This document summarizes an upcoming conference on baseball literature and culture to be held in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in April 2015. It includes the schedule for Session B2 which focuses on baseball and spirituality, with three presentations on related topics. It also includes several excerpts and quotes related to baseball, spirituality, and the renewal of life that comes each spring with the start of a new baseball season.

1. 20th annual conference,
Baseball in Literature and Culture
Murfreesboro, Tennessee
April 3, 2015

2. Spring Training
and the perennial renewal of life

3. *Session B2: Baseball and Spirituality
Location: Dining Rm. C Chair:
Phil Oliver, Middle Tennessee State University:
“Spring Training and the Perennial Renewal of Life”
Brian Steverson, Knoxville TN:
“Baseball Literature-Bible Literature: Cultural
Interconnectivity”
Warren Tormey, Middle Tennessee State University:
“Imposing the Genesis Narrative onto the Vintage
Game”
I may be the token spokesman for none (“spiritual, not religious”) on our panel - unless the Church of
Baseball counts as religious.. In the beginning was the Grapefruit (and later the Cactus)...

4. I believe in the Church of Baseball. I've
tried all the major religions, and most of
the minor ones. I've worshipped Buddha,
Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees,
mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I
know things. For instance, there are
108 beads in a Catholic rosary and
there are 108 stitches in a baseball.
When I heard that, I gave Jesus a
chance. But it just didn't work out
between us. The Lord laid too much
guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to
theology. You see, there's no guilt in
baseball, and it's never boring...
which makes it like sex. There's never been
a ballplayer slept with me who didn't have
the best year of his career. Making love is
like hitting a baseball: you just gotta relax
and concentrate. Besides, I'd never sleep
with a player hitting under .250... not
unless he had a lot of RBIs and was a great
glove man up the middle. You see, there's
a certain amount of life wisdom I give
these boys. I can expand their minds.
Sometimes when I've got a
ballplayer alone, I'll just read
Emily Dickinson or Walt
Whitman to him, and the
guys are so sweet, they always
stay and listen. 'Course, a
guy'll listen to anything if he
thinks it's foreplay. I make
them feel confident, and they
make me feel safe, and pretty.
'Course, what I give them lasts
a lifetime; what they give me
lasts 142 games. Sometimes it
seems like a bad trade. But
bad trades are part of baseball
- now who can forget Frank
Robinson for Milt Pappas, for
God's sake? It's a long
season and you gotta trust
it. I've tried 'em all, I really
have, and the only church
that truly feeds the soul,
day in, day out, is the
Church of Baseball.
But of course the Church of
Baseball counts!

5. But seriously, “spirituality” is
rooted in espiritu, which
signifies breath. Respiration
is our most natural recurrent
function. Can inspiration and
aspiration be far behind? Not
for a fan in Spring Training,
where spiritual
transcendence is natural and
recurrent too.

6. So if our subject is beginnings, the
perennial renewal of our national
pastime is at least as spiritual a date on
the calendar as Christmas. Or Easter.
In Richard Ford’s words, Easter is “the
optimist’s holiday… the day for all those
with sunny dispositions… a tidy holiday
to remember sweetly and indistinctly as
the very same day throughout your life.”
Like Opening Day. Or better, like Feb. 15
(or so), when “pitchers and catchers
report.”

7. But let’s not overthink this. The
really spiritual dimension of
baseball in spring was captured by
Roy Campanella when he said in
baseball you’ve got to have a lot of
little boy in you - or girl, I’m sure he
also meant to say. Games are for
playing, and play is a function of
spirit.

8. Let’s suppose they’re right. What did
Crash Davis say? It’s a simple
game, “we gotta play it one day at a
time.” And of course, “lesson
number one: don’t think; it can only
hurt the ball club.”
A week ago today my department hosted a
Lyceum address by anthropologist James Bielo
(Miami-Ohio), who related the conviction of
some Biblical theme park designers in
Kentucky that true creativity consists in making
complicated things seem simple.

