Where the Rubber Hits the Road

Let's see... how did that go again? "States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world." (G.W. Bush: State of the Union Address, 2002) He was talking about Iraq, Iran and North Korea. We may need to remind our American neighbors that just because their national game gives every player 'three strikes' before they must 'step away from the plate' doesn't mean that they can assume that we Canadians will agree to give them another chance to come up to bat. We are a nation of hockey fans. We understand that a game can end 0-1, irrespective of whose considered the 'home team'. Most of us believe that the game has been played, and while we stand 1-0 in military terms, it was a Pyrrhic victory when we assess the real losses our team suffered in terms of 'career ending injuries and deaths.' It was like this weekend when poor, battered Vancouver won but got mugged when they played in...

Yesterday marked the opening of the 2011 campaign, so in honor of the occasion, I’ll roll out my personal list of the “Top Nine Reasons why Baseball is to Sports what Catholicism is to Religion.” Why nine? It’s a key number in both traditions -- nine players on a diamond, nine innings in a game, and nine days to a novena. The following are nine reasons why Catholicism and baseball are, quite literally, a match made in Heaven: Both baseball and Catholicism venerate the past. Both have a Communion of Saints, all the way down to popular shrines and holy cards. Both feature obscure rules that make sense only to initiates. (Think the Infield Fly rule for baseball fans and the Pauline privilege for Catholics.) Both have a keen sense of ritual, in which pace is critically important. (As a footnote, that’s why basketball is more akin to Pentecostalism; both are breathless affairs premised largely on ecstatic experience.) Both generate oceans of statistics, arcana, and lore. For...