Why do I keep watching baseball?
This is a question I’ve asked myself often as I’ve followed the Major League Baseball season intently this year, spending much time (perhaps too much time!) following the ups and downs of the playoff race.
Maybe I keep watching because there’s something captivating about the identity of a team; about the continuity of the whole even as individual members come and go through the years.
In following the journey of young ballplayers, many of whom are my own age, I’ve thought about my own journey as part of a “team,” my religious community, the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales.
In the Major League Baseball, a player doesn’t get to choose his team. He doesn’t get to try out for the team he dreamed of playing for as a kid. He doesn’t get to pick the other guys on his team. But, once he’s on the team, even if he knows it may only be for a few months, he gives everything he has to his new team.
In religious life, we too are living a life that we ourselves did not choose without first being chosen. Our life chose us. Or rather, God chose us. We were drafted onto a team not of our own making, some of us when we were 18 years old, others after years of life experience. We didn’t choose our teammates. We didn’t plant the grass upon which we play; we didn’t fashion the wood and leather that are the tools of the trade. The difference between us and the ballplayer is that we’re on the same team for life.
Maybe what’s most difficult about the “game” we play, in comparison to the ballplayer, is that in our day to day life, there’s no visible opponent, there’s no rival in another uniform to get the adrenaline going each day we take the field. Yes, there is real social injustice at multiple levels that needs to be confronted. Yes, personal evil and sin are real. But our everyday life does not always seem to involve a head-on confrontation with them.
Maybe, it’s also the case that for a baseball team that takes the field, the adversary is not the other team on the field. Maybe the adversary, the true rival, is also one we must face as religious: the temptation to let go of hope. The cold pessimism masquerading as realism that says there’s only a 1-in-30 shot at the postseason, or at, best 1-in-15, so why bother? Why not just show up and just aim to finish ahead of the last-place team?
We know that in the life of any team, celebrations can be short-lived. The smiles of a playoff-clinching walk-off replaced a week later by the choking back of tears as your team’s ace gets pummeled in an elimination game. The experts’ applause of your team’s grittiness succeeded by analysis of the manager’s head-scratching pitching change. In our life, I’m sure we’ve often felt very much the same: the high notes of graduations, baptisms, weddings, ordinations and professions are just as frequently followed up by funerals, boring Zoom calls, petty gossip, and the humdrum of the everyday.
So why does the ballplayer keep playing then, and why do we Oblates keep playing the game?
I believe it’s something elegantly simple called hope.
Hope: That indescribable, invigorating, infuriating something within you that tells you to go up and take the field again even though you got blown out 15-1 yesterday, to step in the batter’s box when his changeup is at 90 miles per hour and his fastball is in triple digits. The something that says “heck with it” to the statistical projections and gets a hit against a pitcher who’s dominated every single appearance before.
It’s that same something that drives us Oblates to preach the Gospel when we wonder if anyone is listening, to show up for morning prayer when all we want is more sleep, to love each other and learn from each other when we’ve known each other since high school and think we’ve got each other all figured out.
I’d like to end on a chipper note, saying that we have both a sturdy array of experience and a “talented young core” here in the Oblates. But as I’ve learned, it’s neither experience nor talent that defines us as religious. It’s the fidelity, the willingness to show up to the chapel, to the parish council meeting, to the classroom each day when we feel that our talent tank is empty and we’re running on fumes like an overworked bullpen. And to still give it our best shot, even when we feel that our best isn’t our best.
We’re all on this team together. Let’s play ball.
Joseph McDaniel, OSFS
Seminarian
Oblates of St. Francis de Sales
This reflection originally appeared in DeSales Weekly, the e-newsletter of the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales.
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