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“By and large it is the sport that a foreigner is least likely to take to. You have to grow up playing it, you have to accept the lore of the bubble gum card, and believe that if the answer to the Mays-Snider-Mantle question is found, then the universe will be a simpler and more ordered place.”

-David Halberstam

FIRST INNING

An Affair to Remember

I am having an affair.

My wife knows about it. My children have heard the two of us discussing it in hushed tones from rooms to which they have been exiled. My pastor and many on our church board have brought me in for counseling. Usually people are embarrassed when they find out and don’t know what to say.

"Is it so wrong to love?" I ask them. "Is it a sin to follow my heart?" They study the tops of their shoes in silence. But they are not being honest. You can see it in the reflection on their Florsheims. They miss the romance in their lives. They yearn to rekindle the passion. Or perhaps I’m describing something they have never known. Although I have no proof, I believe I am secretly envied.

I am having an affair. It’s been going on since Kennedy was president.

The first time I picked up a baseball, it wasn’t all that special. The ball was small, round, dirty. I tossed it into the air, and gravity had its way.

I was a kid growing up in a home where the foundation was cracked and the structure was crumbling. Yet here, at last, was something I could depend on. No matter how grass-stained or scuffed was its skin, the ball remained loyal and would always return.

Baseball revealed her inner beauty to me in 1963, and I have been helpless in her presence ever since.

For a time I was a player. But these days I mostly watch. I’ve learned what brings her joy. I know her flaws and sorrows as if they were my own. I no longer need to be in her presence to be overwhelmed with her fragrance. But it helps. She is not so perfect to me as when I was eight and needy. But she is always beautiful.

I was drawn to this game when I was knee high to a shin guard. Drawn like a pyromaniac to a thatched hut, like an Irishman to a three-day wake. It was almost involuntary.

And though baseball incessantly teased with the promise of pennants and championships, the part of the sport that stressed winning was rarely fulfilling to me. The peaks were generally fleeting, and the valleys went on forever. Not that this mattered. If my lust for victory burned unrequited, I could at least satisfy my burgeoning heart with proximity to the beloved game itself.

God was a different story altogether. If God was calling me during those early days, He got nothing but busy signals. If He was beckoning me to follow, I was on another path. If He was wooing my hungry heart, it was a task requiring supreme perseverance. I was already in love.

To me, God was interesting, mysterious, and worthy of fear. But love—torrid, passionate, fanatical devotion—these are colors of an emotional rainbow I never would have attributed to the Author of all creation. The god I was introduced to was a joyless deity. Mirthless and somber. The one who rained fire and flood upon the land. The one who demanded obedience over and against abiding affection.

I don’t know why God didn’t strike me dead over this golden calf in the first inning of my existence, why He restrained himself from leveling every baseball diamond from San Diego to Maine in righteous indignation. If my early baseball days were any indication, certainly a lifetime of idolatry lay ahead.

And God had the best seat in the house from which to view this morality play. I marvel how, daily, He must have sat in bemused silence, surprised by nothing, knowing every outcome—peering effortlessly from the press box of eternity through the smoked-glass windows of my soul.

Who would fault Him for growing jealous enough to sift through the corridors of time, delivering plague upon plague to the mid-1800s village of Cooperstown, New York? All God had to do, prior to the game’s conception, was send a Bakersfield-sized meteor aimed straight at the heart of its birthplace and baseball is never invented.

Then—poof!—jai alai is America’s national pastime.

God had a better idea. It was ingenious, really. Why not take the thing that held my rapt concentration—baseball—and use it to instruct and draw me closer to Him? So brilliant was God’s execution, I remained blissfully ignorant of it for the first thirty-one years of my life.

When the day came for Him to reveal this master plan in October of 1986, it grabbed my whole attention like a sharp grounder to short that you expect will hug the ground but instead trick-hops off the hardpan infield, delivering an agonizing shot to your forehead. It’s difficult to ignore God when you’re flat on your back, seeing stars and counting angels.

***

The other day a box of old family photographs arrived in the mail. My mother was cleaning out some closets and thought I might enjoy the memories. I found my third-grade class picture and, on a whim, asked my daughter Dusty to pick me out of the lineup. There were sixteen boys in the picture. It took fifteen tries to nail her old man.

Had I really changed all that much? I guess my twelve-year-old answered that question for me. But it’s a little hard to accept. In my heart I am still that third grader, telling the same corny jokes, pulling on little-girl pigtails.

I found a posed snapshot of me taken during my early days of organized ball. The child is slight of build and severely freckled. His short auburn hair is all but hidden by an oversized green cap with a big red R on it. His baggy uniform, like Jonah’s whale, appears to have swallowed him whole. There is a leather glove carelessly dangling from one hand, appearing to have only decorative value.

You study his eyes and there is a Robinson Crusoe look about them. They are lost and adrift. I guess growing up between the Bay of Pigs and Watergate will do that to you. He is not the vibrant, happy-go-lucky kid I had expected or remembered. Was memory failing or had Mom hired a child actor, purchased her first computer, learned Photoshop, and doctored this picture?

Then it hit me. The red R betrayed the mystery. Raineers. This was my first team. My first uniform. My first glove. This was the beginning of the marvelous journey—the start of this lifelong affair. We had, apparently, just met, and infatuation had not yet set in.

Once we became acquainted, baseball gave me purpose and direction. She steered me toward home more times than a designated driver on St. Paddy’s Day. Baseball was my salvation—my lithe and graceful partner on the ballroom dance floor of life.

The boy in the photo doesn’t know it yet, but he is about to fall in love. Madly, hopelessly, irrevocably. It will be one of the truly profound miracles in his life.

And isn’t it just like God to use a miracle to get our attention?

Do not lust in your heart after her beauty or let her captivate you with her eyes.

—Proverbs 6:25

Copyright© 2001 Michael O’Connor. Used by permission of Bethany House Publishers. May not be reproduced without permission.

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