Covering all of the bases
Revisiting a column from Easter past:
If we paid clergy as much as we pay baseball players, would we expect them to pray hurt?
This thought occurred to me when I realized some years ago that the start of baseball season and Easter often come within days of each other, and this year is no exception. And no matter what set of beliefs you may hold, you’ll have to admit that Easter and Opening Day have lots in common.
For example, on both Opening Day and Easter, the seats of their respective arenas are clogged with people who come out only twice a year – to church on Easter and Christmas, to the ballpark on Opening Day and Closing Day. Most of the spectators on these days may grasp the basic rules of the game but probably need a roster to tell the players apart. This is particularly true in many of today’s mega-churches, which have so many pastors and services that the clergy have to coordinate to make sure that the pastor in one service isn’t forgiving a sin that the pastor in another service spent 25 minutes condemning.
I was about 6 years old and still dazzled by both baseball and church when I first noticed how much the two intertwine. The initial connection I made was obvious – Sunday’s a big day for each. When was about 10, I found the final parallel.
My family belonged to a denomination begat by Southern Baptists, and sermons routinely ran 45 minutes but sometimes went into extra innings. One Sunday, in the bottom of the 10th, it became obvious that though the starting preacher still had his stuff, he was tiring. So they brought in a relief preacher. And he got the save – a man who bolted to the front of the sanctuary, knelt down and professed faith. “Church is just like baseball!” I thought. And nothing I’ve seen since then has shaken my faith in that observation.
In fact, about the only differences I’ve discovered between baseball and religion are that, in church, everyone roots for the home team, and churchgoers trying to get out of the parking lot are much more surly than baseball fans doing the same. This, and I’ve never seen a pew-clearing brawl.
I’ll admit that most of this is only my opinion. So let me balance things with revealing what I learned about religion from the players themselves. I first ran my baseball-religion hypothesis past a friend who had a divinity degree but was working as a religion editor. I’d come up with some pretty interesting parallels, he allowed, yet he pointed out that even well-paid people of the cloth might only make about $80,000 a year. At the time, Major League Baseball’s minimum yearly starting salary was $100,000. Strike one. But then he told me that in some cases, pastors seeking a new position are required to preach at a neutral church so the selection committee from the prospective new church will not be unduly influenced by the congregation of the old. Now, to me, that’s a preachoff (playoff). Home run!
Not much later, I received final confirmation of my baseball-cum-religion theory from two Catholic priests I interviewed. After they had described the fulfilling aspects of their jobs, I asked them to outline a few of the hazards of being a priest.
“If we mess up,” the younger of the pair told me, smiling, “the bishop will reassign us to New Castle.” In other words, “the manager (bishop) will send us down (reassign) to the minors (New Castle).” And sure enough, he did, in fact, find himself at a small parish outside New Castle a few years later. He’s in AAA (Cranberry Township) now.
Since then, I’ve been trying to determine which league (denomination) has correctly interpreted the ground rules. Raised a Protestant, since coming of age I have attempted to cover all the bases by attending services in Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist, Catholic, Anglican and non-denominational churches and by studying Buddhism and other disciplines. That’s because even with a program, all the players look about the same to me.
But the Catholics sure do have the best uniforms.