People of the Book
A Blog about Book Publishing from a Catholic Perspective

The Boston Red Sox won the World Series last night, the third four-game sweep of the series in the last four years. It was a splendid season. We now face the looming cold gray months with only football to divert us. Some years ago, when the World Series ended three weeks earlier than it does today, Bart Giamatti, former Yale president and baseball commissioner, wrote this elegy for baseball:

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come out, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.

“You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

“Today, October 2nd, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.”

A reader of this blog writes to object to a recent baseball post: “Barry Bonds’ ball has no place in a forum for spirituality,” she complains.

O but it does. Baseball and spirituality are hopelessly entangled. Consider the spiritual lessons learned by Detroit Tigers fans. Our heroes were in the World Series last year. Sunday afternoon they will go home, out of the playoffs. They are the fifth-best team in the American League, and their fans are all disappointed.

Expectations were high at the beginning of the season, and for three months the team played very well. Then, in mid-July, they began to falter. Some of it was bad luck: eleven pitchers were on the disabled list for part of the season. Some of it was age: former stars couldn’t get around on the high fastball any more. Some of it seemed to be that old cliche “lack of concentration.” The Tigers lost and lost again. By early September, an ugly truth was apparent: at least four teams in the American League were better than the Tigers.

It’s a metaphor for the human condition: great expectations and impressive talent followed by mediocre performance and ultimate defeat. Don’t tell me that baseball doesn’t belong on a spirituality blog.

But there’s hope. We’ll watch some terrific baseball in the playoffs and World Series. And there’s next year. The Tigers will be better, and the Yankees and Indians might be worse. I’ll end with Terence Mann’s speech from the movie Field of Dreams:

“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again.”

The ball that Barry Bonds hit to break Hank Aaron’s career home run record will be branded with an asterisk and given to the Hall of Fame. The owner of the ball allowed fans to vote on the ball’s fate. Nearly half wanted to brand it. Background here. The Hall of Fame will accept the ball. “We’re happy to get it,” said Hall of President Dale Petroskey.

Fashion designer Marc Ecko paid $750,000 at auction for the baseball that Barry Bonds hit to break Hank Aaron’s record of 755 career home runs. Bonds’ dinger was a bitter moment for many fans. He’s widely suspected of using illegal steroid drugs to transform himself from a skinny, fast outfielder with good power into a hulking, muscle-bound slugger.

Ecko has decided to let fans decide what to do with the home run ball. He’s set up a website that lets fans vote on three options: 1). give the ball to the Hall of Fame; 2). brand the ball with a big asterisk and then give it to the Hall of Fame; 3). shoot it into outer space. Vote here.

I voted for the asterisk. You have to acknowledge Barry’s accomplishment, but it’s a questionable feat. In my opinion, anyway.

Are the Tigers headed for the World Series again? I hope so. Even if they fall short, this catch last Sunday by centerfielder Curtis Granderson will long be remembered.

Last Tuesday, the baseball gods blessed Justin Verlander. The 24-year-old Tigers right-hander pitched a no-hitter against the Milwaukee Brewers. I don’t watch too many Tigers games on television from beginning to end, but I happened to catch this one from the first pitch (a strike) to last (an 0-2 curve that J. J. Hardy lifted to Magglio Ordonez in right for the last out in the ninth, the twenty-seventh batter that Verlander retired without a hit). Bless the light schedule that allowed this indulgence of TV watching.

Every fan dreams of seeing a no-hitter. It represents the ultimate accomplishment in baseball, perhaps in all of sports. The pitcher is by far the most important player on the field (“Ninety percent of the game is half pitching,” said Yogi Berra), and the heart of the game is the mano-a-mano contest between pitcher and batter, usually an exquisitely balanced one (“Good pitching will always beat good hitting – and vice versa,” said Berra another time). A no-hitter is the pitcher’s complete mastery of this contest with batters. Verlander dominated. He struck out 12 Brewers, and many others were fortunate to get enough wood on one of his pitches to ground it weakly to an infielder. Still, for all his excellence, Verlander was lucky. Three outs came on exceptional defensive plays.

