When you catch the ballyou throw it back, right Dad?

A holy moment in the church of baseball:

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More from the Suffragan Bishop of Baseball

The Suffragan Bishop for Baseball has posted the following rubrics for the observation of baseball in the Episcopal Church:

Every game is a double-header. The early game is played by National League rules. The later game is played by American League rules.

Before the game, we sing the National Anthem. All four verses.

The most popular seats are in the back. If you come late, you may have to sit immediately behind the plate or one of the dugouts.

Our team does not rush organizational decisions. We have had an interim manager for three years.

Every month or two, the team wears a different color.

Even though not much happens in most games, we are always standing up and sitting down.

During the “seventh inning stretch” half of us stay standing at our seats and the other half make elaborate circuits around the ballpark, greeting their fellow game-goers.

The concession stand is quiet for most of the day, but is mobbed at the conclusion of the game.

These rubrics are adapted from those promulgated by Mark MacGougan, who is said to be “One of the Top 50 Episcopal Liturgical Comedians in Central Connecticut.”

Mission work is an essential part of Episcopal baseball. The following is a worthy example:

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Tertiary!

Happy Opening Day:



Here is the original:



"I cannot tell!"

"Tertiary!"

H/T to NYTimes Laugh Lines.

Proper Liturgy for Opening Day 2009

Dear Baseball Fans:

The Baseball Fan observes with great devotion the days of the Baseball Season, and it became the custom to prepare for Opening Day by a season of reflection and prediction.  This season provided a time for converts and seasoned Fans alike to share with each other their allegiances and analyses so that conversations, whether appointed or joyously unexpected, could begin with mutual understanding and awareness.

I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Game we love, to the observance of a truly great Season by self-examination and objectivity; by reflection, contemplation, and self-awareness; by differentiation from past rivalries and present and obligatory pay-backs; and by reading and studying The Sporting News' Baseball Annual, the sports pages, baseball blogs, and websites, and, perhaps, conversing (at arm's length) with baseball handicappers of renown (one of whom in The Great Gatsby sports cuff-links made of human molars).

And, to make a right beginning to the Season, let us now kneel in silence to determine the results of our studies and our hopes for the Teams, and to set forth those results below:

Andrew's 2009 Baseball Season Predictions*

Winners of Divisions and Wild Cards, League Champions, and World's Champion

AL East: Boston Red Sox

AL Central: Minnesota Twins

AL West: Los Angeles Angels (of Anaheim)

AL Wild Card: New York Yankees

AL Champion: Boston Red Sox

NL East: New York Mets

NL Central: Chicago Cubs

NL West: Los Angeles Dodgers

NL Wild Card: Philadelphia Phillies

NL Champion: New York Mets

World's Champion: Boston Red Sox

Play Ball!

The text of the liturgy (above the predictions) comes courtesy of the Custodian of the Book of Baseball Prayer, The Ven. "Dusty" Stringfellow.

* = "A good therapist always reserves the right to be wrong." -- Virginia Satir

Thirty Days...

...until pitchers and catchers report for spring training!

Just as we are hit with a major arctic blast...there is hope in the Church of Baseball.

The Proper Liturgy for Opening Day

The Baseball Fan observes with great devotion the days of the Baseball Season, and it became the custom to prepare for Opening Day by a season of reflection and prediction. This season provided a time for converts and seasoned Fans alike to share with each other their allegiances and analyses so that conversations, whether appointed or joyously unexpected, could begin with mutual understanding and awareness.

I invite you, therefore, in the name of Baseball Fans everywhere, to the observance of a truly great Season by self-examination and objectivity; by reflection, contemplation, and self-awareness; and by reading and studying Street and Smith's Baseball Annual, the sports pages, baseball blogs, and websites, and, perhaps, conversing (at arm's length) with baseball handicappers of renown. And, to make a right beginning to the Season, let us now kneel in silence to determine the results of our studies and our hopes for the Teams, and to set forth those results below:


2008 Baseball Season Predictions
Winners of Divisions and Wild Cards, League Champions, and World's Champion

AL East:
AL Central:
AL West:
AL Wild Card:
AL Champion:

NL East:
NL Central:
NL West:
NL Wild Card:
NL Champion:

World's Champion:

Please use the comments below.

Thanks to the Ven. "Dusty" Howard Stringfellow, Archdeacon of the Diocese of Bethlehem (who is a fan of the NY Yankees, bless his heart).

World Champions!!! Again!!!

Amalie Benjamin of the Boston Globe describes it, which is good because I am so giddy I am speechless!

For the second time in four years the Red Sox have won the World Series.

With a 4-3 win over the Rockies in Game 4, the Red Sox have swept their second straight Series, winning eight straight Series games.

Jonathan Papelbon closed it. The final out came on a Seth Smith strikeout swinging.

Jason Varitek had the ball, in case the Hall of Fame is looking for it. He put it in his back pocket as he ran to the mound to celebrate with Papelbon.

And Mike Lowell is the Series MVP--a great choice! This was a total team effort. The Sox showed they win on power hitting, the showed they can win on extra bases and they showed they can win a pitching duel.

That's eight world series games in a row!

And what a great closing game! The Rockies are a team with heart and character. I think the eight day rest really hurt them. You can tell because they really did not run on all cylinders until game three and really began to pull it together tonight. If tonight were game one or two instead of game four, it would have been a very different series. They will be back.

But for now...It's Duck Boat Time!

Congratulations Red Sox--and hooray Red Sox nation! The best team in baseball in 2007 wins the World Series!