13. I’ve been privileged to participate in this event every year since 2008, making it nearly as much a perennial
source of personal renewal now as the game itself. In that time we’ve mostly been graced here by pitchers -
Denny McLain, Mudcat Grant, Fergie Jenkins, Jim Rooker, Tommy John, Jim Bouton (and I just missed Bill
“Spaceman” Lee), so it’s great to see hitters of the stature of Willie Wilson and Ken Griffey stepping up to the
lectern.
For the record (it being baseball, after all): in my previous talks here I’ve discussed Ted Williams & John
Updike, Sidd Finch, the meaning of life, umpires and rules, heroes of my youth like Bob Gibson & later semi-
villains like Mark McGwire, time and eternal recurrence, Nashville’s old Sulfur Dell ballpark... Can’t believe it’s
taken me this long to get back to Spring Training!

15. People ask me what I do in
the winter when there’s no
baseball. I’ll tell you what I
do. I stare out the window
and wait for spring. Rogers
Hornsby

17. In March of 1961, The New Yorker sent Roger Angell to
baseball spring training. Being a longtime fan, Angell could
not cover baseball as an objective journalist; it would be like
asking a young child to analyze Disneyworld's rides as a
strict critic - remaining stoic would be impossible...Angell
wrote contradictory to the standard of his profession -
subjectively, in the voice of a fan. Forty years after his first
story about elderly baseball fans at spring training, his
unique formula for baseball writing lives on.

18. To Angell, baseball means writing in the present
tense: "baseball presents itself so clearly that there
is a tendency to see it as it's happening again."
Baseball means timelessness: every game is
always the same as every other game, and yet
always different. Baseball means facing history:
players not only against their contemporaries, but
against every player in the history of the game.
Baseball means boxscores, the magical
arrangement of names and numbers that when
deciphered reveals the story of a game. Baseball
means dealing with failure: "there is more Met than
Yankee in all of us," says Angell, underscoring
man's natural tendency to err. Roger Angell and the
Meaning of Baseball

19. Baseball sights and settings are so familiar that reporters reëncountering the game at the spring-training
camps in Arizona and Florida give an almost perceptible little nod as they step out onto the first field of
March and find all in place once again. Here are seven or eight players, larger and younger than one has
remembered (as always), gathered around the batting cage, awaiting their turns at the plate in easeful,
half-forgotten poses that now slide heck into recognition like a foot into a bedroom slipper.

20. There’s nothing new here; there’s no
end to this, year after year, and yet
each time out, each spring, it feels
surprising as well as comforting,
utterly fresh and known by heart—
the old game in a young season.
Circling the batters, the writer
approaches the cage from the rear,
takes up his own stance (one foot
automatically finds the bottom railing
of the cage, like that of a toper
easing up to the bar), adjusts his
own hat, and tests the tension of the
knotted netting in from of him,
making sure he won’t catch a foul in
the face.

21. The batting coach, an old acquaintance,
puts out a beefy paw in welcome, but
his eyes go quickly back to the batter. A
couple of the players offer recognizing
smiles or head-bobs, but their attention
is elsewhere; this is business. Then
there’s a shock: a traded-for star, a
towering, famous figure, stands over
there among the rookies and the
regulars, looking all wrong in his
strange new uniform—and then, in the
same instant, looking young and
dangerous in this born-again role. Ask
D., the writer reminds himself in a
mental note. How does it feel, etc.?
Work, of a sort, has begun.
Roger Angell, “A Heart for the Game,”
The New Yorker May 2 1988
HoF 2014

22. Troy: Why do we inflict this on
ourselves?
Ben: Why? I'll tell you why, 'cause the
Red Sox never let you down.
Troy: Huh?
Ben: That's right. I mean - why?
Because they haven't won a World
Series in a century or so? So what?
They're here. Every April, they're
here. At 1:05 or at 7:05, there is a
game. And if it gets rained out, guess
what? They make it up to you. Does
anyone else in your life do that? The
Red Sox don't get divorced. This is a
real family. This is the family that's
here for you.

23. Wednesday, October 30,
2013
Hurry Spring
A wise but frustrated old Red Sox fan once
said: baseball breaks your heart.
It is designed to break your heart. The game
begins in the spring, when everything else
begins again, and it blossoms in the summer,
filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as
soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves
you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely
on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the
memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and
then just when the days are all twilight, when
you need it most, it stops.

