🏟️ Faith and baseball: Why these fans feel a special connection to MLB’s playoff teams 🔌
Long-held customs and rituals define America's national pastime
By Bobby Ross Jr.
D.J. Iverson’s love for the San Diego Padres runs deep.
Soul deep.
Baseball is not a religion to Iverson, the associate pastor for New Vintage Church in Escondido, California.
He worships Jesus Christ, not the late Tony Gwynn — even though Iverson, like most of the Friar Faithful, identifies the first-ballot Hall of Famer nicknamed “Mr. Padre” as his all-time favorite player.
READ: Jesus at the Ballpark: Why MLB teams host faith nights
But make no mistake: Iverson, a 44-year-old father of two school-age boys, experiences the exhilarating ups and excruciating downs of the Padres on what feels like a spiritual level.
“There’s a lot of layers to that connection for me,” said the season ticket holder, who often peppers his sermons with baseball references. “The first big one is that I grew up going to games with my dad. A lot of the father-son time I remember with my dad involved baseball.”
Iverson is far from alone in his intensely personal connection to the game, known for its long-held rituals and customs. The sport was first described as America’s national pastime in the 1950s.
A year ago, I celebrated as my own long-suffering team — the Texas Rangers — finally made it to baseball’s proverbial promised land, winning the World Series for the first time in the franchise’s 62-year history.
This October, my Rangers — much more in keeping with their underachieving history — fell short of the postseason, so I’m forced to live vicariously through friends cheering on MLB’s six remaining playoff teams.
Those teams include the Cleveland Guardians, who have gone 75 seasons since last winning the World Series in 1948; the Padres, who have endured a 55-season title drought since joining the league as an expansion team in 1969; and the Detroit Tigers, who last hoisted the championship trophy in 1984 (when they, ironically, beat the Padres).
The others are the New York Mets, seeking their first World Series title since 1986; the New York Yankees, the 27-time champions who last won it all in 2009; and the Los Angeles Dodgers, who claimed the big banner in the COVID-shortened 2020 season but haven’t earned a full-season championship since 1988.
In talking to my friends about their allegiances to these teams, I’m amazed by how similar many of their stories sound.
“Field of Dreams,” the 1989 baseball movie starring Kevin Costner, is fictional, but the sentiments it expresses ring extremely true.
“I grew up in ‘a baseball house’ in Detroit where a Tigers game was on the radio each afternoon or evening from February to October, and everyone knew the score,” said Ron Hadfield, a longtime writer and historian at Abilene Christian University in Texas.
“My dad played semipro baseball as a young man against 1930s stars of barnstorming MLB and Negro League teams, so he had plenty of stories to fuel our imagination,” Hadfield added. “He coached our youth teams and those of his grandsons into his late 80s and shaped our passionate appreciation for the sport.”
Hadfield doubts God has a rooting interest in the Tigers’ games, but he occasionally will pray for the team’s safety and success anyway.
“And I admit to having asked for a win or two through the years,” he told me.
But win or lose, Hadfield sticks with his Tigers — through the extraordinarily long regular season of 162 games plus whatever the playoffs might bring.
“The ups and downs test everyone's patience, resolve and ability to focus on each day, each inning, each pitch,” he said in an email.
“My hometown team has reached the World Series three times in my 67 years, and I witnessed one of them in person — the thrill of a lifetime, even though they lost their final game while my brother and I shivered in the cold October rain,” the Tigers fan added, recalling the San Francisco Giants’ four-game sweep in 2012. “This fall could be the fourth, even though it would require a near miracle or two at the end of one of the most unbelievable comebacks since the sport was first played in 1839, 1744 or whatever history you most believe.”
Indeed, the Tigers — just a month and a half ago — faced 500-to-1 odds even to qualify for the postseason. Yet somehow they did.
Another surprise World Series contender is the Mets, my friend Bill Robinson’s adopted favorite team since moving to New York as a domestic missionary in 2023.
“I inherited my love of baseball from my mom,” said Robinson, who traveled to games in Atlanta and Milwaukee last week before watching the Mets clinch the American League Division Series in New York this week. “She taught me how to read the box scores, from the duration of the game to the attendance to what every abbreviation meant.”
My friend B.T. Irwin was about 9 years old when his dad took him to his first Cleveland game at the old Municipal Stadium around 1985.
The Guardians were known as the Indians then.
