There are three things in my life which I really love: God, my family, and baseball. The only problem - once baseball season starts, I change the order around a bit.
-Al Gallagher

I see great things in baseball. It's our game - the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us.
-Walt Whitman

What is both surprising and delightful is that spectators are allowed, and even expected, to join in the vocal part of the game.... There is no reason why the field should not try to put the batsman off his stroke at the critical moment by neatly timed disparagements of his wife's fidelity and his mother's respectability.
-George Bernard Shaw

The regular season is upon us - and it came in with a bang, with Ryan Zimmerman christening the new Nationals Park with a walk-off homer after a blown save. Today, the rest of the league starts. I'd originally meant to make this a practical post about the Cubs' prospects this year, but as you'll see, it turned into something a bit more... unorthodox.

There's something great about Opening Day, and it's not just the tired old yarns about every team having the same record, or the glories of spring, or the Orioles having another week before being mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. It's that we know that this is the beginning of a long, drawn out, frustrating, exhilarating, breathtaking process, the season that was and is and will be.

Baseball is curiously like the liturgy in many ways. There's a lot of standing up and sitting down; there are hymns ("The Star-Spangled Banner" at the beginning of the game, "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" in orthodox parks during the seventh-inning stretch) and responses (everyone knows what to do when the bugle call plays... "Charge!"). For those who can afford the unfathomable expense, there is the Hot Dog of Life and the Beer (or Coke) of Salvation, along with the ubiquitous peanuts and cracker jacks.

But the most significant way baseball is like the liturgy is in the communion of the saints. When we in the Christian tradition celebrate the full liturgy by partaking in the Eucharist, we believe we are connected not only with Christ but with the saints throughout the history of Christianity. In a similar way, even at the newest of new ballparks or the sandiest of sandlots, when we watch or play baseball, we're connected in what I think is a mysterious and cosmic way not only with the great players of the past - Willie Mays, Three-Finger Brown, Satchel Paige, Joe DiMaggio - but with everyone who's ever sat in the grandstands, with our fathers and our fathers' fathers who would take them to games, tell them what a balk is, cheer at the home runs, marvel at a pitchers' duel.

Maybe this is a guy thing, I don't know. But there's something real, something spiritual about the game of baseball that quite simply doesn't exist for other sports as far as I know. There's something contemplative and deep and profound about the symmetry of the infield and the unpredictability of the outfield, about the men who go to work playing a child's game, about the moment well-savored, the situation well-appreciated, the bases-loaded jam, the ninth-inning rally, the walk-off home run.

But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first. -Matthew 19:30

Baseball is a game of contrasts. Someone goes down with a career-ending injury, and a rookie steps up in his place in a big way. A team everyone expected to win chokes in the final weeks, and a team everyone expected to be in the gutter is in contention. One rookie brought in as roster filling will come up and spark his team, and another one who everyone expected to be the next Willie Mays will struggle to make the Mendoza Line. The first do become last, and the last do become first, unless they're the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who pretty dependably become last every year.

So this is it. Year 100. I say this every year, but I think this year is next year. I dare to dream, because I have no other choice in the matter; it's been 100 years, and it's about time. The last will become first.

Go Cubbies.

Quotations shamelessly yoinked from the Quote Garden, which is like the Olive Garden but with better food.

Labels: Baseball, Chicago Cubs, Religion