Category Archives: Sports

Why God Loves Baseball

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The ghostly baseball announcer commands the farmer “if you build it, he will come.”  So the man tears up part of his farm and builds a baseball field and is visited immediately by members of the shamed 1919 White Sox.  So begins W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe that was later made into the American classic movie Field of Dreams.  When the farmer, Ray Kinsella, meets one of his heroes Joe Jackson, Shoeless Joe says “This must be heaven.”  Ray replies “No, it’s Iowa.”  The famously slow outfielder from South Carolina may be excused for his confusion, for a baseball field can very easily be confused with heaven for those who have eyes to see.  It is quite literally the perfect game.

First there is the fact that the game is deeply Trinitarian.  The number three and its multiples are found everywhere.  There are 3 outs, 9 innings and the game is complete once 27 outs, that is  outs, are recorded.  There are 9 players on the field, a field in which the pitcher’s mound whose diameter is 18 feet and is 60 feet, 6 inches from home plate.  The bases, of which you must touch all 3 before advancing home, are each 90 feet apart.  It is played on a diamond, the symbol of purity and one of the 12 gemstones of the New Jerusalem.  We can’t help but love it because it is played on a diamond, the same precious stone that God uses to write on man’s heart (c.f. Jer 17:1).

The most exciting (and rarest) of plays are the triple, the triple play and striking out the side on 9 pitches.  Only the truly excellent players can achieve a 30-30 season (that is 30 HR and 30 SB) or strike out 300 batters.  Canonization is guaranteed by 3000 hits or 300 wins.  The game is played without a clock and thus foreshadows the timelessness of heaven (it is a great sacrilege when kids have to play the game under a time limit).  In fact when both teams play it perfectly, that is when there is a double perfect game, it could go on forever.  There is also the goal, beginning at home and striving to return there, as an apt parallel for life as proceeding from that same Trinity and our hustling to return to God.  Baseball is then a parallel for the Divine Romance between man and God.


Field of Dreams By JoeyBLS

Baseball’s historical roots are clouded in darkness with nothing like it found anywhere, making us think it was created ex nihilo. On the Seventh Day, God rested and watched the Seventh Game of the World Series, the perfect ending to His perfect creation.  Sin, PEDs and instant replay may have tainted that creation, but baseball still gives us a glimpse of paradise restored.  That ultimately is why sports, and baseball in particular remain compelling to us—America’s pastime.  Baseball is not a necessary thing or even a really important thing, but in the strict sense neither is creation.  Baseball, like all of creation, exists out of the superabundance of God’s goodness.  He created it in order to bring us joy; enabling us to grasp at the seeds of hope found within His creation.  For a small window of time we are brought into a well-ordered world where human perfection is on display and only fair play allowed.  It is, as Aristotle thought, a foretaste of true contemplation.

That the Seventh Game of the World Series will be played on All Saints Day is providential.  For those who watch the Astros and Dodgers tonight will become as the “great cloud of witnesses” cheering the players on and winning and losing with them.  They become the 10th man on the field.  The game binds a community together, that is why we name them after cities instead of giving the naming rights to companies.  And now that the Suffering Servant (the Cubs) has prospered, the game can work its healing power on devastated city like Houston the same way it did Boston in 2013.

Walt Whitman, when he first encountered children playing ‘base’ in Brooklyn declared “the game of ball is glorious.”  Is it heaven? No, but it isn’t Iowa either.  Baseball brings us to some place on the road between the two.

Turning the Other Cheek

Sports

Mixed Martial Arts or MMA is one of the fastest growing sports in the United States and its popularity since its inception in the early 1990s has grown to the point where one fighter recently took home a million dollar purse.  With such a large following, it is not uncommon for the winner of a fight to express gratitude to God for helping in a win.  While we have addressed the question of whether God cares about the outcome of a sporting elsewhere, MMA deserves a closer look because it is decidedly an unChristian activity by its very nature.  No one is questioning the sincerity of belief of the fighters, but what needs to be called into question is whether one can bring glory to God doing something which, ultimately, is wrong.

To begin, it bears mentioning that the fact that MMA is wrong is not because it is violent, per se.  The fact that two fighters are engaged in a “friendly” fight that involves a degree of physical violence is not the problem.  The problem is the goal—to knock the other opponent out.  In this regard we would pass the same moral judgment on boxing, but not on wrestling or most martial arts.  In the latter the goal is to use grappling or sparring techniques to pin or score points against your opponent.  As proof of the intent, the head is almost always off limits.  In MMA the goal is to deprive your opponent of consciousness and therein lies the moral problem.  It is always wrong to deliberately deprive another person of consciousness violently without a proportionally grave reason.

