The term “student-athlete” is at best inaccurate and at worst a fiction. Once upon a time college football was organized and run by and for students. Maybe it’s time to return to that by starting all over. Which institution of higher learning in America will one day become the University of Chicago of the twenty-first [...]
“Of all these sports,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1893, “there is no better sport than football.” As in many things, TR was on the cutting edge of cultural opinion in the United States, as it was about to takes its place among the powers of the world. That he too often conflated football and world [...]
On April 25, 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial celebrations, Chicago Cubs outfielder Rick Monday saved an American flag from being burned by two protestors who had trespassed onto the field during a game at Dodger Stadium. As the bottom of the fourth inning got underway, the protesters placed the flag in left-center field [...]
More than 75 years ago, Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey made history for the Brooklyn Dodgers by breaking baseball’s “color line." But today’s Los Angeles Dodgers are making a different kind of history by honoring men who put on nuns' habits in order to mock the Catholic Church. The devoutly Christian Robinson and Rickey must [...]
Baseball is beautiful, fun, and enjoyable. It can also help us learn how to enter into the present moment. Of course, one does not have to be a fan of baseball to enjoy life truly. But loving a sport such as baseball can help us to appreciate life as it comes to us in the present [...]
Baseball has an essence that mirrors the heavenly city and the precision of creation better than other sports. Its calmer nature also embodies that sense of tranquility which the restless heart seeks. The baseball season has arrived. America’s pastime sport returns, like Persephone from her bondage in Hades, to signal the return to life that [...]
“Ryan is the only guy who puts fear in me. Not because he can get you out but because he can kill you.” —Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson It was the last day of our spring training odyssey: Sunday, March 28, 1993. For the past week, I, along with my friends Mark and John, had [...]
The film “Field of Dreams” beautifully portrays in a contemporary idiom the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but even more so, the grand cosmic drama to which that Parable points: that of Paradise lost and Paradise regained. In view of the beginning of baseball season, and as the father of two Little Leaguers, I thought [...]
The new principles that Simone Biles is introducing into sport may be more humane, more compassionate, and even more just than the outlook that demands any sacrifice in the pursuit of victory, but they may also shine with a less radiant luster. I have no wish to add my voice to the chorus of praise [...]
Our deepest norms of order can still be seen in operation on the diamond when they’ve been adulterated everywhere else. Baseball is our Utopia — not in assuring us of the victories we dream of, but in guaranteeing ideal conditions even of defeat. We are players or spectators of other sports, but citizens of baseball. [...]
In a sadly predictable development, Major League Baseball continues to go the way of the Woke, demonstrating a contempt for its audience and the players' and owners' narcissistic need for self-validation through virtue-signaling. This past weekend I tried listening to an Orioles game for the first time since swearing off baseball last year because of [...]
To believe that a certain athlete, musician, artist, political leader, or writer is not just “great” but “the greatest of all time” is to give undue weight to our time and to our own experience. It also unnecessarily forecloses our imaginative horizons that something or someone can indeed come along and surpass what we may [...]
As we attempt to understand Marianne Moore’s baseball poems, it is important to see the contextual influence of her brother and their mutual interest in Pauline Christianity, a tradition they never abandoned. There is some mystery in the space between sport and religion that many Christian athletes inhabit and of which Marianne Moore is the [...]
The Black Sox Scandal was a Major League Baseball game-fixing scandal in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox (Arnold "Chick" Gandil, Eddie Cicotte, Oscar "Happy" Felsch, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, Fred McMullin, Charles "Swede" Risberg, George "Buck" Weaver, Claude "Lefty" Williams) were accused of throwing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds in [...]