The Paschal Promise

Our redeemers are doing calisthenics.

Andrew Painter on the mound in 2023.

The boys of summer are in Florida and Arizona preparing for the 2025 baseball season. Here are three solid reasons why I shouldn’t care:

1. Alex Bregman, a star infielder, has just signed a 3-year contract with the Boston Red Sox. He will earn $40 million a year. Assuming he is injury free in 2025, that means he will earn $67,000 every time he comes to the plate, which happens 600 times a season. Based on a wonky statistic called WAR (wins above replacement) Bregman over his career has become the 20th best non-pitcher in baseball. Not the best. Not the second best. The 20th best. And that gets him $1.5 million a week.

Plus free meals.

$1.5 million! That’s more than twice my weekly paycheck. For what it’s worth, the best player in baseball, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, makes $2.7 million a week. If things get rough for him financially, though, he can always fall back on an estimated $2 million per week in endorsement money. Again, this compares to my own personal 2025 endorsement-revenue projection of $0. (This could improve if I start dating Blake Lively or Pete Davidson.)

So that’s not right. Salaries like that for playing a game for half the year suggests our society might possibly have a skewed value system.

2. Whether one squad of 28.9-year-olds outperforms a competing roster of 28.9-year-olds does not matter. It brings no health, freedom, justice, education, dignity or sensible balanced diet to a single human soul. On the contrary, it leads to sloth, nachos and — not infrequently — fistfights. This is our National Pastime? Why not art, literature, chess, astronomy, Big Brothers and Big Sisters, HOAs, dentistry?

There is so much to be done in this world, so much to elevate mankind. How does a line drive to the left field gap get us anywhere?

3. Biggest time suck ever. Last year, someone I very much respect and admire spent more than 400 hours watching streamed Philadelphia Phillies ball games and at least another 250 hours consuming news and statistics about the team and its players. That is 25 hours per week for 6 months. What in the world is the matter with him me?

Okay, I suppose baseball does matter to me, and has for about 62 of my nearly 70 years. Immensely. I don’t even take an off-season, which is filled with endless conversation — and journalistically abhorrent levels of baseless speculation — about the roster and prospects for the coming year. That for a century has been dubbed the Hot Stove League, in which many millions of fans alternate among shoveling snow, imagining the near future and arguing with friends about the shape of the reconstituted club.

For me it is a solitary exercise. Others obsess communally. I’ll simply note I am fully versed on 2nd baseman Bryson Scott’s nerve impingement, Trea Turner’s change in approach at the plate, Orion Kettering and Joe Ross’s potential as late-inning relievers, a new batting order, the ascension from the minor leagues of phenomenal pitching prospect Andrew Painter and a hundred other things that are objectively irrelevant to humanity. Unless Brandon Marsh’s struggles against lefties are more weighty than they seem.

But why? Why, despite the three unarguable points made to begin this column, do I persist in making a religion out of Major League Baseball? Ah. Why, indeed.

1. Perfection is rare, and baseball is a perfectly designed enterprise: 90-foot basepaths on the diamond. A pitchers’ rubber 60’ 6” from the plate. A 17” square target called home plate. These immutable dimensions have allowed success and failure proportionately for almost 200 years. For all but the fastest players, stealing second base is a 50-50 proposition, but failure is more costly than success. For hitters, the failure rate over history is just under 75%. For the elite hitters, it is 70%. Yet teams over time, on average, scored 4.54 runs per game — because pitchers must work within a small strike zone, sometimes walking batters and sometimes throwing strikes in the hitter’s sweet spot. This is astonishing equilibrium. I don’t believe in “God’s Design,” but Abner Doubleday’s is borderline supernatural.

2. Team and individual performance. Baseball is exciting in (some parts of) all 162 games; at its most basic it is a struggle for victory. But the players’ success, and sometimes heroics, are an entirely separate matter of interest. In the Phillies most (many) hapless years, there was always a Steve Carlton or Willie Montenez to cheer for.

3. Self-contained, season-long and historical excitement are thrilling because the outcome is unknown. Who will win tonight? Who will win the division, league and World Series championships? Which players will perform the best this season, or over their careers? It all accrues, pitch by pitch, forever.

4. Statistical documentation. The records of team and individual performance are all there from the mid-19th century on. Again, every pitch adds to the record, enabling infinite insight and competition, even with the long dead. Not to mention scrutiny of every player’s fortunes in the season as it unfolds.

5. Virtuosity, grace and beauty. The baseball field itself, manicured and green, quadrisected by ruddy dirt basepaths and the batter’s box, is a man made wonder, as if mathematically calculated by Druids or Masons or ancient astronauts. And on its sacred geometry, players’ athleticism is arresting and sometimes otherworldly (Google “Trea Turner’s smooth slide”). Not to mention the splendid tableau of the adonises in uniform. Wholly apart from the contest, each game is a spectacle.

6. The inner game. Some people complain that baseball is boring, but it surely isn’t if you see the hidden strategies and mini-dramas that fill the 15 or 20 seconds between pitches. I’ve been watching baseball for six decades, and I see or learn something new almost every game.

7. Community. A baseball crowd is an intimate gathering of 40,000 of your best friends. Your team affiliation is membership in a tribe, and — whether subtly or cultishly — in this shared devotion fans find a part of their identity. I happen to own only one Phillies-branded totem — a cap, which I seldom wear. But when I see one on a stranger, I don’t care what their politics are, what novels they admire, what criminal record they might have. We are kin. I might stop my comrade on the street and say, “The year of Andrew Painter!” and we will share a bond. These are not profound connections, but they are real and lovely.

8. Distraction and escape. Baseball fandom and being an aesthete or citizen of the world are not mutually exclusive. But often, and especially in the horrifying right now, caring deeply for humanity is exhausting, frightening, infuriating and ungodly agonizing. Baseball takes me to another world altogether, free of scoundrels and self-inflicted destruction.

The winter of our discontent is giving way to a springtime passion reborn, where sporting faith and hope can welcome us — or at least distract us — with its glorious gifts. On March 1, the Trump Administration will enact tariffs on Canada and Mexico that will be ruinous to all three economies and trigger a global trade war with calamitous consequences for billions of human beings, most of them very poor. Me, I probably won’t sweat it in real time.

Nope. I’ll be listening to the Phils’ opening Grapefruit League game against the Detroit Tigers. I’m so looking forward to it. More than you can imagine.