The glory of God is a base runner fully alive

Published 8/2/05

Around town this time of year, you can catch folks in full uniform heading to the sandlots with shiny bats, moth-eaten mitts and goofy grins.

Now what would possess grown guys and grown girls to spend a summer evening on a dusty diamond risking a muscle tear for the sake of softball?

One theory is the exercise thing. But if bulge is our battle, swimming, cycling or jogging probably prove more effective. (As someone has said, baseball—and that’s ditto for softball—is a game that squeezes six minutes of action into two and a half hours of play.)

For others, it may be the tribal attraction. That’s the experience of hooking up with like-minded locals on courts, fields, rinks and diamonds to participate in a common recreational passion only to find that what’s re-created is a team that rallies around its members like a family. What’s intriguing about the tribe is that it can be a dugout full of Democrats and Republicans, union bosses and chief officers, Pentecostals and Presbyterians, twentysomethings and sixtysomethings, all tightly bound by the thin string of a favorite game. Tribe members may only meet for a few hours on game day in a very brief season, but during those innings and evenings, no stronger strings are strung.

Maybe workers become players after hours because the business world puts us drudges behind the computers of sterile cubicles to stew in unfulfilled creative juices. When the 5 o’clock whistle blows, what we hear is the game whistle, the starting gun, an ump’s voice somewhere yelling, “Play ball!”

But if you’ll let me be so lofty, sniff, sniff, I’m wondering if we’re not drawn to the diamond because there, between the foul lines, we find what Calvin—or was it Berra?—called “theatrum gloria Dei.” That is, the theatre where we play for the glory of God.

In the “theatre,” grown women lean left to stop a dangerously hard hop and then dance off second to make the throw to first for the mere sake of a double play. In the theatre, out of shape outfielders gallop across green outfield acres and into the path of an oncoming teammate just to flag down a high fly and prevent a late inning rally. In the theatre, jocks run the bases with wild abandon and slide home in a pair of shorts even when it gives them six inches of open wounds but only one run. And in the theatre, folks like me bravely return to the batter’s box after going down swinging the previous inning on a pitch that would be a strike only in a bowling alley.

Yeah, we do it because at that point in the play of the after-hours athlete, vocation, money, education, race and politics count for zilch. And at that point in the action, we men and women of the game are fully alive. Several centuries before Calvin, St. Iraneus reportedly said, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” Surely, this second century father of the church coached an early church fastpitch softball team. Could it be that he saw poetry in the windmill windup or understood the mystery of that infernal infield fly rule?

But for all the glory of the game, there are evil forces at work. Just a few weeks ago the International Olympic Committee voted to drop softball from the Summer Games after 2008. It’s one of the first sports to be dropped in nearly 70 years. Among reasons cited were its association with the steroid-stained sport of baseball, which was also canned, and the sport’s total domination by American teams.

That makes sense since softball is the most popular participant sport in the United States today. An estimated 56 million will play at least one game of softball this summer. Because I couldn’t play just one, I played in 12 and coached a team that was always anxious take the field. In fact, speaking of goofy grins, one evening we almost collided with the other team as we tried to take the field at the beginning of the game. Oops, my bad. I forgot we were visitors.

I guess my mind was on the glory. Faded glory at times, but glory nonetheless.