Pittsburgh Catholic Newspaper - News and Features

News & Features

Major league Catholics
archived from: 2006-07-07
by: Robert P. Lockwood

With Pittsburgh hosting baseball’s 2006 All-Star game on Tuesday, July 11, the Pittsburgh Catholic takes a look at some of the prominent Catholic ballplayers of the past to create its own All-Star team.

Babe Ruth was dying. The cancer that had attacked him at a young 53 was eating him alive.

As described in Leigh Montville’s “The Big Bam” (Doubleday, 2006), “a statue of Blessed Martin de Porres, known as the Negro saint, stood on Babe’s nightstand. On July 21 (1948), Ruth’s condition worsened, and Father Kaufman game him the last rites of the church. It was a strangely controversial move. The priest received a lot of positive mail, but also some hate mail from Catholics throughout the country who thought that Ruth’s profligate life didn’t deserve forgiveness. One was written entirely in ecclesiastical Latin.”

He lasted until Aug. 16. “The Babe died a beautiful death,” Montville quotes Father Kaufman telling reporters outside the hospital. “He said his prayers and lapsed into a sleep. He died in his sleep.”

The greatest ballplayer who ever lived had always called himself Catholic, and for years the Knights of Columbus considered him their most valuable player.

When baseball dominated the sports scene in ethnic immigrant cities like Boston, New York, Detroit and Chicago in the 1920s through the 1950s, it was Catholics who made up a healthy part of the fan base.

Even today, the fan base for professional baseball remains the metropolitan areas of our larger cities and particularly in the Northeast, where the majority of the Catholic population still resides. Add to that the Catholic populations that live in Los Angeles, San Diego and traditional Midwest enclaves such as Pittsburgh, Chicago and St. Louis and you can still build an argument that baseball remains as it has since the beginning of the 20th century, a disproportionately Catholic game.

And there are the players themselves. There is no official list (though somewhere on the Internet it may exist) of Catholic players, and the Hall of Fame doesn’t break down its membership by religion.

But Catholic ballplayers made up a healthy part of every line-up throughout the game’s history. Take the 1948 Brooklyn Dodgers and you find 12 Catholics listed on the playing roster, including Gil Hodges, Ralph Branca, Pete Reiser and Carl Furillo.

So many Catholic elements

There is no connection between throwing a good curve and being a good Catholic. At the same time, many of those identified as Catholic who played ball were not necessarily sterling citizens of either church or state. Perhaps Ruth deserved that stern lecture in ecclesiastical Latin on Catholic moral theology.

Yet, there is something about the game of baseball that marks it Catholic, more so perhaps than any other of our games on the national sports scene. A lot of it is what we read into the game. And some could argue, effectively no doubt, that it is all just a bit of hokum. There’s nothing more Catholic about baseball than there is about paved highways — both are just a part of the scene and neither a ballgame nor an interstate have anything to do with living the great Catholic life.

A. Bartlett Giamatti, the late commissioner of baseball and former Yale University president, would disagree. He wrote about how “much of what we love later in a sport is what it recalls to us about ourselves at our earliest. And those memories, now smoothed and bending away from us, are not simply of childhood and a childhood game. They are memories of our best hopes. They are memories of a time when all that would be better was before us, as a hope, and the hope was fastened to a game.”

The difficulty with the nay saying is that we simply do not view the game as ordinary. It has become a part of our cultural understanding, a part of our self-understanding, as no other sport. And that self-understanding has so many Catholic elements.

There is a mysticism we give to the game, so evident in movies of the game like “Field of Dreams” or “The Natural.” The game is not so much a matter of life and death, but about life and death.

Lou Gehrig playing heroically — the Iron Horse who never missed a game — is cut down while still in his prime. Dying, he tells us that he’s the “luckiest man on the face of the earth” for having love, friendship and the game to play. He became an icon for a generation of young men about to make the ultimate sacrifice in World War II.

Some have argued that the lack of a time clock in baseball is what hurts the game with contemporary fans who crave the excitement of the last minute rushing by.

But leave it to a Catholic game like baseball to remain unfettered — and unrushed — by time. The church marks time in centuries, not the fleeting moment. A game that could theoretically go on for eternity strikes a distinctive Catholic chord.

