The Church of Baseball

I may not be one of those nuts who can spew endless streams of stats and "little known facts: about the game, but I love baseball. There are many reasons why, and I am sure I'll spend time spewing about each one of them, but not this morning.

I don't have cable, satellite or even high speed internet- so I don't get to watch but a couple of games a year. But I "watch" the games on "Gameday", a silly presentation of stats basically. It goes from pitch to pitch and sometimes has long gaps between events. It's all done over the modem line so there are some times when nothing happens at all- and you find out you lost your connection. But I watch. I am fascinated. Sometimes, I am obsessed.

There 162 games in a season. Plenty of time to recover from losses, move on from big victories, and/or recover form injuries. No team goes completely winless. Any game there is a chance of winning- a chance for hope to be real. A chance to cheer and feel happy. With in any game, someone did well at some point. No one goes hitless. No team goes scoreless...for too many games in a row anyway.

I return again and again for six months to see who won, who did well, and who stepped up to a challenge. I live the game in my mind- turning the written word into images in my mind. I imagine many of the faces, the emotions, and the thoughts. Always looking and dreaming of the stories between the stat lines.

I don't do a lot of church these days. I think of God a lot and I like to read his stat book. I imagine the stories between the lines. What were those stories really like? What s the underlying lesson in each verse? What were the characters really thinking? A well done movie is nice, but it never equals my own imagination.

I miss going to church sometimes. I miss having conversations about church things. But church has failed me, at least in the building sense. I'll stick to my scriptures and my prayers for now. And for the next six months, I'll be also studying and learning from the stream of stats playing themselves out through my 56K stadium.

That should be enough religion for now. And for now, as Annie of Bull Durham would say, the only church that serves day in and day out is, the Church of Baseball.