The World Series Reflects Life And What Little We Can Control
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(OPINION) The first game of the 2023 baseball World Series is Friday. The audacious name for the championship event dates back to 1903, when almost no one outside the United States played the sport. Now, baseball is also popular in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Caribbean countries and parts of Central and South America — and the sport’s peculiarities can help us understand both biblical truth and American culture.
Let’s start with Chapter 9 of Ecclesiastes: “Under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.” Baseball is different from basketball, where a perfect shot will go into the basket. In baseball, it’s possible to hit a ball so hard that it can travel for over 330 yards (300 meters) at 124 mph (200 kilometers) — yet a well-positioned fielder can catch the ball in the air. The hitter then trots back to his team’s bench, a failure.
In that way baseball reflects life, which often shows us how little we control. In the top baseball leagues, an average batter gets a hit only one of four times at bat. The best batters get a hit only one of three times. Forty-five years ago I interviewed Bart Giamatti, who left the presidency of Yale University and became the chief executive of Major League Baseball. Giamatti said about baseball: “It breaks your heart; it’s meant to break your heart.” (He died of a heart attack at age 51.)
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Giamatti’s statement is true as far as it goes. Not only individuals, but teams have to deal with surprising failures. Three teams this year — the Baltimore Orioles, Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers — achieved the traditional mark of excellence by winning at least 100 of the 162 games played in the regular season. All three lost in their first round. The Texas Rangers (90 wins this year) and the Arizona Diamondbacks (only 84 wins) are meeting in the World Series. Both teams surprisingly triumphed in each of the first three playoff rounds.
Baseball also differs from basketball and football in its lack of an overall time limit, such as 40 minutes — Olympics basketball — or 90 minutes (World Cup). Instead, each team gets nine chances (“innings”) to score: An inning continues as long as the team is successful. Teams gain success not by running down an oblong field to deposit a ball in a goal or over a line but by running from base to base in a circular motion and reaching the base from which they started: home plate.
(Graphic courtesy of MLB.com)
Baseball early in the 20th century became the national sport of the United States because it is also democratic: Unlike football or basketball, where a star player can dominate the action, each of nine batters per side gets a turn in the spotlight, in order. In the 21st century some major league teams pay tens of millions of dollars to hire one, two or even three stars, but if their other players are weak, they rarely have as much success as teams with nine unspectacular but solid players.
Back to Ecclesiastes, which tells us to abandon the illusion that we are in control of our lives. David Gibson in “Living Life Backwards” summarizes its message: “Stop trying to understand everything, to be in control of everything.” He quotes Ecclesiastes 9:7: “Eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart.” Gibson says “the whole point of Ecclesiastes (is that) the life you have today comes from God’s hand as a gift. … Enjoy life with your wife today because tomorrow she might be gone — or you might be.”
Either the Texas Rangers or the Arizona Diamondbacks (named after a snake) will be celebrating 10 days from now. The losers will mourn, and the winners should enjoy the victory, while realizing that they probably will be mourning next year. No major league team in the 21st century has won the World Series two years in a row. A thoroughly modern way to avoid the realization of eventual failure is to drop competitive sports and move toward “cooperative” activities in which “everyone is a winner.” But getting rid of heartbreak cuts out the heart of sports, and life.
Having our hearts broken is central to baseball and Christianity, which takes that understanding one step further. Christians realize that through heartbreak we learn this world is not our home. We all face a ninth inning in which our physical hearts will break, but we can go beyond both stoicism and whimpering. When God breaks our hearts spiritually, we gain a deeper hope.
In this serious world we have a philosophical choice. We can settle for “it breaks your heart” and say no more. Or, we can follow that phrase with the conclusion to Psalm 23: “Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
Marvin Olasky, chairman of the Zenger House Foundation, edited World magazine for 29 years. He now has affiliations with Discovery Institute and Acton Institute.