Tuesday was a great night for Verlander and the Tigers. Frustration and worry returned Wednesday. The bullpen coughed up a lead in the ninth and the Brewers won. The Tigers lost again Thursday with poor pitching and bad hitting. Yet the Tigers are still second in the AL Central division, a game or two behind Cleveland. The season is long and full of surprises.

In the big inning, God created Heaven on Earth. And it was without form, and void. God separated the dirt from the grass. He called the grass Outfield and the dirt He called Infield. God made the Infield a 90-foot square and the Outfield not less than 400 feet to center and 320 feet down the lines. He declared this Fair Territory. All other territory, God then declared, was Foul.

And God divided the players into two teams of nine players each, under direction of a manager, to play The Game on His field. God called some of these players Pitchers and some of them Hitters. He placed a Pitcher precisely 60 feet, 6 inches from a Hitter. Then God commanded that it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out at the ol’ Ballgame.

And God granted jurisdiction of The Game to lesser Gods, whom He called Umpires. God said the Umpires are infallible, blessed with Heavenly authority, whose judgment is not to be questioned under penalty of expulsion from The Game. And God looked at his creation and He was pleased. Then God created the Infield Fly Rule to confuse nonbelievers.

And God said, Let there be light beer, and there was. And, God said, let there be peanuts and hot dogs and overpriced souvenirs and let there be frosty chocolate malts with little wooden spoons that you can buy nowhere else except at this Heaven, which God called a Ballpark, and there was. God looked at His creation and it was good.

And the Lord God formed, from the dust, a collection of elite players in His own image. The Lord God then breathed the breath of life into His creation. God called this creation the National League.

And God said, It is not good for the National League to be alone. The Lord God shall make it a mate. And thus, while the National League slept, God took several of its top players and created the American League.

And God blessed The Game, saying, Be fruitful and multiply. Put teams in every city with deserving fans, God added, even if this occurs at the expense of starting-pitching depth.

From time to time, God understood, The Game would be corrupted by the Serpent. The Serpent was more cunning than any other beast and he would take many wicked forms: the Black Sox, segregation, the Designated Hitter, the Reserve Clause, dead balls, juiced balls, spit balls, corked bats, George Steinbrenner, AstroTurf, the 1981 strike, collusion, lockouts, Pete Rose, the 1994 strike, greenies, cocaine, HGH, Andro, steroids, $20 parking, corporate mallparks, Scott Boras, Donald Fehr, and Bud Selig.

But, God said, the goodness in The Game shall always prevail. As needed, the Lord shall bestow upon The Game a Savior. And the Savior, like the Serpent, can take many forms. The Savior shall remind Fans how blessed The Game truly is. The Savior shall be called by many names, including Cy, Matty, Honus, Big Train, the Babe, Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, Lou Gehrig, Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, Buck O’Neil, Hank Greenberg, Red Barber, Harry Carey, Vin Scully, Jack Buck, Satchel Paige, Bill Veeck, Roberto Clemente, Ernie Banks, Hammerin’ Hank, Cool Papa, Dizzy, Lefty, Whitey, Stan the Man, Big Klu, the Say Hey Kid, Campy, Duke, the Mick, the Splendid Splinter, the Gas House Gang, the Big Red Machine, the Damn Yankees, Pudge Fisk, Pudge Rodriguez, Yaz, Pops, the Wizard of Oz, Fernando, George Brett, Moonlight Graham, Roy Hobbs, Wild Thing Vaughn, Bingo Long, the Ryan Express, Donnie Baseball, Rickey, Eck, the Big Unit, the Cactus League, Cal Ripken, Tony Gwynn, Camden Yards, Rotisserie Drafts, Web Gems, Derek Jeter, Dontrelle Willis, Vlad Guerrero, and, from the Far East, Ichiro. And, God guaranteed, there are many more to come.

God looked upon His creation and He was very pleased. And God spoke, yelling, PLAY BALL!

