The Faith of 50 Million: Baseball, Religion and American Culture (review)

Jules Tygiel, whose ground-breaking Baseball's Great Experiment (Oxford University Press, 1993) opened up the national pastime as a legitimate field of academic study, acknowledged the dangers he faced as a doctoral student contemplating the history of a sport. "Baseball is not the stuff upon which successful careers in history are normally made," he noted (p. viii).

Much has changed since then, so that now even theologians can jump into the field of academic baseball studies. If The Faith of 50 Million is any indication, this is a good thing. The volume draws its title from The Great Gatsby , in which a gambler modeled after Arnold Rothstein is described as the man who could "play with the faith of 50 million people" (Faith , p.2). Thus baseball intersects literary culture. When editor William Herzog compares gamblers to the snake in the garden of Eden and offers Babe Ruth as the redeemer of the great game from its fall, we see the religious themes that can also be invoked. From this starting point these authors explore "the 'sacred' meaning of baseball in American culture" (p.3).

They have much ground to cover. The writers are academics, drawing from expertise in church history, ethics, biblical studies, English, and theology. Though they occasionally write with tongue very much in cheek (Stanley Hauerwas's droll, autobiographical forward is worth the price of the book), this is solid work. To cite only a few of the essays, historian Christopher Evans presents baseball as the American civil religion, representing both the nation's highest aspirations of liberty and justice as well as its darker, venal side. Donald McKim compares the heroic themes attached by sportswriters to the lives of Christy Mathewson and Grover Cleveland Alexander, using these popular versions of their stories to explore notions of saints and sinners in American culture. Appropriately for a Protestant New Testament scholar, Herzog offers redemption to Joe Jackson, finding him sinless in the Black Sox scandal. Fred Glennon explores the Christianity of Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey in an attempt to understand the higher motivations underlying integration. Feminist theology gets a nod as well, as Eleanor Stebner and Tracy Trothen explore the impact of gender norming on perceptions of women in baseball.

There is more in this vein, and these are essays worth reading. If one is tempted occasionally to think that these are academics who have discovered a way to have some fun, linking their specialties to their enthusiasms, their love for the game does not diminish their judgment. Baseball, as these authors point out, has always been more than a sport in the United States, and its broader context needs investigations of the sort Tygiel presented in the 1980s. In a religious context the national pastime functions as a morality play, with characters good and evil. This should not surprise us. Themes of light and darkness fill today's sport pages, just as they did at the end of the nineteenth century when "rowdy ball" remained in its prime. Bud Selig and Don Fehr stack up nicely against Al Spalding as figures accused of having something less than the greater interests of baseball at heart. Ballplayers find themselves vilified for their greed in seeking huge contracts, which by their nature separate them from the day-to-day existence of the average American. They continue to be depicted as noble in victory and "chokers" in defeat, even though statheads have demonstrated the illusory nature of clutch performance in a sport heavily influenced by random chance. As an ugly labor dispute looms in the background, independent leagues offer themselves as a pastoral, pristine alternative to the overpriced, out-of-touch Major Leagues.

As with any good academic work, this volume points...