24. Then comes the long hard
winter. Stories are told, the
heart begins to heal, and
eventually to hope. For the
briefest while, it's only a game.
Bart Giamatti needed to believe
something lasts forever. I just
need to believe Spring Training
will come again. The
countdown begins. Up again,
old heart.*
*Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!—it seems
to say,—there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the
world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical
power.Ralph Waldo Emerson

25. Not God, but life, more life,
a larger, richer, more
satisfying life, is, in the last
analysis, the end of
religion. The love of life, at
any and every level of
development, is the
religious impulse." WJ,
VRE

26. Religion, therefore, shall mean for us the
feelings, acts, and experiences of individual
men in their solitude, so far as they
apprehend themselves to stand in relation to
whatever they may consider the
divine….the immediate personal
experiences will amply fill our time, and we
shall hardly consider theology or
ecclesiasticism at all.

27. “Although all the special
manifestations of religion
may have been absurd (I
mean its creeds and
theories), yet the life of it as
a whole is mankind’s most
important function.”

28. Friday, March 6, 2015
Adventure time!
Our father-daughter Spring Break/Spring Training
adventure can't happen fast enough.
Up@dawn
continuing reflections caught at daybreak

29. We greet the dawn snow-and-ice-bound this morning, she in sub-zero Illinois, me
surrounded by a record (for this date in Nashville) snowfall. But in our minds we're
already there, a stone's throw from the best Grapefruit League venue ever (Al Lang
Stadium) and short drives from next week's games in Clearwater (Tigers-Phil),
Tampa (Red Sox-Yanks), Bradenton (Sox-Bucs), and Dunedin (O's-Jays). So, my
topic for next month's 20th annual Baseball in Literature and Culture conference at
my school is inevitable: Spring Training and the Perennial Renewal of Life.

31. Speaking of Blue Jays, I hope we see one in particular before
our Friday return flight. He's the most interesting pitching
prospect since Sidd Finch. If it were April 1 I'd be sure the late
George Plimpton wrote this:
Daniel Norris ("The Van Man") has a
consistent 92-mile-an-hour fastball, a $2
million signing bonus, a deal with Nike
and a growing fan club, yet he has
decided the best way to prepare for the
grind of a 162-game season is to live here,
in the back of a 1978 Westfalia camper he
purchased for $10,000. The van is his
escape from the pressures of the major
leagues, his way of dropping off the grid
before a season in which his every
movement will be measured, catalogued
and analyzed.

32. If a baseball life requires
notoriety, the van offers
seclusion.
If pitching demands
repetition and exactitude, the
van promises freedom.

33. "It's like a yin-and-yang thing for me,"
he says. "I'm not going to change who
I am just because people think it's
weird. The only way I'm going to have
a great season is by starting out happy
and balanced and continuing to be
me. It might be unconventional, but to
feel good about life I need to have
some adventure."
(continues)
We need to have some
adventure too, Older Daughter
and I. We need to get out of
this deep freeze and into the
sunshine. Vamanos!

35. March
2000

38. Nope, the best moment was in
March 2000, in Jupiter (got the
preposition right that time): Ray
Lankford made up for Mark
McGwire's snub of my then-5 year
old daughter's request for an
autograph by walking behind the
batting cage where he'd just
cracked his Louisville Slugger...
and handing it to her. Nice guy,
Ray.
March 2015

39. March 7, 2010. Spring Break inevitably puts me
in mind of Spring Training, which it looks like
Older Daughter and I won’t be visiting this year
after all. Alas.
I’d been looking forward to connecting the dots:
ten years ago the whole family went to Jupiter.
Jupiter, Florida. Spring home of the St.
Louis Cardinals. Older Daughter, age 5,
was the world’s biggest Mark McGwire fan.
He was just off his second consecutive
monster season. Nobody yet suspected
anything illicit about his performance.
We ambled into the public access area
between practice fields (along with Younger
Daughter, still in stroller) and observed the
red-clad stars and aspirants taking batting
and fielding practice, jogging and stretching
in the crisp March sun, and slowly waking
to the possibilities of a new season. Next
year was almost here.

