Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Baseball, Sports & Recreation, General
ISBN: 9781592407545
Google: EgtXXc2aTMYC
Amazon: 1592407544
Publisher: Gotham
Published: 2013-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

The Atlanta Braves were one out away from defeat in yet another World Series when their mercurial manager, Bobby Cox, finally ran out of signs to flash to his players. All he could muster was a deep sigh and a cold, blank stare toward the pitcher’s mound.

Cox had been there before—three of his previous four trips to the Series had ended in bitter disappointment—but this one, in 1999, felt different. For the first time since their captivating run of division and league championships had begun nearly a decade earlier, the mighty Braves were about to be swept four games to none. Cox had already decided to decline the post-Series interview with NBC—another first. He would send star pitcher John Smoltz in his place.

Elsewhere in the dugout, Cox’s third baseman and that season’s Most Valuable Player in the National League, Chipper Jones, also was scanning the Yankee Stadium scene. He had a different reaction; he simply shook his head and started to laugh. Moments earlier he had seen the Braves’ powerful first baseman, Ryan Klesko, break three bats in a single turn at the plate, the last one shattering as he produced a meek pop fly to second base. Klesko then trotted back to join the rest of his teammates in watching their season end with a whimper.

What the Braves also were watching was greatness. There was simply no answer for Mariano Rivera’s cut fastball. When the game finished, Jones compared the pitch to “a buzz saw.”

The Yankees’ closer had discovered his cutter by accident two years earlier, in 1997, while tossing a ball to another reliever in the bullpen. After initially trying to change his mechanics to straighten out the pitch (when gripped correctly, it resembles a four-seam fastball but is held slightly off-center, with the thumb toward the inside of the ball, causing it to break, or cut, toward a right-handed pitcher’s glove side as it reaches home plate), Rivera decided to embrace it, and the game of baseball has never been the same. By 2011, Sports Illustrated estimated that a quarter of all major league starters regularly used the pitch as part of their repertoire. But no pitcher, starter or reliever, throws it as skillfully as Rivera.

With a week remaining in the 2011 season, Rivera threw twelve cutters in thirteen pitches to retire the Minnesota Twins’ batters in order and earn his record-breaking 602nd career save. James Traub, my dear friend who for several years joined me in teaching the Baseball as a Road to God seminar at NYU, wrote in The New York Times Magazine: “Rivera, when pressed, attributes his gifts to providence; people of a more secular bent say that he combines one of the single greatest pitches the game has ever seen—his cutter—with an inner calm, and a focus, no less unusual and no less inimitable.”

That inner calm, indispensable in a closer, traces back to the shores of Puerto Caimito, Panama, a fishing village that counted Rivera, his parents, and his three siblings among its thousand or so residents in the seventies.

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