As spring training ends and the teams head north to begin the season, let’s listen to John Fogerty’s “Centerfield,” the greatest baseball song ever.

Here’s a performance by Fogerty in 1997. He wrote the song in 1985 after watching the All-Star game from the centerfield bleachers at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

Pitchers and catchers have their first spring training workouts today, and fans can begin to ponder life’s persistent questions. Who will be the fifth starter in the Tigers’ rotation? Will the Twins overcome the loss of Fancisco Liriano? Who will play centerfield for the White Sox? And those are just the pressing questions in the American League Central division. There are five other divisions in major league baseball. Twenty-seven other teams. A rich feast of speculation. And of joy and heartache.

Here are the latest odds on the 2007 World Series championship. I’m pleased and a little startled to see my Tigers sitting in second place behind the rich, aging Yankees. Both Chicago teams are in the top five, which will please everyone at Loyola Press. The gambling odds reflect the conventional wisdom. There will undoubtedly be teams that surprise, as the Tigers did last year. Who will that be this year? My candidates are the Cleveland Indians and the Milwaukee Brewers.

As managers are wont to say in the spring, “if we stay healthy and get some breaks, we’ll surprise some people.”

The British critic A.N. Wilson writes about J.R.R. Tolkein’s fascination with Europe’s mythic past.

Columnist Phil Lawler isn’t happy that Doubleday, not Ignatius, is publishing the Pope’s new book. But, one commenter points out, “For all of Ignatius Press’ orthodoxy, they’re very slow . . . . Doubleday will get the book out fast and that’s good, isn’t it? More people will read it.”

Three famous novelists — Jeffrey Archer, Elizabeth Berg, and Anne Rice — are releasing new books inspired by the gospels.

Steve Bogner and friends indulge in some stimulating book talk. Lots of “word of mouth” recommendations here.

At YouTube, the Pauline Sisters suggest best Catholic books for Lent.

And finally, with the Super Bowl safely behind us, it’s time to think about God’s game. Pitchers and catchers report next week. Click here for a complete list.

My friend Bob Lockwood, a splendid writer and ardent baseball fan, passed along the rumor that the great Hank Aaron is a Catholic convert. Bob hasn’t been able to confirm the story, and I haven’t either. But I posed the question to Google, and came up with this tantalizing bit of evidence.

But perhaps The Imitation of Christ is also especially well suited to the game of baseball. The game is designed to humble the exalted. Failure and defeat are built into every inning. The best hitters make outs 7 out of 10 times at bat. Pitchers do well to give up less than four runs a game. The mood of The Imitation of Christ is decidedly toward the darker side of Catholic spirituality. It says little about setting forth to take bold action in the world, but rather advises the reader to expect adversity and to make the most of it. Hank Aaron’s spiritual reading might seem unusual. But maybe not so unusual, in light of the game he played so well.

Christianity Today interviews N.T. Wright, Anglican bishop, New Testament scholar, and popular spiritual author. A friend of mine and I are reading and discussing Wright’s Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, a most impressive book, whose title deliberately echoes C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Says Wright: “We’re talking about Jesus as the Lord of the world—not the Lord of people’s private spiritual interiority only, but of what they do with their money, with their homes, with the wealth of nations, and with the planet.”

Speaking of Lewis, the Washington Post reviews the latest volume of his collected letters — the final volume. This one sheds light on both Aslan and Joy Davidman.

Finally, about a month before pitchers and catchers report to spring training, the Real Live Pastor (aka Gordon Atkinson) writes a lyrical blog post about baseball and Bible study. He and his preacher buddies talk about the Bible while playing catch. It’s like being a kid again:

And then your friend winds up like a spring and then unwinds. You see his arm blur around his body and there is a white circle coming toward you at a terrific speed. But you feel no anxiety because your gloved hand slips forward smoothly and you pluck the ball right out of the air. You’ve caught a thousand balls, and you know you’ll catch this one. There is a sharp pop in the leather of your glove that stings a bit, but even the sting is nice in its own way.