40. McGwire eventually joined his teammates on one of the fields, and Older Daughter patiently awaited
her opportunity to request an autograph. Finally it came. And just as quickly went. The star mumbled
something about club rules preventing him from obliging his young fans, and was suddenly gone.
That could’ve ruined her day, but
thanks to McGwire’s teaammate
Ray Lankford (a very good
centerfielder, 238 career HRs)
she instead collected the coolest
possible souvenir from Spring
Training: his bat. He spotted her
behind the screen and, when his
round of BP concluded,
unceremoniously handed it to her.
It’s in her closet now.

41. "Daily rituals, especially
walks, even forced
marches around the
neighborhood, can be
the knots you hold on
to when you’ve run out
of rope." Ann Lamott
“The wonder of life is often most
easily recognizable through habits
and routines.” Maria Popova

42. “Few lament the end of spring training. There is little
like it in the American experience, something whose
beginning is awaited impatiently and greeted
eagerly each year, yet whose demise is met with
indifference, relief, even glee. Any baseball player
or fan will tell you: as good as spring training is, it’s
easily trumped by opening day… there is an
emptiness as well, a sense that something special
has gone and will not return for some time. But it will
return.
Pitchers and catchers report in just 320 days.”

43. To be interested in the changing
seasons is a happier state of mind
than to be hopelessly in love with
spring.
George Santayana*
*Who also said: “There’s no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the
interval.” Play ball!

45. Huggins-Stengel Field, St. Pete

48. March 10
Tigers 6 at Phils 0
Clearwater
Xavier Avery ph
single,
8th inning

53. March 12
Red Sox 10
at Yankees 6
Tampa
Arod’s 1st HR
since
September
‘13

54. ‘78 World Series trophy

55. March 1
March 12
Red Sox 5 at Pirates 1
Bradenton
HRs in the 3d from Ortiz & Sandoval

57. March 13
O’s 2 at
BlueJays 5
Dunedin

60. MLB tv
O’s at
Bucs
March 15
Not the
same

63. Monday, March 5, 2007
Greetings from sunny Florida!
Venice, FL. It's another lovely day in
baseball paradise, at my friend's home south
of Sarasota (where I'm meeting another
friend at noon for the Reds' game at Ed
Smith Stadium). Made my way here after
yesterday's game at old McKechnie Field in
Bradenton -- Reds whupped the Bucs, but
Spring Training isn't about who wins & loses,
it's about delighting in the atmospherics, the
sun, the possibilities and the hope springing
eternal...

64. Skeeter
Tuesday, June 23, 2009. John
Updike's poem "Baseball" evokes
a moment in my life that could
come back to me tinged with mild
humiliation, or at least blushing
humility, but thankfully it just makes
me smile. Recalling the skill and
difficulty involved in the deceptively
simple-seeming act of snagging a
fly ball, Updike wrote:
...circle in the outfield
straining to get a bead
on a small black dot
a city block or more high,
a dark star that could fall
on your head like a leaden meteor.

65. I had not quite disgraced the player
whose glove I borrowed for the contest:
the one and only "Skeeter" Barnes, a
very good career minor leaguer who
had many cups of coffee in The Show
with Cincinnati, St. Louis, Montreal, and
Detroit. You could look it up.
But you'll have to take my word for what
Skeeter said to me as I returned his
glove to him and hustled back to my
hiding place in the grandstand. "It's not
as easy as it looks, is it?" No, sir. It's
not.

66. What are we really renewing, we lifelong baseball fanatics, every Spring? I think we’re renewing our capacity for
childlike wonder and, if no longer aspiration - that ship has definitely sailed - then certainly still admiration. It’s not
at all as easy as it looks, but we can recall a time when the difficulty was a taunting challenge and not yet a
smirking rebuff.
It’s why a gray-templed, bald-headed eloquent old scholar will always still address a paunchy, raunchy, barely
schooled, inarticulate former athlete at gatherings like this one with a deferential “Mr.”
And mean it.

67. Thursday, March 8, 2007
Lakeland
Wow! Lakeland is a perfect
baseball venue. I'd never attended
a "real" game there before, just an
informal intrasquad game years
ago at which I recall Sparky
Anderson being vocally managerial.
This time I paid for admission to
Joker Marchant Stadium and opted
for a spot on the left-field "berm,"
the angled hillock just behind the
fences. It was a lovely vantage
from which to see a game (not to
mention batting practice, during
which I came oh-so-close to
snagging a HR ball more than
once).

