Beyond the Game

“In the basement of my family’s home, my friend Bobby “Dougie” Douglas and I knelt and prayed with all the intensity we could muster, grasping between us in dynamic tension each end of a twelve-inch crucifix we had removed from the wall. We prayed before a radio instead of an altar, which broadcast the sounds of Game Seven of the 1955 World Series instead of hymns. We had sprinted to my home the instant the nuns released us from our eighth-grade class—sprinted as fast as we could, driven by our knowledge that, with three innings to go, the Brooklyn Dodgers were leading the New York Yankees by the perilous score of 2–0. All we and every other living Dodgers fan had known to that point were the pain and anguish of bitter disappointment. Three innings and that finally could change.

In that basement, seconds felt like hours as we prayed and lived through each agonizing pitch; through the pinch-hitting appearance of an injured Mickey Mantle with one man on and two out in the bottom of the seventh inning (he popped out); through the tension an inning later as the Yankees put two men on with two out (the young Dodger pitcher Johnny Podres struck out Hank Bauer on a high fastball to end the threat). Release did not come until Yankee rookie Elston Howard tapped the final pitch (a changeup) weakly to short—indeed, not until shortstop Pee Wee Reese’s low throw had been snared by the outstretched glove of Gil Hodges at first base.

For three innings, time had slowed; but in that moment it froze: The Brooklyn Dodgers had won the World Series! Seven decades of waiting were over! Dougie raised his arms in exultation, releasing the crucifix, whereupon the laws of physics drove the head of Christ into my mouth, chipping my front tooth. I wore that chipped front tooth, unrepaired, as a visible memento for nearly fifty years.

All these years later, every pitch of those last three innings is etched in memory—not because our prayers were answered (at least not in any way that I would acknowledge today). That day lives for me still because it was magical (better yet, mystical): the improbable triumph, yes; but even more important, the intensity of the hope and ecstasy that Dougie and I shared… We were transported to a plane familiar to “the faithful”—to a place where faith, hope, and love were as much on display as Podres’s arm. October 4, 1955. For me and millions of others, a sacred day. Why? Hard to put into words. Impossible to capture completely in our limited vocabulary. But we do have a word for something that defies reduction to words: ineffable…

The essence of the agony and ecstasy Dougie and I experienced during the final innings on October 4, 1955, is not in the confluence of baseball and religion on a surface level—listening to a broadcast while clutching a crucifix—but is in its depth, the feelings and sensitivities that were evoked by the experience. During Podres’s long walks to the mound, it was impossible not to wonder if he had a few more pitches in his tired left arm, to worry if too much was being asked of the twenty-three-year-old pitcher. After he threw his final pitch, after that last ground ball, we were released from all those years of misses and, as tension turned to joy, we celebrated with exultation worthy of the dervishes. In only three innings of baseball, all that: wonder, awe, hope, passion, heroism, and community.”

~ John Sexton, Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game