Forgotten Virtue: The Baseball Hero Nobody Knows

By |2024-02-14T18:57:33-06:00February 14th, 2024|Categories: Baseball, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays|

Gil Meche His career stats indicate that he was a mediocre baseball pitcher—perhaps the epitome of mediocrity: 84 wins; 83 losses; a 4.49 Earned Run Average; a Walks-plus-Hits-to-Innings-Pitched ratio of 1.42. Yet Gil Meche, who played for the Seattle Mariners and Kansas City Royals, was responsible for one of the most astounding, yet almost unnoticed, [...]

The Day Rick Monday Saved the American Flag

By |2023-06-13T18:07:21-05:00June 13th, 2023|Categories: American Republic, Baseball, Independence Day, Stephen M. Klugewicz, Timeless Essays|

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 [...]

The Moral Decline of the Dodgers

By |2023-06-12T16:33:45-05:00June 12th, 2023|Categories: Baseball, Catholicism|

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 [...]

No Time for the Pastime

By |2023-03-29T18:48:47-05:00March 29th, 2023|Categories: Baseball, Catholicism, Christianity|

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 and the Cure of Souls

By |2023-03-29T18:50:43-05:00March 29th, 2023|Categories: Baseball, Culture, Paul Krause, Senior Contributors, Sports, Timeless Essays|

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 [...]

“Field of Dreams”: Baseball, the Prodigal, & Paradise

By |2022-06-19T14:55:06-05:00May 26th, 2022|Categories: Baseball, Featured, Film, Imagination, Timeless Essays|

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 Republic of Baseball

By |2021-05-04T16:37:16-05:00May 4th, 2021|Categories: Baseball, Timeless Essays|

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. [...]

Baseball Goes For Woke

By |2021-04-27T20:52:19-05:00April 6th, 2021|Categories: Baseball, Civil Society, Stephen M. Klugewicz|

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 [...]

Marianne Moore’s Baseball Poems

By |2023-04-14T23:43:18-05:00July 27th, 2020|Categories: Baseball, Character, Christianity, Culture, History, Literature, Poetry, Sports|

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 [...]

Judging the Black Sox: The Baseball Scandal of 1919

By |2020-06-30T18:30:55-05:00June 30th, 2020|Categories: Baseball|

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 [...]

“Baseball Has Marked the Time”

By |2020-05-16T13:36:23-05:00May 16th, 2020|Categories: Audio/Video, Baseball, Film|

The following is the speech of Terence Mann (played by James Earl Jones) from the film Field of Dreams. Ray, people will come, Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway, not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as [...]

“Give Us Back Our Game”

By |2020-05-10T14:31:34-05:00May 10th, 2020|Categories: Audio/Video, Baseball, Music, Sports|

"Give Us Back Our Game" appears on Terry Cashman's 1995 album, Passin It On: America's Baseball Heritage in Song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwQPfGLOZy8 Give us back our game It belongs to us The people of America Give us back our game It's a song about us Before the fields and all of the dreams turn into dust [...]

Go to Top