How to Love Baseball: A Moral Appeal

Meditations on This Game of Peace

It’s the long winter before Spring training, and once again, I’m going to try to pay attention to baseball well. Since being a parent, and lacking regular access to cable, it’s difficult, but I’m hopeful now that both kids will be playing this Spring, I have an excuse to spring for an MLB subscription and fall asleep in the evening watching a game.¹ I’m a fairly ardent defender of baseball as being not only the best sport, but the most virtuous sport. As Stanley Hauerwas, retired Christian ethicist, put it in a letter to his godson:

One of the practices of patience I hope you’ll want to develop is called baseball.  Baseball is America’s greatest gift to civilization. It is a slow game of failure.  If you win half the time, that’s considered very good.  Not only that, but a game takes nine innings, and the season is very long.  During a game it often seems that little is happening.  Of course this is true only for those who don’t understand the game.  It takes extended training in patience to be a baseball fan because you must acquire the habits that allow you to see how compelling and beautiful this game of peace is. ²

There it is, in unapologetic terms: baseball as the gateway to virtue. One must patient, okay with failure, attentive—these are not virtue itself but the path there.

Like anything that makes us more virtuous, it changes, and not always for the better. One need not be a purist to say that the game shouldn’t experience change: I’m actually okay with the designated hitter rule, and fine with limiting the number of pickoff attempts a pitcher can make per batter. I’m worried about the new pitch clock, which will speed up the game significantly, as well as about the loss of the outfield shift. If you’re not a baseball follower, these terms mean nothing to you, and it all looks like boredom regardless of how you slice it.

And it’s not as if baseball hasn’t had its very public set of scandals in the last twenty years: there’s a reason why Barry Bonds—who has more home runs than anyone in history—and Alex Rodriguez—who produced more offense than any shortstop ever—will never be in the Hall of Fame.³ It’s a very human game, after all, like all games: Dominican leagues which feed into the American minor leagues ruthlessly underpay their players; for every Roberto Clemente who dies on a humanitarian relief mission, there’s a Lenny Dykstra, mired in grand theft auto and fraud.

What I’m saying is this: if you’re asking whether or not playing baseball makes you a better person, a more virtuous person, you’re asking the wrong question.

And importantly, baseball alone won’t make you more virtuous: around here, you can tell when baseball season has started by the number of families missing in church on Sunday for travel games. It has a way, unlike other organized sports, of subsuming the preparation and attention of its players. It’s a sport of obsession and, thus, of ambition, and thus, of vice. Do you see whole businesses where people go in to practice their sideline throws for soccer, or their blocking for football? And yet, batting cages will never die.

But all of this malformation that happens in the professionalization of the sport—the ways in which it gets mired in controversies and becomes a hellscape of self-inflicted wounds with strikes, walkouts, and changes no one asked for—the game itself remains exactly what Hauerwas says: “this beautiful game of peace”. It is a game in which nothing happens for an hour, and then everything happens, and you have to keep paying attention to not miss it. It is a game in which the lowly can be heroes, and in which the powerful can be dethroned, where the longsuffering can find relief and where generational team curses cannot be effaced by landing a superstar in offseason free agency.

And in these clashes of good and evil, this thing remains: everyone playing is playing with excellence, and the fans know it, even when we lose. If your team gets beaten, it’s partly because the umps are blind, and partly because Rivera really was that good, like it or not. If Andre Dawson hit one out, it was partly because our pitcher was out of control and because Dawson had one of the best swings the Cubs have ever had. Baseball is a sport of begrudging acknowledgment of excellence even when you’re losing.

And that kind of excellence doesn’t just happen: it requires patience, habit, and the willingness to lose a lot in service to being better. Some baseball players, like Roger Maris, become pure technicians in the pursuit of excellence, sacrificing a well-rounded game for the one thing: to hit home runs. But some, like the aforementioned Andre Dawson, will slowly build a good career that is recognized as a great one by slugging it out in less than desirable circumstances.

The Willingness to Be Better-than-Average

I’m using Dawson here to talk about baseball’s excellence as Hauerwas describes it, not because he’s one of the household greats, but because it’s disputed as to whether or not he even deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, to be one of the exemplars of baseball excellence at all. His final batting average was below .300; he had less than 3,000 hits in his career, and less than 500 home runs. Despite being one of only five players ever to hit 300 home runs and steal 300 bases in his career, and despite being marquis player for two of the most lackluster teams in his era—the Chicago Cubs and Montreal Expos⁴—his numbers were all good, but not great.

No one mentions Dawson in the same breath with the greatest outfielders to ever play. But Dawson, over 22 years, played with consistent excellence, and won his only Most Valuable Player award while playing on the last-place Cubs.⁵ It is not for this combination of excellence on a terrible team that makes Dawson praiseworthy, but that he continued to play excellently despite how awful they were. All of this meant that Dawson’s potential was muted, had less support than it should, and thus, that his presence in the Hall will always be debated by those who care enough to debate these things.

But this is part of the virtue of baseball: that we do things well over a long period of time, and in less than ideal circumstances. One could say the same thing about lots of other sports, but this is the distinction: for baseball, the long-period-of-timeness, the slowness, is part of the point. The homeruns are the carrot on the stick, and the sideline mascot races are the entry point to get you in the front door, but you stay because of the slow excellence. You stay because it’s patient craft, and you’d better pay attention or you’ll miss the electricity when it happens.

1. I am always open to patronage for this goal, or just patronage in general.

2. The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), 83-84

3. I am willing to bet a not-insignificant amount of money on this claim. Baseball loves a comeback, but its tolerance for cheaters only extends to the sneaky ones: runners who take an extra stride in their lead off of first base, pitchers who can get away with a spitball. These fall under the heading of “shrewd” or “crafty”, but players who ballooned up with steroids during the BALCO scandal years have had their reward.

4. He’s in the Hall of Fame in an Expos uniform. I only knew him as a Cubs player from watching endless numbers of games on WGN, because WGN, for some reason, was a part of every basic cable package in the 1980s and 90s.

5. This remains the only time this the award has ever worked out this way.