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The Spiritual Significance of Royals Baseball: Patience, & Royals Fever

The Spiritual Significance of Royals Baseball: Patience, & Royals Fever

Last updated on: October 30, 2014 at 12:29 pm by Tim Suttle

The Spiritual Significance of Royals Baseball: Patience, & Royals Fever 2014-10-30T12:29:31-06:00 Tim Suttle

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“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… 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.” – Annie Savoy, Bull Durham

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For KC Royals fans, the 2014 baseball season has been sheer magic. Over the past few weeks I have spent several evenings with my two young boys cutting out newspaper clippings, taping them to their bedroom walls, recalling our favorite moments from the season, laughing and telling stories, completely blown away by all that this team has accomplished.

Baseball is one of those sports that can go either way. It can be big-market, glitz and glamour, with a celebrity culture and verve to match the most nauseating excess professional sports has to offer. It can also brim with the nostalgic memory of a society that still has time to stop and watch a game and eat peanuts and talk and laugh and tell stories and enjoy the passing of time together.

There’s no clock in baseball. This is key. Time is not kept. Time passes. You cannot tell the game when it should be over. The game will tell you. Baseball is one of the few popular cultural moments where waiting is still part of the deal. Twenty-seven outs per side; it might be two hours it might be five; it might go nine innings it might go twelve. In my case I might be awake when the game ends, or I might have fallen asleep already, but either way there will be no rushing baseball. We need things in our culture that will still make us wait.

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There’s a lot of talk in professional baseball about how to speed up the game. I hope nothing comes of it. Baseball might be the last American past time that can teach us how to be patient.

The classic definition of patience is waiting without complaint. To me it has the sterile sound of secular-philosophical textbook writers. No self-respecting theologian would let that definition sail by without taking a swing at it.

For one thing, waiting must involve some sort of discomfort if it is to produce patience. The waiting has to be hard. Otherwise patience is not really required. For another thing, complaint has always been an important part of the Christian tradition (Jewish and Muslim traditions as well). Lament is a big part of the psalms, and even has a dedicated book in the bible (Lamentations). Lament has two parts: the complaint (this really sucks, God, and it feels wrong to me); and the affirmation of faith (even so, God, I will always worship you). God may not take to whining, but never seems to mind an honest complaint.

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God may not take to whining, but never seems to mind an honest complaint.

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Maybe a better definition of patience would be: enduring discomfort through faithful complaint, and faithful worship.

Baseball has all of that and more. Enduring discomfort is part of the game. I’m thinking specifically of innings six through nine of the Wildcard game against Oakland when Royals fans were hoping against hope for a comeback from three runs down. Suffering through grueling shutouts like the Royals in game 5, and the Giants in game 6.

Faithful complaint is a part of baseball. Every pitch that didn’t get the call for a strike, every homerun ball that tails just outside the foul pole, every close call, these are the lamentations of the baseball faithful. The rally in the bottom of the ninth, the extra innings’ walk-off homer, this is where the faithful find vindication, and their patience rewarded.

I confess that I have not always been patient during the last three decades of Royal fandom. After the ’94 strike I stopped loving baseball. Money was changing the game. Small-market teams were at a significant disadvantage. It was irksome watching the Yankees—the team we used to battle for championships—win pennant after pennant, fielding a roster so bloated with talent it was tantamount to playing pros against college kids. The imbalance tripped my justice meter, and mostly just pissed me off. Small-market teams simply could not compete.

In 2003 the Royals got off to a blazing start and I got interested again as they sat alone in first place for much of the season. We all knew that they would come back to earth, but held out hope they would still make the playoffs. When the inevitable late-season slide took them out of playoff contention, the season ended in disappointment as it always did. The next year they traded Carlos Beltrán for Mark Teahan, John Buck, and Mike Wood, more small-market woes.

When the Royals hired Dayton Moore I got excited. He talked about pitching as the currency of baseball. He got the Glass family to invest in the minor-league system. He was building the franchise from the ground up with a solid foundation. I started to believe. I stopped saying “they” and started saying “we” again.

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When the Royals hired Dayton Moore I got excited… I stopped saying “they” and started saying “we” again..

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In 2010 my family spent the summer in Cape Cod while on sabbatical. The Cape Cod league is a wood-bat league for college standouts. Pro scouts lined the backstops at nearly every game with their radar guns and clipboards. We watched a game in person almost every night. We chased foul balls and ate Crackerjacks. My oldest went to free clinics with the players and coaches. He met Kolton Wong, the St. Louis 2nd baseman, and one of his coaches was Marcus Stroman, who got 11 wins for Toronto this year. We had baseball fever.

For the past three seasons my wife, my two boys and I have followed every Royals game. We check the standings each morning in the newspaper. All summer long we let the kids stay up late to watch the games. When school started, I would record the end of the previous night’s game so we could show the deciding moments to the boys the next morning.

During the 2014 Royal’s regular season stretch run when I started to lose heart, mostly out of sheer habit, but it was my kids who wouldn’t let me. They were all in, and I was becoming emotionally invested. I was starting to believe. The gut-punch of the final regular season series against Detroit was almost more than I could bear, but this gritty team kept battling.

Then came the wild-card game against Oakland, the sweep against the Angels. The Orioles took down Detroit, the Royals’ regular season nemesis. And then they, I mean we, swept the Orioles, my emotions and hopes building with every game. What was happening to me? I was starting to believe.

Thirty years of disappointment and accommodation to failure was slowly giving way. I was starting to say something out loud, something I hadn’t said (and believed), since I was a kid: “I think we’re going to the World Series.”

I’m all in now, fully emotionally invested. I’m ready to see Royals fan’s patience rewarded. If we don’t win it all I will be heartbroken. And you know what? I don’t care. This season is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Do you believe in miracles? Yes I do.

It has been 29 long years for the faithful here in Kansas City. If that’s not patience, I don’t know what is. I have Royals fever, and the only solution is a win tonight in game 7. Let’s seal the deal at home where we can really celebrate. Let’s go Royals.

[After the 3-2 loss in game 7 I wrote a final post on the 2014 Royals season: No Regrets… ]

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