I think I’ll ask my friend if he wants to discuss Simply Christian while playing catch. Maybe this idea will catch on at my parish. It’s hard to get adults, especially men, to turn out for parish events. They might if the Lent event features small group catch . . .

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come out, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.

“You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

“Today, October 2nd, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.”

–A. Bartlett Giamatti

The World Series ended, fittingly enough, with a Tiger hitter striking out with men on base. It was one of the many hundreds of strikeouts racked up by this team of hackers during this magical season. An aggressive approach to hitting looks wonderful when it works, when the pitching is mediocre and uncertain, when the sliders flatten out and the fast balls drift into the middle of the plate. Then the balls fly over the fences and into the gaps between outfielders. But when the opposition pitching is good, as it was in the World Series, the advantage, already with the pitcher, swings even more strongly in favor of the man on the mound. He doesn’t have to throw a strike when the batter is coming up to swing at the first good pitch he sees. When he gets ahead in the count, the good pitcher can toy with the aggressive hitter’s mind. The St. Louis Cardinal pitching was very good. We were treated to a succession of Tigers swinging at balls in the dirt and staring in awe at unexpected slow curves that landed in the strike zone.

The Tigers scored eleven runs in five games. Not nearly enough to win. They also committed eight errors. Five of these were by Tiger pitchers. Four of them were damaging and two were catastrophic, costing games four and five. The team that had done the little things right throughout the playoffs suddenly stopped playing the game smartly and smoothly.

My son and I went to the first game of the Series last Saturday at Comerica Park. We were all happy and a little dazed. “The Tigers in the World Series. I can’t believe it,” people said in the stands and in hot dog lines and on Woodward Avenue outside the ballpark. In the World Series, with this team of free-swinging Venezuelans, Midwesterners, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans, with these cheerful young pitchers who throw so hard, led by the crusty old-school manager. Yes, we’re in the World Series with these terrific Tigers who, one suspects, will be even better next year.

It was a transcendent, indelible baseball moment: two outs, bottom of the ninth, two men on, game tied, the American League pennant on the line. Forty thousand roaring fans on their feet. Huston Street, Oakland’s closer, on the mound. He glares at the batter, Magglio Ordonez, the Tigers slugger, who has been struggling in the playoffs. The count is 1-0. Street sets, pitches, Mags swings –

I saw it when it happened, and I saw the moment replayed on television maybe 25 times: the perfect swing, the ball arcing up, up, up into the chilly night air, then down into the frenzied crowd in the left field stands. A walk-off, three-run, game-winning, series-winning, pennant-winning home run. Pandemonium in Comerica Park – pure joy for Tigers fans everywhere. Add the name of Magglio Ordonez to Carlton Fisk, Joe Carter, Bill Mazeroski, Bobby Thompson, Aaron Boone, and Kirk Gibson in the pantheon of post-season home run heroes.

The moment was all the sweeter for the superb play that led up to it. The Tigers had scrapped back to tie the game after falling behind 3-0. They did all the little things right: double plays, advancing runners, taking the extra base, laying off bad pitches and swinging at the good ones. Most of the time it made no difference, but a couple of times smart play mattered. The Tigers’ first run scored after Santiago, a backup infielder playing only because another was injured, sacrificed a runner from second to third with nobody out. In the top of the eighth inning, Oakland loaded the bases with two outs. Wil Ledezma came in from the bullpen, threw hard stuff to a batter who has trouble with fast balls, and got him to pop up.

Baseball teams don’t run plays like football teams do. Pitchers and hitters have an idea of what they would like to do, but things seldom work out the way they plan. The batter reacts to what is pitched to him. When he makes contact, chance and luck play a large role in what happens next. Successful teams play hard and play smart. They do the right things, especially the little things, and wait for the game itself to create the moments when victory can be achieved. Ordonez stood at the plate in the ninth inning yesterday only because the Tigers had done many difficult, subtle, and smart things to put him there.

