The ‘Indefensible Hope’ of Baseball

WITH THE COMING of spring and warm weather, my thoughts turned, as they always do, to the importance of the game of baseball in my family and the valuable lessons I’ve taken from it. We have a sign outside our home: “We interrupt this family for baseball season.” It reflects how much baseball means to our whole family and how much time and space it takes up in our day-to-day lives for much of the year.

Some of my most rewarding years as a father were the 11 years (and 22 seasons) that I coached my sons, Luke and Jack, in Little League Baseball. Though that time is past, baseball still very much connects our family as my sons have moved through school, with my oldest continuing to play baseball at Haverford College.

Each spring my wife, Joy Carroll, organizes an extraordinary baseball service trip to the Dominican Republic for our sons’ Wilson High School baseball team for its spring training. I go along to help and watch a wonderful week that many coaches, players, and parents have called “life-changing.” This year, we took 25 teenage boys to the DR, a country that produces an amazing 20 percent of Major League Baseball players. Our trips are hosted by the Grey Sisters, a congregation of Catholic sisters founded in Canada and longtime allies of Sojourners, and Dominican baseball coaches. Our players serve and our baseball program supports ministries as varied as an orphanage for special-needs children, an elder-care facility, a program for Dominican girls going to school to become doctors in their own country, and, this spring, a project to help rebuild a Pentecostal church.

Perhaps my favorite moments are when we go out to a rural bataye (sugar workers village) to put on a baseball clinic for children and then play a game with an older team, when I can watch the deep connections our kids make with their kids. And to see, at the end of the week, when the Wilson and DR players say their goodbyes to each other.

The connection made between our players and the Dominican players is deep, as it is with the special-needs children and elderly residents. But our reflections at the end of the week also make clear that connections during a short visit are not enough, and our players are encouraged to see how their lives, their studies, their majors in college, and their careers and vocations can help them make long-term connections like these throughout their lives and leverage those connections for social justice. The players get that.

ONE OF THE most valuable lessons I’ve learned from baseball, as a father, coach, and fan, is what it can teach anyone who engages with it about hope, especially hope in the face of seemingly impossible odds. I have come to see baseball as a game of hope, because in baseball, failure is the name of the game. That is what makes it so much like life and faith—and so full of the intense expectations that lead us to hope. Think about it: Even the very best baseball players fail to get a hit two-thirds of the time—most players much more than that. Even when a player gets a hit, it is usually because of a pitcher’s failure to keep the ball away from the sweet spots. Yes, failure is the name of the game of baseball, but hope against that failure is the energy of the game.

Author John Updike spoke of the “indefensible hope” of baseball: “There will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope.” Isn’t hope always indefensible in the end? Isn’t it always a matter of faith—the faith that makes life possible, which is always so full of human failure? Life amid our current political and religious crisis is no game, but baseball has a lot to teach us about how to approach it—even and especially when the odds seem stacked against those God commands us to protect.

The basic lesson of baseball—the critical importance of perseverance and hope in the face of failure—is also one of the most important lessons we need for life in this world, and perhaps especially for this political era. Our relationships and solidarity with those who are vulnerable in our society means we cannot, morally, opt to give up because it’s too difficult or because we so often encounter obstacles, setbacks, and failures. In that sense, we have no choice but to persevere, with or without hope. But how much better it is to persevere with hope.

Indeed, I believe that the greatest gift of the Christian faith—which baseball can also help remind us—is the knowledge that there is always hope, and we will not forever hope in vain.