The 2025 Baseball Playoffs: The Metaphysics of Baseball

Dear Friends and Readers,

I offer this essay to provide perspective on an important component of American culture.

I hope this is another way of staying in touch.

Fr. Jim Bacik

In the days after the Los Angeles Dodgers clinched their second straight World Series title, baseball fans continued to ponder the 2025 Major League Baseball playoff games with their marvelous defensive plays, dramatic home runs, tense extra inning games, questionable managerial decisions, dominant pitching performances, disappointing losses, and strategic use of the sacrifice bunt. Most remarkable was the “Ruthian” performance of Japanese star Shohei Ohtani, who in the NLCS had the greatest game in the history of major league baseball: pitching six scoreless innings with 10 strikeouts and hitting three home runs, one that went 469 feet and left Dodger Stadium.

To provide some perspective on the playoffs, I offer the following essay, “The Metaphysics of Baseball” adapted and updated from my book, Spirituality in Action (pp.97-102). Baseball has always attracted the attention of intellectuals and scholars who tend to see the game from a philosophical perspective. Already in 1846, the poet Walt Whitman enunciated the often-repeated theme that baseball is the quintessential “American Game,” our national pastime, our distinctive contribution to the world of sports. Whitman claimed that baseball was as important as the Constitution in shaping American life, in part because of its ability to enhance the physical and emotional health of the citizenry. Today baseball retains its preeminent popularity among American sports fans. For instance, the seventh game of this year’s World Series attracted a larger television audience than either the Super Bowl or the NBA finals.

For the contemporary author, John Thorn, baseballs’ greatest contribution to America is not as a mirror reflecting our society, but as a safe haven protecting us from it. Baseball is “a providential antidote to our raging, tearing, relentless progress, an evergreen field that provides rest and recreation, myths and memories, heroes and history.” We go to the ballpark to escape the rat race and to replenish our spirits. Burdened by modern life, fans are refreshed by the calm rhythms of the leisurely, slow-paced games.

From a more radical perspective, sports writer, Allen Sangree (d. 1924) saw baseball as “a national safety valve,” a way of letting off steam which plays the same role in our society as political revolutions do in Central America. Some sociologists think that the enthusiasm generated by the Detroit Tigers’ championship season in 1968 helped avoid riots in Detroit’s simmering inner city.

The historian and biographer, Doris Kearns Goodwin, recalls when she was only seven years old her father bought her a scorebook and taught her all the intricacies of scoring a game. While watching the Dodgers play on TV on summer afternoons, she would keep score so she could tell her father every detail of the game when he came home from work. Later as an adult, when she took her own boys to Fenway Park to see the Red Sox play, she would close her eyes and recall attending games with her father. “There is magic in those moments,” she says, “for when I open my eyes and see my sons in the place where my father once sat, I feel an invisible bond among our three generations, an anchor of loyalty linking my sons to the grandfather whose face they have never seen, but whose person they have come to know through this most timeless of all sports.” Baseball connects the generations. Reminiscing about baseball often begins “when my dad took me to the game….” Baseball gave many of us a world to share with our fathers and memories to treasure.

The late essayist Roger Angell was fascinated by the paradox that baseball looks like an easy game, but in fact makes incredible demands on players who fail more often than they succeed. The best hitters make outs more than 60% of the time. Aaron Judge, a finalist for the 2025 American League MVP, struck out over three times as often as he hit a home run. In professional football, the best teams lose only a few times a season; the best major league baseball teams know the agony of defeat over sixty times in a season. The winningest pitcher in major league history, Cy Young, lost over 300 games. Even Ohtani did not pitch well in the seventh game of the World Series. Roger Angell says it is the “obdurate difficulty and the steely demands of the game that lurk beneath its sunny exterior” which entrance baseball fans.

Some people are taken with the geometry of the game. The late Bart Giamatti, who moved from the presidency of Yale University to Commissioner of Baseball, wrote a book about baseball entitled A Free and Open Space. He loved the open green space of the field, the precisely determined dimensions of the diamond, the many rules that govern the game, and the interplay between energy and discipline needed to excel in the sport. Focusing on the pivotal spot in the ordered space, Giamatti wrote: “Baseball is about going home and how hard it is to get there and how driven is our need. It tells us how good home is. Its wisdom says you can go home again, but that you cannot stay. The journey must always start once again, the bat, an oar over your shoulder, until there is an end to all the journeying.” Not many fans would express their appreciation of the game in such lofty terms, but some of us enjoy a sweet moment of aesthetic delight when we see a perfectly executed double play or a runner score from third on a sacrifice fly with a beautiful fadeaway slide into home.

Statistics have an importance in baseball not found in other sports. Most football fans do not know how many touchdown passes Tom Brady completed in his career. On the other hand, many baseball fans know that Miguel Cabrera retired in 2023 with over 3,000 hits and 500 home runs. Author Bill Somes claims that baseball statistics form a common language that bridges generations and sets standards. To say that a hitter got over 3,000 base hits in his career does not just mean that he got a lot of hits. To the fan it signifies that the hitter performed consistently over a long career and joined an elite group of 33 stars who reached that high plateau, including Derek Jeter, the only Yankee player to do so. The baseball language of excellence includes Joe DiMaggio hitting in 56 straight games; Cal Ripken playing in 2,632 consecutive games breaking Lou Gehrig’s record; and Hank Aaron hitting 755 home runs surpassing Babe Ruth in the process.

Part of the appeal of baseball is the ability to produce dramatic moments which propel individual players into stardom and capture the imagination of fans; for instance, the 17 walk-off home runs in World Series history. One of the most memorable was hit by Kirk Gibson in the first game of the 1984 World Series giving the Los Angeles Dodgers the victory over the Oakland Athletics. Circumstances added to the drama. Gibson, who was the National League most valuable player of the year, had serious leg injuries that prevented him from taking a full swing. He was called upon to pinch hit in the bottom of the ninth inning with a man on first base with two outs and the Dodgers behind by a run. Furthermore, he was facing Dennis Eckersley one of the best closers in the major leagues. Nevertheless, he blasted a home run into the right field seats. As he limped around the bases pumping his fist, the announcer Jack Buck repeated “I don’t believe what I just saw.” Many baseball fans have relived that moment by watching the video. These dramatic moments help make baseball, in the words of poet Donald Hall, “a place where memory gathers.”

Baseball is a game not a religion. It has a dark side, racial segregation, betting scandals, and the use of performance enhancing drugs. Nevertheless, baseball resonates with some noble sentiments: the drive for excellence, the need for leisure, an appreciation of physical skills, the conviction that achievement requires discipline, the hunger for special times and places, a willingness to sacrifice for the good of the team, and the desire for an ordered world where it is possible to get home safely- a hopeful notion greatly needed in our deeply polarized society.