Jonathan A Fink - The Baseball Gods are Real: The Religion of Baseball

The Baseball Gods are Real: Volume 3 The Religion of Baseball

Written by Jonathan A. Fink

Copyright 2021

ISBN: 978-0-5788296-8-5 (e-book)

Polo Grounds Publishing LLC

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Jonathan A. Fink.

Credit and thank you to Meg Reid for book cover design and book layout.

Credit and thank you to Meg Schader for editing.

Credit and thank you to Leon Macapagal for book cover photo.

Credit and thank you to Kim Watson for Jonathan Finks biography photograph.

Credit and thank you to Abi Laksono for Polo Grounds Publishing logo.

A special thank you to my parents Beth and Jeffrey Fink.

This book is dedicated to Tyler Skaggs, The Los Angeles Angel

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE INTRODUCTION

THE FIRST BOOK I AUTHORED,THE BASEBALL GODS ARE Real: A True Story About Baseball and Spirituality, was autobiographical and chronicled the first 42 years of my life. I discussed my love of baseball and many of the important events in my life, including a midlife crisis at the age of 38 which inspired me to explore a spiritual path. A few chapters in the book revealed how I transformed myself through the practice of yoga and meditation. At about the same time, I was introduced to one of the mysterious forces in the universe, the work of the Baseball Gods.

In my second book, The Baseball Gods are Real - Volume 2: The Road to the Show, I continued on my spiritual journey and chronicled the next chapters of my life. After 13 years as a financial advisor with Morgan Stanley, I started my own socially responsible investment firm, Satya Investment Management. Thereafter I had a chance encounter with professional baseball player Jon Perrin who was working at a restaurant at that time, an off-season job. A blossoming friendship led to his apprenticeship with me, which eventually led him to join my firm as a professionally licensed investment advisor. This second book also chronicled Perrins own journey through baseballs minor league system, from his early days climbing the ranks in the Milwaukee Brewers organization to his eventual trade to the Kansas City Royals.

In this book, my third in the series, The Baseball Gods are Real - Volume 3: The Religion of Baseball, I pay homage to the Baseball Gods and set out to praise all things related to baseball and spirituality. The book focuses on what many describe as baseball miracles, celebrates baseballs cathedrals, applauds baseballs saints and calls out its sinners. The book also acknowledges the baseball fanatics, whom I affectionally refer to as the zealots, and magnifies many of the rituals and superstitions that help make baseball the wonderful, mysterious, enjoyable game it is.

Finally, this book explores baseball karma, examines freak injuries, and searches for the fingerprints of the Baseball Gods from beginning to end. It celebrates Baseball Gods moments and even explores the paranormal world of baseball, including baseball tales of ghosts and, believe it or not, UFOs. Rounding third base and heading for home, this book looks ahead to the golden age of baseball yet to come.

As I am sure you can tell from this introduction alone, I am passionate about baseball and have been ever since my first catch with my dad in the backyard of our home on Long Island in Merrick, New York. I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. May the Baseball Gods always be with you!

CHAPTER ONE

The Religiosity of Baseball

Religion is belief in someone elses experience.
Spirituality is having your own experience.

Deepak Chopra

LET ME START BY SAYING THERE ARE A NUMBER OF interesting similarities between baseball and organized religion. Baseball stadiums are beautiful and individually unique as are churches, synagogues, temples and mosques. The game of baseball is filled with ceremony, tradition, ritual, numerology and superstition just like many religions in the world. Many who closely follow baseball worship the sport, make sacrifices, pray for their team and suffer when their team loses. These emotions are also common in religion. Baseball and organized religion both offer a sense of community, hope, faith and their followers even believe in miracles.

Writers, poets and authors in years past have tried to capture the spirit of baseball in a religious context. In his 1919 essay Baseball as a National Religion, Harvard educated philosopher and legal scholar Morris R. Cohen said that baseball provided the essence of religious experience because fans unite in a mystic unity with a larger life of which we are a part. More recently, sports historian John Thorn, author of Baseball in the Garden of Eden, described baseball as not just a religion, but rather as a sectarian national religion. Lawyer and academic John Sexton, author of Baseball as a Road to God, conveyed that the game of baseball had that special something that gave it some of the qualities that we typically associate with religion. In an interview with Religion and Ethics Newsweekly in 2013, Sexton, who also served as the Dean of the New York University School of Law and thereafter as the fifteenth President of the university, said, Baseball is an avenue to that in the sense that there is this dimension that we experience in baseball of that which cant be put into wordsIn baseball, as in religion, the seemingly impossible is part of the game. Gary Laderman, Professor of American Religious History and Cultures at Emory University, pointed out that the game of baseball does not need the Baseball Gods or even the holy spirit to be a religious phenomenon. In his Huffington Post article named Is Baseball Sacred? Laderman noted that, What truly makes baseball a potentially religious phenomenon is not the presence of God, but that on a more basic level it can be sacred.

I am certain that Morris Cohen, John Thorn, John Sexton and Gary Laderman would agree with me that the game of baseball is not just religious, but also spiritual. In fact, the games religious and spiritual foundation can be traced back to the prehistories of baseball.

CHAPTER TWO

The Prehistories of Baseball

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. Is has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: its part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that was once good and could be again.

-Terence Mann, from the movie Field of Dreams

LONG BEFORE MY DAD, JEFFREY FINK, AND MY UNCLE Eddie Fink learned to play alternative versions of baseball such as stickball, punchball and stoopball growing up on the concrete streets of the Bronx in New York City, the game of baseball was played in many different forms over hundreds of years, going back to medieval times in ancient Europe. The folk games that most closely resemble modern-day baseball started in the British Islands, but the religious and spiritual foundations for the game were arguably established long before that in ancient Ireland.