“Fundamentally sound” is the baseball cliché for doing the little things right. My son and I went to the game on Friday – the first playoff game in Detroit in 19 years. Kenny Rogers and two other Tiger pitchers shut out the A’s on two hits. The infield turned three double plays behind them, the last one with the bases loaded in the eighth. In the very first inning, the Tigers executed a flawless hit and run that led to the only run they would need. Hit and runs are hard to pull off. The risks are great, but so are the rewards. A lot can go wrong. This time, everything went right. Everything is going right for the Tigers now. The World Series opens in Detroit on Saturday.

The Tigers dispatched the mighty New York Yankees from the American League playoffs in decisive, shocking fashion this weekend. The games at Comerica Park on Friday and Saturday were not even competitive as the Tigers won 6-0 and 8-3. The All Stars and future Hall of Famers in the Yankee lineup looked confused and overmatched, surprised at what they were seeing from the Tiger pitchers. Inning after inning, they popped up, grounded out weakly to short and second, and flailed desperately at pitches two feet out of the strike zone. This week, Kenny Rogers, Jeremy Bonderman, Joel Zumaya, and Todd Jones raised the art of pitching to a high level. Can there be any more exhilarating feeling for an athlete than that felt by a pitcher, walking off the mound in the ninth inning with a big lead in a playoff game, to the roars and cheers of a hometown crowd? That’s what Rogers and Bonderman did Friday and Saturday. Bonderman brought the curtain down on the Yankees on Saturday. But the guy who got carried off the field in triumph was a graying, 61-year-old man named Jim Leyland (above), the Tigers manager. For some of us fans of a certain age, that was a special treat.

The Tigers now play the Oakland A’s for the American League championship, what my brothers and I (and Jim Leyland) grew up calling “the pennant.” It’s more baseball, and a team to care about.

The Tigers trounced Kansas City this afternoon and clinched a playoff spot. Motown rejoices and the champagne flows. But consider the spiritual side of this sports drama. This is the same team that lost 119 games three years ago, the second most in baseball history. Not only is the team the same. Many of the players are the same. Ten Tigers on the roster this afternoon played on that dreadful 2003 team. Three years ago they were terrible. This year they’ve been superb. This shows not just the possibility of redemption but the reality of it. Cubs fans take heed.

Then there’s the Tigers fans’ season-long experience of modest expectations being abundantly rewarded. It’s like the refrain in the Passover Seder praising God’s generosity. A modest improvement over last year’s 71-91 record would have been enough for us. Then a winning record would have been enough for us. A competitive team would have been enough for us. But now we have a playoff team. Possibly a division champion. American League champion? World Series champion? We shall see, and we will hope, but if this afternoon’s glory is all the baseball gods will give us, it will have been enough for us.

Still – can we dream for more? Sure we can. I like the Tigers’ chances. The other night I read the chapter about the playoffs in the brilliant book Baseball Between the Numbers by the stat heads at Baseball Prospectus. They looked at hundreds of factors, and isolated three that are strongly correlated with postseason success: a dominating closer, starting pitchers that get a lot of strikeouts, and good defense. The Tigers have excellent defense, three starters with power arms, and a very good if not exactly dominating closer. Of course most teams that get to the postseason have similar talent. We can dream. But let’s enjoy the day.

I like the Atlanta Braves well enough, but I’m not a special fan. They’re 18 games behind the Mets in the NL East, and I’m looking forward to a Tigers-Mets World Series. But Sister Marian of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne loves her Braves. She went to a Braves game when she was a young nun, and had that baseball epiphany that smites the true fan. “She adored everything about it: the grass, the sun, the fans, the players and the pretzels,” writes Jack Curry of the Times. Six days a week, Sister Marian cares for dying cancer patients, the ministry of the Hawthorne Dominicans. Her favorite thing to do on her day off is, naturally, to go to a Braves game. Bobby Dews, the Braves’ bullpen coach, is a close friend of Sister Marian. He’s moved by her work with the dying. “It’s just an incredible feeling to know there are people, earthly people, who care about us the way God does,” he says.