69. The Tigers hosted the Braves, into
extra innings ( I confess to leaving
before the resolution of the 4-4 tie,
with concerns about Orlando
gridlock -- not unreasonable
concerns, as it happens.) Detroit
looks good this year, with the
addition of Gary Sheffield. BTW:
Lakeland offers the best selection
of non-Budweiser products of any
place I've been in the Grapefruit
League (or in the majors, come to
think of it). First time I've ever been
able to tell a Brit fan at a baseball
game where he could find some
Boddington's.

70. Leaving 2007 Spring Training behind, I'm in a reminiscent mood. My 1st-ever
Spring Training was the last time the Cards were reigning champs, '83. I
remember an upstart rookie outfielder named Andy van Slyke pounding a
long home run against Joacquin Andujar, the '82 Series star, in one of those
serendipitously-discovered free intrasquad games at the Cards' old St. Pete
facility.
(Andujar, who once said his favorite word in English is
"youneverknow," responded with a mock finger-wag at
van Slyke).

71. Pirates: McKechnie Field, Bradenton
1923… Blue Jays: Dunedin Stadium.
Phillies: Bright House Field,
Clearwater… Yankees:
Steinbrenner Field, Tampa

72. Grapefruit League VenuesRed Sox: JetBlue Park at Fenway South,
Fort Myers 2012-. Inside it resembles
Fenway Park, complete with a Green
Monster...enni
Orioles: Ed Smith Stadium, Sarasota
2010 makeover. One of my last phone
conversations w/Mom, 2007.
Pirates: McKechnie Field, Bradenton 1923.
Tigers: Joker Marchant Stadium,
Lakeland 1966,2d-oldest ballpark in the
Grapefruit League. No team has called
one city its Spring Training home as long
as the Tigers, who began going to
Lakeland in 1934

73. “By the time Walter O’Malley died in 1979, Dodgertown was as it would
be for the next 20 years, a baseball theme park… Like the theme parks
up in Orlando, Dodgertown attracted visitors from across the land. They
all came in search of America as it once was and would never again be.
Except here.” Charles Fountain, Under the March Sun

74. Al Lang Field, St. Pete. Boston Braves 1922-1937.
New York Yankees 1925-1942, 1946-1950, 1952-1961.
St. Louis Cardinals 1938-1942, 1946-1997. New York
Mets 1962-1987.Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays, 1998-2008.
“In 1921, former mayor Al Lang helped to secure, on
behalf of the city’s park board, a 99-year lease on a piece
of land at the water’s edge at the foot of First Aveue
South. Spring training baseball would be played there for
more than 85 years.” Charles Fountain, Under the March
Sun

76. McGwire, Lankford, Jupiter 2000...
Ray’s bat...
‘07, return to life after weeks of
serious pulmonary illness...

77. Youneverknow…
‘83, my first spg training game was an intrasquad
match at the Cards’ St. Pete training facility about
5 miles from Al Lang. I sat in the bleachers directly
behind the backstop. The rookie Van Slyke went
deep on the Series star Andujar, and got a jocular
finger-wagging reprimand for it.
Another very informal St. Pete venue was used by
the Mets. I remember intrasquad games there
between the Gary Carters and the Dwight
Goodens. (Or was it the Strawberrys?)

78. And here's the sort of thing that can
only happen at a Spring Training
game: on entering McKechnie Field
I was greeted by a retiree renting
seat cushions, who abandoned his
spiel when he noticed my tee-shirt
from "Chocorua, New Hampshire" -
- he not only knew the place well,
he also knew of William James and
the fact that WJ had a summer
home there (the place James loved
because it had so many windows
and doors, "all opening out"). We
talked about James, Chocorua,
philosophy, etc. for several minutes
while his rental business took a
holiday. That has never happened
to me in a big league ballpark.

79. Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Delight in Bradenton, Venice
6:50 pm E.T. My last full day of Spring Training, reluctantly concluded (but happily consummated). Pirate City
remains charming and little-known (you can stand in the middle of an array of four diamonds, a few steps
behind each home plate, as b.p., infield practice, and intra-squad games are going on). Phils beat Bucs in
Bradenton, another gorgeous day-game (they announced the weather back in PA: 20 degrees, more snow
expected), Ryan Howard smashed a double off the centerfield wall. Then, another rejuvenating beach walk
(Venice Beach this time).

80. It'll be hard to leave in the morning, but I need to reach Jacksonville by nightfall -- unfortunately my old friend
near J'ville will be heading out of town in the a.m. But there should be just enough time to spare for a stop at
the Tigers' place in Lakeland -- and I'll try to resist the impulse to stay for the game at 1. It sure was nice --
symmetrically so -- when my Cards avenged 1968 last October (thanks to the incredible lack of throwing-to-1st
prowess on the part of the Tigers' pitching staff) and at the same time softened the blow of 2004 -- and did it
with a team that probably couldn't have bested the '68 Cards once in ten tries. Just goes to show that baseball
is indeed a funny game. As Casey Stengel said, there comes a time in everyone's life, and I've had plenty of
'em...

81. Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Spring Training!
The first "real" spring training games of the season (there's an oxymoron for you, I guess) commence today in
Florida and Arizona. Unless the sky falls between now and Friday, I'm goin'! Spring Break begins Friday
afternoon, and I'm taking the long way to a philosophy conference in South Carolina -- via St. Pete, Bradenton, &
Sarasota. Stay tuned for dispatches from baseball heaven (apologies to "Bull Durham's" Iowa)...

82. Friday, March 2, 2007. I'm hittin' the road this afternoon, headed eventually to a philosophy gig in
South Carolina... but it's Spring Break, so pleasure precedes business: I'm taking the long way, via
St. Pete, Bradenton, Sarasota, Ft. Myers, Kissimmee...
It's been too long since last I heard
the crack of the bat up close. My best
Spring Training moment ever, by the
way, is not the lone foul ball I ever
caught in my bare hands while
juggling dog & beer (in March '91 at
St. Pete's Al Lang Field, when the
Cards' still played there and not on
Jupiter; it was shanked by Dale
Sveum of the Philadelphia Phillies
[lifetime .236 hitter, future former
Cubs manager], and I plucked it in
the right field grandstand where the
Bay view is rivaled only by San
Francisco's PacBell Park (or
whatever their corporate masters are
making them call it now).

83. Xavier Avery
● Full Name: Xavier Tyrone Avery
● Born: 1/1/1990 in Atlanta, GA
● Bats/Throws: L/L
● HT: 6'0''
● WT: 190
● Bio >
● Debut: 5/13/2012
● College: N/ATeam: Detroit Tigers
Age / DOB: (25) / 1/1/1990
Ht / Wt: 6'0' / 190
Bats / Throws: Left / Left
Contract: view contract details
Share:

84. I got to thinking about Ray yesterday when I
ran into my old pal at the bookstore, there to
gather my Spring Break leisure reading, and
he reminded me of another gracious old
ballplayer named Skeeter. Thanks to people
like them, people like Mark McGwire don’t
ruin the game for people like Older Daughter
and me. Thanks to them, we’ll look forward to
Spring Training. Maybe next year.

85. It was an early summer Sunday, the Nashville
Sounds were hosting an afternoon game at Hershel
Greer Stadium, and I had just settled into my seat to
watch batting and infield practice before the game's
scheduled 2 pm start. (We don't do that very often
anymore, to my regret. I was still a single guy on my
own recognizance back then.) A Sounds staffer
approached with an offer any sensible person of my
general athletic competence would have declined. I
accepted. So that's why, a few minutes before 2, I
found myself in center field as another Sounds
staffer pointed an up-ended pitching machine in my
vicinity and proceeded to launch a succession of
black-dotted baseballs into the high sky above me.

86. A city block? Might as well have
been a city away. I did manage to
catch one of them, but all of my
attempts were successful from the
team's point of view: they elicited
loud crowd reactions. Howls of
derisive laughter. General
merriment. And in spite of it all, I
had a blast doing it. As Updike says
later in the poem, it is our birthright
as Americans to fail spectacularly.