There was a time when every fiber of my being looked forward to the World Series. The first one to which I paid much attention was the 1967 Series—I was nine years old—between the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals, which is, as it turns out, the matchup that we have this year.
I watched every inning that I could of the classic World Series in the 1970s in which those great Cincinnati Reds, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Oakland Athletics teams were involved. I hung on every pitch of the 1975 contest—the greatest series of my lifetime, so far as I’m concerned—between the Reds and the Red Sox. The ‘80s are a bit of a blur what with seminary, the beginnings of my career, and the birth of our children, but I know that I watched as much as I could. The enduring memories of that decade are the homerun by a gimpy Kirk Gibson of the Dodgers off Oakland’s closer extraordinaire Dennis Eckersley in the 1988 tilt and the earthquake that struck during the Oakland vs. San Francisco Series of 1989; both events shook the world in their own way.
I suspect I’ll watch some of this year’s Series but I’m not planning my life around it. I guess it’s partly because I just have other things I’d rather spend my time doing; after all, with each passing moment life becomes more and more scarce and thus more and more valuable so I’m trying to spend my time creatively and well.
I suspect that the main culprit behind my increasing lack of interest in the World Series, though, is the Atlanta Braves baseball team.
I’m a Braves fan. I started following them when they moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta (something for which our son’s Wisconsin in-laws have never forgiven them) in 1966. With a couple of exceptions (1969 and 1982, when they won the Western Division Championship but were swept in the League Championship Series), for the first twenty-five years of their Atlanta residency, the Braves gave us little hope of a World Series experience. Most seasons they were out of the race by the All-Star break. Most seasons we knew that they were really out of the race before Spring Training began.
Then came the most exciting season in Atlanta Braves’ history—the worst to first season of 1991. With young stars in the making like pitchers John Smoltz and Tom Glavine and outfielders David Justice and Ron Gant, with grizzled veterans like Terry Pendleton and Sid Bream, and with role players like Greg Olson and Rafael Belliard, the Braves went on a remarkable run that led to an Western Division championship, a win over a highly favored and frankly, far superior Pittsburgh Pirates squad, and an epic seven-game World Series loss to that year’s other worst-to-first team, the Minnesota Twins. That year began a remarkable run in which the Braves won their division title for fourteen consecutive years. They made four more World Series appearance in the ‘90s, winning the title in 1995.
What an experience it was to have my team in the postseason every year and to have them appear in the World Series in half of the years of the 1990s! I only thought I had been interested in the Series before; now that my team was in it, I lived and died with them during every moment of every contest. But now, when the Braves are not there, which they have not been in a long time, I find myself not being very interested.
That’s only natural, I suppose, but I find it troubling. After all, baseball is a great game—the greatest game, I would argue—so I should care about it for the sake of its intrinsic beauty and grandeur, not just because I have a team in the game. I should love baseball for baseball’s sake. And I do. I just need to reclaim that first love, a love I had for the sport of baseball that rose above the fortunes of my favorite team. I need to refocus on the game at large rather than on my little corner of it; I need to appreciate and celebrate the joy that fans of other teams feel and to understand and empathize with their frustrations.
All of this has implications for how we think (or don’t think) about the Nation, the World, the Universe, and the Church—and our little pieces of them …
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