One may say that there are ways for an MMA fighter to win other than by knockout but those are merely accidental.  It is the knockout that is the primary goal of the fighters, promoters and fans.  The fighters are not just known by their win-loss records, but by their number of knockouts.  No fighter sets out to win by decision or submission, but wants to knock their opponent out.  Obviously not all matches end in a knockout–while significant less than boxing (7.1 % of the time), a knockout still occurs in about 5% of the MMA matches.

It is also important to mention that when examining the morality of a given act that we look to the intention of the moral actor not at whether they are successful or not.  So even though there is a knockout in only 5% of the matches, it is most certainly the case that in 100% of the matches both fighters are intending to knock out the other.  It may change the moral gravity of the act itself whether they are successful, but it is still an objective wrong.  A person who sets out to kill someone by putting a bomb in their car is still guilty of attempted murder even if the bomb does not go off.

It bears mention as well that it is the goal of the fighter that sets it apart from something like football, even though there are more concussions than in MMA.  While football players regularly receive head injuries and concussions, it is not a goal of the football player to knock the other player out.  Certainly there are some players who do try to, but these players are labeled as “dirty” evidence by the NFL’s Bountygate scandal from a number of years ago.

For the sake of clarity, it is also helpful to understand what it is that makes it wrong.  When we speak of something as a sin or wrong against our neighbor we mean that we are deliberately depriving him of some good without a proportionate reason to do so.  In the case at hand, the fighter intends to deprive his opponent of the use of his reason, the highest and most uniquely human faculty that he has.  In other words, it is contrary to his dignity because it attempts to make him into something less than human.  As an aside, drunkenness is wrong for the same reason—it deprives us of our proper use of reason.

Only recently have we begun to see the danger of repeated head trauma and that concussions (which is what happens when someone is knocked out) cause permanent brain injury. Because of its lasting effects, no amount of money or fame is enough to be considered a proportionately good effect to inflicting (or even receiving) permanent brain injury. All of us have an obligation to maintain bodily integrity and thus a right to do so.  A fighter has, then, no just reason for harming a neighbor in his rights to bodily integrity or well-being by inflicting wounds which will most certainly lead to long term impairment of his body.

Presumably the fighters themselves are freely engaging in the fight and thus bear full responsibility for their actions.  What about the fans?

MMA fans, by their presence and enthusiasm, participate in the wrongs of the contestants.  Certainly we would not have seen the growth in the MMA without the support of the fans.  Therefore we need to first examine the fans’ role through the moral lens of cooperation in sin.

The principle of cooperation recognizes that a number of people directly and indirectly participate in bringing about an evil action.  To understand this principle of moral philosophy, it is important that the distinction be made between formal and material cooperation.  It is meant to assess how closely one aligns their will with the intention of another to carry out evil.  Formal cooperation assumes that one aligns their will with the evil intention of the principal moral agent.  Material cooperation presumes that one does not directly align their will with the principal moral agent.  Material cooperation may be of two different kinds. If one cooperates in an evil act by performing something that is essential for the performance of the evil action, then it is immediate material cooperation. If one cooperates in an accidental or nonessential manner in the evil action, then it is called mediate material cooperation.
Returning back to question of MMA fighting we can certainly see that there is immediate material cooperation.  Just by paying to see the fight, the spectator contributes financially to the contest; the fighter fights primarily for the purse supplied ultimately by the spectators. But in almost all cases the spectator’s cooperation is formal.  They too have come to see “a good clean fight” in which one of the participants is knocked out.  In many ways the fans are no mere spectators to the wrong in that they are encouraging the fighters by cheering them on.

Engrossed in what is in essence a brutal culture, we can easily miss the bigger issue.  What makes prize fighting like MMA wrong for people to watch is that it is based on deriving pleasure from the injury of another person.  This is so obviously wrong that we often overlook it. “A man who is angry without being injured or with one who has not offended him” is according to St. Thomas “not to be cruel, but to be brutal or savage.” For all the supposed sophistication of our culture, it is marked by a brutality or savagery that takes pleasure in the unnecessary sufferings of other men.  It is the same thing that led Romans to watch the gladiators fight.  It leads to an overall insensitivity to the sufferings of others that is a defining tendency of our culture.  We should feel pity and compassion in the injury of another person and not cheer it.  To pay money for such a thing only shows how depraved we have become.

 

 

The Biggest Fan?

