Overview

Sermon on the Mound
Michael O’Connor

Finding God at the Heart of the Game

God loves baseball. He even uses it for His own good purposes. If anyone  would know, it is Michael O'Connor. In October of 1986, O'Connor was watching  game six of the World Series. Through a bizarre and unlikely rally, God captured his undivided attention.

Convinced God was orchestrating the New York Mets' phenomenal comeback, O'Connor began analyzing why God would rig a game watched by millions for his benefit. Why would God care about him?

Sermon on the Mound reveals that God is available to us everywhere even in our national pastime. "Like God, baseball has always focused on relationships," O'Connor writes. "Owner to manager. Manager to player. Player to fan. It is as simple as fathers playing catch with their sons and as complex as a ball smacking the pocket of a well-oiled glove that echoes and ripples throughout generations."

With baseball stories and reflections that range from the hilarious to the sacred, Sermon on the Mound is the perfect book for anyone who loves the  game.

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Michael’s Personal Overview.

How I Came to Write Sermon on the Mound

One night in 1999 I was brainstorming with my friends, author Laura Jensen Walker and her husband Michael.

“What would you write about if you could spend time on any subject that means the most to you?” one of them offered.

I said, “I guess I’d write about my two favorite subjects—God and baseball. I’d write about my crazy theory that God loves the game and uses it for his own good purposes. Backtracking, I told them I knew no publisher would touch a book with such a crazy, unprovable premise.

But they were mesmerized. So I kept talking and they kept listening. “Sermon on theMound” is the result of that conversation.

Although listed as a devotional, this is really a baseball memoir of a young man who falls madly, hopelessly, irrevocably in love with a game for which he had little gifting. “Sermon on the Mound” is, most of all, the story of a Heavenly father who noted the attraction between the boy and the game, using it to teach the child some of the most important lessons of his life.

Filled with pathos and humor “Sermon on the Mound is just as accessible to the hard core baseball fan who loves God as it is to the person who loves the game but is struggling with issues of faith. This is, after all, the place I found myself in, when God came knocking on my door with a ball in one hand and a glove in the other. 

Michael O’Connor