The Tigers beat the White Sox Monday and Tuesday to extend their lead in the AL Central to 7 ½ games, so my son and I went to Comerica Park last night hoping to see Detroit push the slumping Sox into a deeper hole. It didn’t happen. Jermaine Dye hit a three-run homer in the first inning, Joe Crede hit two other dingers, and the Sox hung on to win 7-5. Sox manager Ozzie Guillen (right) was on his best behavior after being thrown out of Tuesday’s game for protesting balls and strikes calls in a profanity-laden Spanglish tirade. Detroit third baseman Brandon Inge started two slick double plays right in front of us. Long reliever Wilfredo Ledezma worked out of a couple of jams with some nifty clutch pitching. Baseball is a beautiful game, even when your team loses. Admittedly, it’s easy to say that when your team has the best record in baseball, and has its main rival on the ropes.

Now I heard the music clear from the outfield, “Nuttin to worry, nuttin to worry, no hitter boy, no hitter boy, never worry, nuttin to worry,” and I stopped worrying right there and then, with 2 down and none on, knowing from then forwards that it was my ball game to win. I had the old confidence, and I never lost it, not then nor any other day. Give me a baseball in my hand and I know where I’m at. Give me a piece of machinery and I may be more or less in the dark. Give me a book and I am lost. Give me a map and I cannot make heads nor tails, nor I could no more learn another language than pitch with my nose. But give me a baseball and I know where I’m at, and I fired down to Fielding twice, 2 blazing fast balls, and then I changed up and throwed him a jughandle curve ball that he went for like a fool and bounced down to Sid. I raced over to cover. Sid waved me away and beat Fielding to the bag in plenty of time.

Mark Harris
The Southpaw

Ozzie Guillen on Mariano Rivera yesterday after the Yankee closer recorded his 400th career save against Ozzie’s White Sox:

“On the field and off the field, he’s a Hall of Famer. Young players look up to him. The way he is, the way he performs on the field and the way he treats people, I think Mariano is the perfect baseball player.”

The Times Book Review this weekend features an essay about baseball novels. The writer, John Thorn, thinks it’s difficult to write a good novel about a game, even a game as beautiful and metaphorical as baseball, but he thinks a few novelists have done it. He commends Ring Lardner, Mark Harris, Robert Coover, and Eric Rolfe Greenberg. Greenberg is new to me. I’ll have to get The Celebrant. Thorn quotes one of Robert Coover’s characters, who has seen a perfect game: “Think of it . . . to do a thing so perfectly that, even if the damn world lasted forever, nobody could ever do it better. . . . In a way, you know, it’s even sad somehow, because, well, it’s done, and all you can hope for after is to do it a second time.”

One recent commenter pleaded with me to put more baseball on this blog, so, by popular demand, I’ll oblige. This year I’m a different kind of baseball fan than I’ve been in years past. I’m a Fan Who Cares. Baseball used to be a detached pleasure – a savoring of its landscape, its history, statistics, and nuances, its myths and its tensions. Now it’s an affair of the heart. Now I cheer and groan in front of the TV, plan my evenings and weekends so I can catch at least the last three innings of games, and look ahead to upcoming games and speculate about the starting pitching rotation.

The object of my passion is the Detroit Tigers, my local team for more than 30 years. Incredibly, the Tigers have the best record in baseball, and have had for many weeks. The Tigers have been bad for more than a decade. Three years ago they were atrocious – one of the worst teams of all time. Now they are on top of the AL Central, two games in front the White Sox. They clearly have the starting pitching, fearsome bullpen, and slashing hitters to keep them in the pennant race to the very end. The best thing about the Tigers’ renaissance is that it’s a surprise. The Tigers don’t have to win the World Series to have a successful season (unlike our rivals, the White Sox, who won it last year and will be miserable if they don’t do it again). It’s all delightful for a fan – a surprise rise from misery to mastery. Every victory is an astonishment. There’s probably a spiritual lesson here, but I think I’ll just enjoy the baseball. We’ve won 11 out of the last 12 games. It’s the summer of the Tiger.