Culture, Sports

Perhaps because of the number of players from Catholic Latin America, Major League baseball is the most outwardly religious of all the professional sports. Players regularly make the sign of the cross before stepping into the box and point to the heavens when they get a big hit. But most players and fans, when pressed, will say that God does not really care about the score of a baseball game. Despite the consensus, this assumption should be addressed. It reveals God as distant Father that is too busy running the universe to care about the outcome of a baseball game rather than Him in whom “we live and have our being”(Acts 17:28)
One might reasonably ask what kind of father does not care whether his son wins his baseball game. It might be that the father cares solely because his son does, but nevertheless a loving father ought to care whether his son wins his baseball game or not. But, it might be objected that the interlocutor is projecting man’s fatherhood onto God’s Fatherhood rather than the other way around. Only God is truly a Father and a man is a father only by way of analogy. For example, everyone would agree that a man who stands idly by while his child runs into the street and gets hit by a car is a terrible father. God’s Fatherhood on the other hand is not diminished when He allows the same thing to happen because His Fatherhood extends eternally. In other words, God’s Fatherhood is more than man’s fatherhood and not less. If a human father cares for his children’s happiness more so would God the Father care. We shall return to this point shortly.
In truth, the person who says that God does not care about the score of a baseball game is reversing the analogy. He is projecting the “trophy mentality” that is so prevalent among parents and coaches today onto God the Father. There is no award for excellence, only for trying. We do not care whether you win or lose and therefore God does not either.
But there is a deeper issue at play here. This type of mentality reveals a deep-seeded dualism that infects modern man. The modern dualist believes that the world is made up the two opposing realms of the secular and the spiritual. There is no real overlap between the two worlds and the gods of both realms act independently of each other. The end result is that modern man is disintegrated and lives his life in a completely compartmentalized fashion. One needs only to look at Sundays as evidence. The ritual of watching football (and usually a lot of it) honors the secular god “weekend” while we go to Mass in the morning because “giving God one hour of my week is the least I can do.” The best of us try to try to keep one foot in each realm but the secular god eventually wins out because he is literally in our face all the time. He finally wins out when we concede “God does not care how we worship Him.”
It was mentioned above that if human fathers care about the happiness of children than God cares even more. This comment deserves further explanation. To the modern mind, happiness is synonymous with contentment. It is seen subjectively as a temporary feeling that is dependent on external circumstances. That the word happy comes from the Old English word for “chance” is a perfect illustration of this. Classically understood though, happiness is a translation of the Greek word eudaimonia which defines happiness as a condition of the soul that finds its ultimate fulfillment in the beatific vision. God, because He wills our eternal happiness, cares about all those things and events that contribute to our beatitude.
What the person who says that God does not care about who wins a baseball game is really saying is that the result of a baseball game has no bearing on the sanctification of mankind. This is to suggest that there are things (or at least this one thing) that are neutral to our salvation. This is a slippery slope. If it really is neutral then the game can be played in any manner the participants and spectators see fit. If the behavior of many of the players and the baseness of the advertising we will see this Sunday is any indication then empirically this seems to already be the prevailing thought. The truth is that grace perfects nature and, not only does it never destroy it, but it also never ignores it.

Cubs Win
It also seems to reveal a denial of God’s Providence. At first glance this seems reasonable. After all, anyone who watches any sporting event is struck by how prominent a role “chance” plays. From a ball that bounces off the pitcher’s leg and ends up in the hands of the first baseman to the weather, chance is often the difference maker in a game. The truth is that a belief in chance and a belief in a Provident God cannot coexist.
What we call chance really is based on one of two things. The first is when we speak of chance that is really based on some unobserved causality. For example, a receiver slips and the defensive back intercepts the pass. The replay later reveals that what we would chalk up to chance is really due to the fact that a sprinkler head was left above the ground.
The second explanation of chance results from two or more lines of causality, neither of which is governed by chance, but act independently of each other. One of these agents of causality is God as the cause of all that is, although there may be other agents as well.
With a proper understanding of the notion of chance, we can now begin to see what someone might mean when they say God does not care about baseball games. God’s Providence imposes necessity on some things and contingency on others. It might very well be the case that God imposes contingency on the results of the baseball game. This however does not mean that it falls outside His Providence. It only means He imparts the dignity of being a cause to His creatures. To the matter at hand, the result of the baseball game may depend upon the freely chosen preparation of the two teams. Nevertheless it does not fall outside His Providence. Everything is part of His plan, even if there are different causes, and this includes who wins a baseball game.
In closing, and to be fair to those who say this, I think it bears mentioning one possible meaning to a statement like “God does not care who wins baseball games.” Like all things governed by His Providence, it is not an absolute end. He uses a baseball game as a means to His overall end of uniting mankind with Himself. That doesn’t mean only that He plots out how a Cubs victory in the World Series can bring about some other good (or the Apocalypse), but also that sports (and I think this is what makes them so attractive to us) point to higher things. St. Paul uses sports (and specifically winning) to both enlighten and motivate his Corinthian audience. The joy of winning can be a sacrament pointing to the joy of winning THE race. And that is enough for God to truly care about the outcome.