Why Baseball is Better than Politics (and Why All Pastors Are Crazy)/ Jeff Heidkamp

We had something about sports a few months ago, and I think we need another one in honor of baseball opening day. Or, at the least, I need something to distract me from my Twins getting pummeled by Canadians last night.

So, if you've known me for about the last couple years, you know I'm a big baseball fan. The last fifteen or so books I've read for pleasure have been about baseball (two tied for best honors, The Last Hero by Howard Bryant and Men at Work by George Will). But what you might not know is that it's a recent thing. I hadn't followed baseball since I was a kid until two years ago. And it's actually been a pretty healing experience to get back into it.

Last season I was trying to convince my eight year old to watch a game with me instead of play a video game on the computer, and she had a classic line. "Dad, I just don't get baseball". I argued with her that she did. We'd watched enough together that she understood the mechanics of strikes, balls, outs, and runs. "No," she responded, "I just don't get why you care." But I actually think that's kind of the point. Sports are good for us precisely because they don't matter, and they probably only get unhealthy if we start to think they actually do matter in some real way. 

I gave up on baseball because I was an insecure middle-schooler. There were jocks, and there were geeks, and then there were, in our arts-centered school district, the music-geeks. I was bad at sports, and the geeks got beat up, so I decided to try to be a music geek. Other than being reasonably talented (which I was), a way to gain entrance into the music-geek club was to declare undying hatred for sports and athletes. So I threw away my sports section, returned my Yogi Berra biography to the public library, and took up with scales and arpeggios.

Music geekdom had a clear premise. We considered ourselves superior to athletes because, as we liked to remind ourselves often, sports didn't matter. Sports was just a bunch of people playing games. But music? Music mattered. Music was life and death. Music was about the soul. Music was true art. Blah blah blah. (Though, for the record, I did play some pretty good music, and a bunch of the people I played with have gone on to do things like open for Wynton Marsalis at Lincoln Center and sing backup vocals for Norah Jones).

But one of the things I realize looking back was how unhappy music made us. It was a harsh taskmaster. And it was precisely the fact of how much we were convinced it mattered that made it so dire. If you couldn't play a part, make an audition, or impress a conductor, very real failure hung over your head.

I moved on from music geekdom to ministry, where we are more convinced than ever that everything matters. And it's this endless mattering that can at times make ministry an impossible burden. This brings me to potentially charlatan brain science. I read this thing about brain science once in a book, and for some reason I believed it. I have never been able to confirm that it is true, and I can't remember the name of the book, so I'm going to type it because it has been experientially helpful, even if the science is questionable.

The brain science said that there was some part of your brain that fires up when you think about things that are ultimate. When you are considering life, death, truth, God, meaning, etc., that part got "hot". And what the researcher said was that in mentally unhealthy people, this part of the brain was often "hot". And in mentally healthy people, it was generally "cool". Which explained to me, regardless of physiological reality, why all pastors are crazy.

And it also explains to me why picking up baseball as a hobby (instead of politics) has been so healthy for me. For a couple hours at night, or while reading, or conversing, I become engrossed in something that even an eight year old can clearly see does not matter. And yet, it does matter. Because it is fun. And God made us not only to steward his creation, but also to enjoy it. And is it a good and beautiful thing to be moved by the fact that a 30 year old man has spent most of his life learning how to hurl a tightly wound ball of yarn 95 miles an hour at a tiny square in such a way that another 30 year old man can't hit it over a wall with a stick? I think it is.

Unhealthy spirituality would probably reject baseball as a waste of time because it takes away from doing the things that really matter. Healthy spirituality lives in a humility that allows us to celebrate rather than castigate our creatureliness.

 

So- do you have hobbies that don't matter? Do they do anything good for you? Do you ever struggle with guilt because they are a waste of time? And how much prayer and fasting are you willing to invest against the Yankees this year?