“Sermon on the Mound”
By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto
Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church
Des Moines, Washington
April 2, 2006
I’ve had an on-again-off-again relationship with baseball throughout my life.
Like the parents of many children, mine thought it would be a good thing for me to participate in organized sports, and so starting at the age of six, every summer they signed me up to play baseball.
Never mind that their oldest child had terrible hand-eye-coordination, wasn’t very fast, was usually the worst player on the team, never felt successful, and never had fun, since I was always stuck far in right field and at the bottom of the batting order. My parents thought playing baseball would be good for me.
(I remember one coach had me play so far out in the outfield that I stayed out there for several innings because I couldn’t see when the inning was over, which was fine with me anyway.)
By the age of nine, however, I had grown up enough and grown tired enough of middle-aged male coaches living out their own failed athletic fantasies through the lives of young boys and interested only in nurturing a team’s star players, that I stood up to my parents and told them I was quitting the baseball team they had signed me up for that summer.
I thought I was more or less done with baseball, but I was wrong.
You see, at the age of 15, I was offered a job at the local newspaper covering high school and college sports, mostly baseball. While I was never good playing baseball, I wasn’t bad writing about it. Besides, being paid for writing anything when you’re 15 is heady. So I spent countless spring and summer afternoons as a teenager sitting in the stands of a baseball game and then hurrying back to the newspaper office to write my story for the next day’s paper.
I liked writing about sports, especially baseball, but I also yearned to do something “more serious,” and so when I was a few years older, I asked my editors at the local newspaper, where I continued to work during vacations throughout college, if I could start writing “news,” and they said yes.
I thought I was more or less done with baseball, but I was wrong.
You see, there’s really no way to know that you’re marrying a baseball fanatic until it’s too late. I suppose there were signs along the way. It was Hiromi who took me to my first baseball game in Japan. (If you’re wondering, baseball in Japan is about the same as baseball in the United States once you get used to eating fried octopus balls instead of peanuts, popcorn, and crackerjack.) It was also Hiromi who insisted, when I was in search of my first congregation to serve as a minister, that it be near a city with a good Major League Baseball team.
And so it is that at least several times a year I find myself seated next to my spouse either watching the Seattle Mariners play at Safeco Field or watching the Tacoma Rainier’s, a Minor League team affiliated with the Mariners, play at Cheney Stadium.
When the Mariners begin their season against the Los Angeles Angels tomorrow on Opening Day, Hiromi and I will both be there.
I don’t want to give the wrong impression here. While I will never be the fan that my spouse is, my attendance at these games extends beyond the duties of spousal obligation.
You see, over the years, I’ve come to have a deeper appreciation for the game of baseball myself, both for the game itself and for what it can teach us about life.
What can baseball teach us about life?
Here’s one thing that becoming a fan of baseball has helped me with.
We live in a world where life seems like such deadly serious business so much of the time, and in such a world, there is something nearly absurd about tens of thousands of people paying money to gather together on a sunny afternoon and watch a group of fully-grown adult men chasing a small white ball around an exquisitely manicured plot of sand and grass while being paid millions of dollars to do so.
In a world that is fraught with so much unnecessary suffering, injustice, and violence, aren’t there better things that we could be doing with our time, our money, and our energy? Doesn’t it all seem so scandalously frivolous?
And my answer is, yes, it absolutely does. But one thing I’ve come to believe is that without a little scandalous frivolity every once in a while, I believe we are each in danger of being overcome by the deadly seriousness of life, of giving in to grumbling about its grimness.
For me, baseball is a necessary antidote to the deadly serious business of life. Sitting in the stands at a baseball game is a reminder that the ultimate purpose of our lives to enjoy them, and that if we don’t occasionally, we are most likely doing something wrong. “Eat, drink, and be merry,” the Hebrew scripture tells us, “for tomorrow we die,” and baseball gives me the chance to do that.
Baseball reminds me that there are at least some times in our lives that the most important and more urgent thing we can do with our lives is sit in the sun, cold drink in one hand, over-priced hot dog in the other, and root, root, root for some over-paid player sliding head first into second base.
I’ve also come to believe that the game of baseball itself can teach us at least a few good life lessons.
What do I mean?
For example, think about this. What’s the batting average of the best hitters in professional baseball? Usually the best hitters in professional baseball usually have a batting average between .300 and .400. That means that the very best of the players only reach first base only one out of three times, if that. That means that most players, most of the time, fail in the batter’s box.
Failing is never easy, and I can’t imagine failing in front of tens of thousands of fans makes it any easier. And yet, that’s what the very best hitters do. They repeatedly fail as tens of thousands of people watch. Every time a batter steps into the batter’s box, some part of his brain has to know, “Most likely, I’m not going to get a hit. Most likely, I’m going to fail.” And yet he steps into that batter’s box anyway. And swings. And most often, he strikes out or grounds out or flies out. Sometime he gets lucky and gets a walk. And only sometimes does he get a hit.
I don’t think baseball players are particular paragons of moral virtue, but there is something admirable about stepping into that batter’s box again and again, perhaps something we can all learn from.
