage,” Hunt wrote: “Now, years mercifully later, their conflict reads like a ménage à trois in a sandbox, childish and charmless.” Of Ron Luciano’s memoir The Umpire Strikes Back (which I loved as a kid), he noted that “I never believed one word in it; this is a series of yarns made out of whole cloth (pardon that), and I suspect Luciano had little to do with it, at least when sober.”
You get away with more, this writer notes, when you’re the editor in chief.
Recent years have added to America’s trove of writings on the Grand Old Game, including reviews of books where baseball legends loom unexpectedly large—as in Valerie Sayers’s usage of a pensive and saturnine Joe DiMaggio in 1941 to frame her 2013 novel The Powers, or Don DeLillo’s set-piece on the (cheating) 1951 New York Giants that opens his 1997 novel Underworld.
In 2019, Jill O’Brien reviewed Joe Bonomo’s chronicle of Roger Angell’s lifetime of baseball writing, No Place I Would Rather Be. Angell, she wrote, was able to “transcend the limitations of more quantitative sports writing in order to show us why we should care about baseball. Its timeless sounds soothe and excite us, and our peculiar love for the game and its rhythms unites us, briefly freeing us from the travails of our daily lives and the punishing news cycle.” Why do we still love baseball, O’Brien asked? “We are released into the ‘great green country’ patrolled by our heroes and antiheroes alike, each ready for the next arcing singularity that may come their way. What a blessed relief!”
And if you really want to get nostalgic, you can read about the founding of baseball in John W. Miller’s 2021 review of How Baseball Happened, by Thomas W. Gilbert. If John’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he has a New York Times bestseller out at the moment, and yes, it’s on baseball. The Last Manager is a biography of the legendary Baltimore Orioles skipper Earl Weaver. You can read Clayton Trutor’s review for America here.
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Our poetry selection for this week is “The Organist,” by Laura Trimble. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
- The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
- Doris Grumbach, L.G.B.T. pioneer and fearless literary critic
- What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
- Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
- Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