But it is more than that. Early in the game’s misty history, runners would move around the bases clockwise. But once the game was codified, the bases were run counter-clockwise, forever establishing that baseball was meant to disregard time.

“The one constant through all the years,” Terence Mann explains to Ray Kinsella in “Field of Dreams,” “has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again.”

Baseball is story telling

Protestantism, it is said, is a faith of saying and hearing — the word. Catholicism is the word and more: sight, smell, taste, touch. The faith is echoed in the way baseball appeals to all the senses. Go to a ballpark — nothing beats fun at the old ballpark, the Cubs’ late announcer Harry Carey always told us — and the senses are overwhelmed.

A New York kid who walks into Yankee Stadium for the first time is overwhelmed by the open field and the green grass growing in a city of concrete. Baseball is as much the smell of a glove or fresh-cut grass as it is the sound of a bat hitting the ball, the taste of a hot dog as much as a well-turned double play.

Baseball is a good conversation, a communal celebration that should never be watched alone. We go to the stadium with a spouse, a sibling, a child or a friend. And we talk about the game, and life, and everything else. Even if we sit at home watching on television or listening on the radio, the play-by-play guy and the color commentator become our conversation surrogates. In Nathaniel Philbrick’s “Mayflower,” he describes the sacred holes dug by the Native Americans who greeted the Puritans in 1620. The holes were along well-worn paths and each represented a particular part of a tribe’s collective history. They would stop at each of these holes as they walked, and tell the stories once again. So that they would not be forgotten.

Baseball is fundamentally story telling:

“Johnny Murphy is in, pitching in relief ... It’s the ninth inning ... (Joe) DiMaggio says to Murphy, ‘Why don’t we fast-ball this guy (Hank Greenberg) once? You know, everyone is curving the son of a gun; don’t curve him.’ Well, Murphy’s curving, because that’s the kind of a pitcher he was. So, he fast-balled Greenberg. Home run. The game’s over. We got beat. DiMaggio’s over there, Murphy is here and I’m over on this side. And about less than five minutes, DiMaggio stands up, and goes over to Murphy, and says, ‘Don’t you ever listen to another word I say’” (Tommy Heinrich, Hall of Fame Yankee outfielder — and a Catholic — quoted in “The Only Game in Town,” by Fay Vincent, Simon and Schuster).

There is also a liturgy to the game, the rules and rubrics that we know by heart and better than most of what we encounter in our daily lives. A guy might not be able to explain the bus schedule, but he can detail the infield fly rule in all its intricacies.

All ballplayers arrive at the finish early, becoming old when most men are just hitting their stride. It is a premature reminder of mortality and the last things.

The game has a hagiography to it where the past is as important — sometimes more important — than the present. Our shared view is always that something much more is going on in the game, something that speaks of a great romantic epic, as Giamatti called it. And the stories are of larger-than-life men whose accomplishments somehow give us an idea of how to live the great life, or at the very least that effort creates its own reward.

More than anything else, it is that hagiography of the game that makes baseball seem so Catholic to us.

List of Catholic greats

Trying to list the Catholic greats of the game — even confined to those already in the Hall of Fame — is asking for an argument, just like any list of baseball greats can get people going at it back and forth. But let me take a shot at it anyway.

But two other issues increase the likelihood of contention over a Catholic All-Star team, over and above just opinion on a player’s skills. On the one hand, a Hall of Famer who deserves to be on the list might not make it because I didn’t realize he was Catholic. For that, I apologize. Second, I’m invoking the Ruth Rule: this is a judgment on how good a ballplayer the Catholic may have been, not on how good a Catholic. My standard is that the player is publicly identified as a Catholic, not a letter of endorsement from his pastor.

Catcher

Yogi Berra, the stalwart catcher for the Yankees and later manager of the New York Yankees and the New York Mets, is my Catholic Hall of Fame catcher. Yogi finished with a .285 lifetime batting average and 358 home runs. Born in 1925, Yogi is still with us because it “ain’t over until it’s over.”

First Base

I’ll go with Orlando Cepeda.

