The American Church of Baseball and the National Baseball Hall of Fame

Abstract

It has been noted that Americans, residents of great secular state, are among most religious people in world. However, by design, United States, home of devout, has no official state religion. There is no Church of America. What, then, takes place of a national religion, a monolithic church with a single unifying doctrine? In this country, where secular is frequently imbued with religious significance, baseball, national pastime, may be said to serve as American religion. Indeed, our vocabulary is filled with references likening baseball and places it is played to religion and religious practice. Discredited for its epic inaccuracies, Alfred Goodwill Spalding's Base Ball: America's National Game is nevertheless advertised as first Bible, and its author as the baseball messiah. (1) The great, old ballparks, both those still standing and mythic homes of long departed teams, are spoken of with awe generally reserved for great cathedrals of Europe . They are our Green Cathedrals. The modern, luxurious retro-stadiums, and even domed monstrosities of 1970s, with their artificial turf and football seating, are thought of as temples to sport. And they are not alone. Every Minor League stadium, every little league diamond, serves as somebody's place of worship. But if ballparks are our churches, where is our Vatican, our Salt Lake City, our Canterbury Cathedral? It is possible to suggest that offices of Major League Baseball, professional sport's governing body, are administrative center of American religion, and commissioner, Pope? But to take this stance is to suggest that spiritual center of our religion is not open to average worshiper. Though Major League Baseball, as an organization, may dictate doctrine, its offices do not serve as a large-scale sacred space. In this respect, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown is baseball's Vatican, baseball's Canterbury Cathedral, baseball's Mormon Tabernacle, a central place, open equally to every worshiper, no matter what his or her local affiliation may be, where all of baseball's devout are on equal ground. And just as droves of pilgrims flock to holy sites of their religions, so too do they flock to Cooperstown, to observe relics of baseball's saints and martyrs. Simply stating that baseball is our American religion and Cooperstown is its spiritual center is one thing; calling baseball truly sacred is another. Unlike virtually every author on subject, I will not invoke Bull Durham's Annie Savoy's opening soliloquy as proof that baseball is a bona fide religion. Instead, I will refer to an article by Frank Hall, which states that analogy between baseball and religion is limited. While baseball, with all its rituals and ceremonies, certainly mirrors religion, it lacks a metaphysics. It may have saints and heroes, but baseball has no real sense of divine. (2) In order for baseball to be a religion, Hall suggests, it must include in its cosmology a concept of afterlife. However, there are other ways to look at it. As early as 1919, hardly a banner year for professional baseball, French theologian and philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen noted that sport offers us, as Americans, from limitations of our petty lives and mystic unity w ith a larger life of which we are a part. (3) Of group worship that leads to this redemption and mystic unity, A. Bartlett Giamatti, a Renaissance scholar well versed in European theological tradition, as well as having been one of our more esteemed popes, writes, Here we are led to America's moral hunger for egalitarian collectivity which impels us as individuals to aggregate and invest aggregation with numinous meaning, over and over again, as if for first time every time. (4) This statement may be said to serve as an example of theory suggested by social scientist W. …