You see, most us avoid situations in which we are likely to fail. I know I do more often than I should, telling myself that the risk of failure, the risk of humiliating myself in front of others isn’t worthy the small possibility of success. I suspect I’m not alone in this.
I wonder what would happen, however, if more of us lived our lives accepting our failures more gracefully, recognizing that many times, maybe even most of the time, we will fail when we try something difficult, but also recognizing that if we don’t keep on stepping into the batter’s box and keep on swinging at whatever opportunities and challenges life throws us, we’ll spend our lives sitting on the bench and never make it to wherever we’re trying to go.
Here’s something else that I think baseball teaches us about life: It’s hard to score by yourself.
Of course, it can be done. You can hit a home run, which, even with steroids, is not an easy thing to do. Or, you can get a single, then steal second, third, and home, which is even harder. (In the entire history of Major League Baseball, it’s only been done 48 times, most recently in 1996.) But most runs in baseball are scored when a runner comes home off another player’s hit. Sometimes a player is even encouraged to hit a sacrifice fly or a sacrifice bunt, giving up a chance at individual success to benefit the common good of his team.
Contrary to this, we live in a society that encourages us to succeed individually, through our own independent efforts, even sometimes telling us that depending on others is a sign of weakness. We live in a society that tells us our own individual success is more important than the common good of the society in which we live.
As a result, I think a lot of us are hesitant to depend on others.
I think depending on others is especially hard for Unitarian Universalists. I was recently reading something by the Unitarian Universalist minister Forrest Church who says that Unitarian Universalists are less like to be “co-dependent” than they are to be “counter-dependent,” meaning that a lot of us will reject reaching out for help even when it may be a really, really good idea.
I can’t help but wonder if most of our lives wouldn’t be a lot easier if we started thinking of our individual lives more like a baseball game, acknowledging that it’s almost impossible for us to “score” completely on our own and thus be more willing to depend on our teammates in life to get us to where we want to go. I also can’t help but wonder what would happen if more people in our society would finally realize that their own success had less to do with their individual efforts than they think.
(I once heard one wit say of George W. Bush that he’s a man that was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.)
Finally and perhaps most importantly, I think baseball can also teach us something about hope.
Now if you’re a fan of some teams, hope may not be that important a virtue. For example, if you’re a New York Yankees fan, you’re probably much more in need of humility than hope.
However, for fans of other teams, hope is a prerequisite.
For example, any Boston Red Sox fan can tell you about the importance of hope.
You see, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series in 1918, and went 86 years, until 2004, before winning another.
Similarly, any baseball fan from Chicago can also tell you about the importance of hope. The Chicago White Sox went from 1917 until last year before World Series wins. That’s 88 years of not winning.
And of course, fans of the Chicago Cubs, the losingest team in baseball, who have failed to win a World Series since 1908, and have failed to go to the World Series since 1945, no more about sustaining hope than anybody else.
When the great 20th century Protestant theologian Reinhold Neihbur wrote that, “Nothing worth doing can be achieved in a single lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope,” he wasn’t talking about the Chicago Cubs, but he could have been. My grandfather was a Cubs fan. My father and his siblings were Cubs fans. My siblings and I were raised as Cubs fan. And now my brother’s children are being raised as Cubs fans. That’s four generations.
But what gives baseball fans hope?
I think it’s this. Baseball, more than any other sport, is a game of numbers and statistics. There are more statistics kept in baseball than in any other sport. But any good baseball fan knows that statistics don’t guarantee anything for any player or any team. Last year’s statistics offer no certainties about this year’s season. Like people say in those investment commercials, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
And tomorrow every team in Major League Baseball starts with a clean slate. Every player steps to the plate for the first time with a fresh start. Last year is over. It’s over for the World Series champion Chicago White Sox. It’s over for the prideful “We’ll buy our way out of any mess we get ourselves into” New York Yankees.” It’s over for the American-League-West-last-place Seattle Mariners. Nothing that happened last year counts for anything tomorrow. Tomorrow is a fresh start for all those teams. When Jaimie Moyer throws that first pitch tomorrow afternoon at Safeco Field, it’s the start of a whole new season, and when Ichiro Suzuki steps to the plate to lead off for the Mariners, that’s a new beginning too.
And when you think about things like that, you can’t but help be a little bit hopeful.
I want to suggest it’s also not a bad way to think about our own lives. Because it’s not just a new season for Major League baseball. Spring is finally here, and it’s a new season in all of our lives.
Whatever happened to us last year, last moth, last week is over. And tomorrow is a new day, a new week, a new month, a new season. It’s a clean slate. And while what we’ve done in the past with our lives might help us and others offer statistically-based predictions about what may happen in the future, there are no certainties.
For the every Major League Baseball team, and for each us, there are only possibilities, and what we choose to do with those possibilities.
Let me finish this morning with words from a colleague, the Unitarian Universalist minister Roger Cowan:
May we all be free from error and stay within life’s basebaths.’ May we not strike out at others not balk at what is set before us…And may, at last, we all be safe at home.
So may it be. Amen.