In my Brooklyn childhood, we had a useful convention called the “do-over.” If, in our games of stickball and slap, some fluke of fate altered the outcome of a play—a car, for example, that suddenly roared down the street and prevented a fielder from getting to a bouncing Spaldeen—someone would call, “Do-over!” And we started over, as if what happened hadn’t. We have now entered the blessed season of the do-over: spring, Easter, Passover, baseball’s Opening Day. This week, every team began a new season with a fresh start, cleansed of last year’s failures and frustrations (see Best columns: The U.S.). Hope, like the sounds of birdsong and bats thwacking baseballs, is in the air.
In a new book, audaciously titled Baseball as a Road to God, NYU President John Sexton makes plain what legions of writers have previously implied: Our national pastime can have a “sacred” dimension, with the power to connect its fans to certain “ineffable” truths. Non-fans may roll their eyes, but Sexton—a Catholic believer with a doctorate in religion—makes his case with depth and subtlety, bringing Thomas Aquinas, Paul Tillich, and the Bhagavad Gita into the conversation. Baseball, he says, “evokes in the life of its faithful features we associate with the spiritual life: faith and doubt, conversion, blessings and curses, miracles…. On some majestic summer days, the many who assemble are one.” On those best of days, we fans of the Mets, Red Sox, Cubs, et al. can know transcendence and redemption. More often, our daily devotion instructs us in suffering, and endurance in the face of loss. And every spring, we get a do-over. Life is hard. We all need do-overs.
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