Good News is Meant to be Told

You know it was inevitable: this had to end being a sermon. Good thing the feast of St. Mark the Evangelist came along. atg+

This past Monday, I was taken by a little story on NPR’s Morning Edition. It seems that a man named Jim Governale found a box of old reel-to-reel tapes in his grandmother's garage. On one of the boxes, was a clipping from the sports page of a newspaper. It read “Koufax No-Hitter” and “Los Angeles vs. New York, 5-0 Perfecto”. Inside the box was a recording of Vin Scully calling the Mets at the Dodgers on June 30, 1962. This game was Sandy Koufax's first no-hitter of his storied career and it would be the first of four perfect games in four consecutive seasons.

The best part of this story was how this tape came to be. It was recorded by Governale's father on his grandfather's machine. One can easily imagine a kid just fooling around with the equipment perhaps plopping a mic in front of the radio.

I don’t know about you, but I can imagine this because I did this kind of thing. Only I recorded nonsense. This kid recorded history. When he set this up, did he have any idea what he was about to preserve? How did it feel when this lark ending being an historic moment? Did he know when he took out the cellophane tape and labeled the box with a headline cut out from the next day's sports page that this treasured tape would land in a box in the back of a garage where it would sit for thirty years?

If you click on the link in the web site and listen to Vin Scully call the last inning of this game, you get the feeling that he didn't know when he came to work that day that he would be describing history or that his words would paint the picture of something magical. When you listen, you hear it unfold right before your eyes.

Listening to Scully and the crowd around him, one can almost taste the hot dog. It’s wonderful.

As far as I am concerned, this artifact is about as holy as seeing a splinter of the True Cross. Not only was it not supposed to have existed, but it was made by accident! Best of all, listening to this tape takes you back in time forty-five years.

Sometimes I wish we could read the Gospels the way we hear this tape. We deliver the Gospel in such a formal way, with people dressed like, well, me, standing in places like this. We are all so reverent. As beautiful as it can be, we are hearing this Gospel in bite sized chunks, often in stories that we have had delivered since we were in Sunday school. Condensed, combined, and refined. We think we know about John the Baptist and Jesus. But what we do is very far away from what the Gospels must have been like to the first people who heard them.

Of all the Gospels, the Gospel of Mark is most like oral literature. It doesn’t read like a book but is best read out loud, sitting cross legged in a circle. I once saw an actor, Alec McCowen, perform the entire Gospel of Mark as a one man performance in a little over an hour and a half. (We have a tape of that here in the parish. We should watch it together sometime.)

The first Gospel’s weren’t liturgical texts. They weren't even bound documents. The first Gospel’s were what one Christians told another person about their experience of Jesus Christ.

Try to imagine that one day you are going about your business and then this person comes into your life: A person who taught with authority, who healed and cast out demons but did not want to draw attention to himself, who fed people on so many levels. A person who would die and also rise from the dead. Imagine being there when Jesus walked into your life. Imagine and then imagine trying to tell the story of those encounters.

Imagine being a person who hears the good news for the first time like this:

Once upon a time John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, "The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."

Imagine. That’s the key word. We make the Bible into a lot of things. Not just liturgical texts, but also texts that teach and direct and set down norms. We think of them as history and some people even think of Scripture as science.

The way Mark comes to us, in its simplicity and the way it move so quickly (John the Baptist arrives, then he baptizes, then he says this, and then he baptizes Jesus, then he is arrested….boom, boom, boom!) reminds us that the Good News is a story that is meant to be told.

And that teaches us something. The first Christians became the first Christians because someone told them a story, and that story was immediate and engaging and opened the imagination, and through the imagination, the Holy Spirit moved and touch and transformed.

It was not just moving people back in time to make them remember Jesus way back then. The story brought Jesus forward and showed people that Jesus is alive and here now and still touching people’s lives and feeding them and healing and changing them.

But wait, there’s more! We can tell the story precisely because Jesus has walked into our lives and has fed us, healed us, changed us in ways that are both great and small but always wonderful. When we listen to the Gospel as a story of Good News in real lives, we realize that we have a Gospel story to tell as well.

Mark begins: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” That story is worth telling. Imagine hearing it as if you are there. Imagine telling it because you are.

The best Gospel’s aren’t stories of people from way back then. The best Gospel is when we hear the story of Jesus with us now.

A Voice from the Past

This morning I heard a delightful feature on NPR's Morning Edition. It is the story of how Jim Governale found a box of old reel-to-reel tapes in his grandmother's garage and on one of them was a recording of Vin Scully calling the Mets at the Dodgers on June 30, 1962. This was Sandy Koufax's first no-hitter of his storied career. The first of four in four consecutive seasons.

Until now, it was assumed that there was no archived recording of the event.

This story satisfies on so many levels: the generational connections, the stats and trivia, and the timelessness of baseball.

The tape was made by Governale's father on his grandfather's machine. One can easily imagine a kid just fooling around with the equipment perhaps plopping a mic in front of the radio and ending up recording this historic moment...and then preserving it in a box labeled with a headline cut out from the next day's sports page...and then the tape landing in a box in the back of a garage where it would sit for thirty years.

In addition to the complete story, you can link over to recorded excerpts of Scully's play by play of the final inning. There are so many things to savor: the articulate descriptions of the play, the players and the crowd; the drama of the moment. Scully said so much with so few words. Any writer would stand in awe. In many ways, radio was made for baseball. A good announcer could bring you into the park via the imagination in a way that television (or a web-cast) cannot. Listen, close your eyes and be transported.

NPR: Recorded History: Vin Scully Calls a Koufax Milestone

Raining baseballs in Boston

The Red Sox swept the first meeting with the Yankees at Fenway. Tonight was a great back and forth game that looked more like October than April. Most fun of all...it was raining baseballs at Fenway for a while there. Four home runs in four consecutive at-bats, a Red Sox record and a tying the major league record.

See it here.