From Puerto Rico, Cepeda was 1958 NL Rookie of the Year with the San Francisco Giants and Most Valuable Player in 1967. An 11-time All-Star, he finished his career, which lasted until 1974, with a .297 lifetime batting average and 379 home runs.

Second Base

If there was ever a Catholic gentleman who played professional baseball it was Charlie Gehringer, second baseman for the Detroit Tigers. He played 18 years for the Tigers, from 1924 to 1942 and played every inning of the first six All-Star games. He finished his career with a lifetime .320 batting average. He died in 1993 at nearly 90 years of age.

Shortstop

Arky Vaughan was generally considered the second greatest shortstop to ever play the game, behind only the legendary Honus Wagner. Vaughan played for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Brooklyn Dodgers. Vaughan was a nine-time All-Star (he homered twice in the 1941 game) and finished his career with a .318 lifetime batting average. Vaughan died in 1952 at the age of 40 after falling from his fishing boat.

Third Base

A 15-time All Star, Brooks Robinson, a convert to the faith, is considered the greatest fielding third baseman in baseball history. He played for the Baltimore Orioles for 23 seasons, won 16 Golden Glove awards for his fielding, won the regular-season Most Valuable Player Award in 1964 and was World Series Most Valuable Player in 1970.

Pitcher

Back in the era when the Yankees did nothing but win World Series titles, two names defined them to the country: Mickey Mantle and Edward Charles “Whitey” Ford. He pitched a record 33 consecutive scoreless innings in World Series play and has 10 World Series victories under his belt. An eight-time All-Star, Ford finished his 17-year career with 236 wins and an earned-run average of 2.74.

Outfielders

• Roberto Clemente: He and Cepeda are the only Puerto Rican natives in the Hall of Fame. One of the great men of dignity to ever play the game, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Clemente is arguably one of the best all-around players in baseball history. With a lifetime batting average of .317 and 240 home runs, Clemente had his 3,000th hit in his last at-bat. He died in an airplane crash at the age of 38 delivering relief supplies to Nicaragua after a disastrous earthquake.

• Joe DiMaggio: He holds one of a few baseball records that purists of the game believe will never be broken: his 56 consecutive-game hitting streak in 1941. Centerfielder for the Yankees and spanning an era from Lou Gehrig to Mickey Mantle, there are those who still say his swing and seemingly effortless grace in the field mark DiMaggio as the purest ballplayer of all time. A lifetime .325 hitter with 361 home runs, DiMaggio was an All-Star 13 times, three-time Most Valuable Player and seemed to have appeared in every World Series game during his career. He died on March 8, 1999.

• Stan Musial: With 3,630 career hits, a lifetime batting average of .331 and 475 home runs, Musial at one time or another held 50 baseball records. But one of the true highlights of his life, Musial has said, was when he joined a group of prominent Polish Americans for dinner with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1969.

• Babe Ruth: As if there could be anyone else.

As just about the whole world knows, Ruth was raised in a Catholic orphanage, St. Mary’s Industrial School in Baltimore, and often credited his love for the game — and his unique power stroke — to Xaverian Brother Matthias Boutlier. Brother Matthias would not only offer guidance, but hit towering fly balls to the 500 assembled boys who would scramble for the souvenirs, a young George Herman Ruth among them.

Having received baptism, first Communion and confirmation, Ruth always identified himself with the church, even if his life did not always mirror the faith lived well. “He would amaze teammates,” Montville writes in his biography of the Babe, “when he would appear at Mass after a night of indulgence.”

When he joined the Red Sox as a rookie, the team was split among Catholics and Protestants and Ruth became the leader of the Catholic contingent.

He stayed close to St. Mary’s and always spoke well of his upbringing there. In 1926, he bought Brother Matthias a new Cadillac, and he would show up at the school often for fundraisers. When his Yankee coach, Miller Huggins, was worried about Ruth’s nightlife that year, he paid to have Brother Matthias come to Chicago, dine with the Babe and make certain he was back in his hotel room at a reasonable hour.

The funeral Mass for Ruth was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York on Aug. 19, 1948. He is buried at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Valhalla, NY.

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