“One of the great sorrows of my life is that Dad was a Cleveland sports fan from the time he moved to Ohio in 1975 until he died in 2022 — and he only ever got to see the Indians go to the World Series three times and choke in every one of them,” said Irwin, the podcast host and development director for The Christian Chronicle.
Irwin lives in the Detroit area, and his wife, Tracy, is a fan of the Tigers — Cleveland’s opponent in the American League Division Series. I’m guessing that’s a fun household this week!
Irwin said he doesn’t really connect his faith with his love for baseball.
But he joked (at least I think he was joking), “I’ve invoked God a few times in the depths of my despair and longing! What faith and sports love have in common, however, is that they are both essentially irrational choices, hope against hope and love for love’s sake.”
My friend Chris Adair, a Yankees fan, was born in Grove, Oklahoma, about 15 minutes from Commerce, the hometown of the late superstar slugger Mickey Mantle.
Adair remembers reading the 1979 book “The Bronx Zoo,” an inside story of the Yankees’ 1978 World Series championship, “at a too-young age.”
“My dad grew up in Grove in the 1950s and 1960s when Mantle was a baseball king from Oklahoma,” said Adair, who works with Oklahoma Christian University’s College of Outreach and Innovation. “He grew up seeing the Yankees in Kansas City almost every year when they played there.”
Adair’s dad took him to his first Yankees game when he was very young. He doesn’t recall exactly what age.
“I got to take my son to the old Yankee Stadium in its final season,” Adair told me. The stadium closed in 2008.
My friend James Wiser doesn’t have family connections to the Dodgers, but he became a diehard fan after moving to Los Angeles in 2004.
“I fell in love hard and fast,” said Wiser, who worked then at Pepperdine University and now serves as dean of library services and educational technology at Abilene Christian University.
The late Vin Scully, the longtime Dodgers announcer, “would talk to me throughout the games about theology and poetry, about literature and life lessons,” Wiser said. “Moreover, Dodger baseball was almost always discussed at Culver Palms Church of Christ, my home church from 2004 to 2017.
“Dodger baseball was on everyone’s minds and hearts,” he said of the congregation, “and their plight was often mentioned in sermons and classes.”
Wiser told me he loves “how a team’s season mimics the road of life.”
READ: New biography gives insight into star pitcher Clayton Kershaw’s faith
Amen, and please buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks.
Iverson, the Padres fan, is the nephew of Joseph “Stretch” Suba, the former longtime bullpen catcher and batting practice pitcher for the Houston Astros.
I met Suba back in 2006 when doing a profile of Cecil Cooper, then the Astros’ bench coach. That was the same year that Iverson’s father, Logan, died at age 51 after a lengthy battle with brain cancer.
Iverson’s memories of his dad revolve around baseball — and specifically Padres games.
“That was our place to talk,” Iverson said. “He shared a lot of life wisdom with me. We grew up watching Tony Gwynn play, and Dad would talk about just the importance of, you know, showing up every day and faithfulness and preparation.”
Iverson has extended that baseball connection to his own sons: Logan, an 8-year-old named after the grandfather he never met; and Henry, who is 6. The father coaches the boys’ youth league team.
“That has been one of the best blessings in my life,” Iverson said of sharing his love for the game with his sons. “Not just spending that time with them, but being able to pour into them and talk to them about being good sports.
“We call it the Tony Gwynn rules,” he added. “You play your best. You have fun. And you be a good sport.”
Like all the remaining teams in the postseason, the Padres have enjoyed a thrilling season.
READ: Q&A: Hall of Famer Rod Carew talks faith and baseball
Could they — finally — win it all?
“I mean, the idea of them winning the World Series is so foreign to me as a Padres fan,” Iverson told me.
But he allows himself to dream about the possibility.
Regardless of the outcome, though, he stresses that baseball is bigger than the box scores. It’s bigger than the win-loss records. It’s bigger even — surprise, surprise — than where the championship banner hangs at the season’s end.
Iverson’s love for the Padres runs deep.
So deep.
Even soul deep.
Inside the Godbeat
In August, I wrote an in-depth profile of Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s controversial state schools superintendent.
Walters keeps making national headlines, most recently with the state Education Department’s bid specifications seeming to favor a Trump-endorsed Bible for Oklahoma classrooms, as reported by Oklahoma Watch’s Jennifer Palmer, Paul Monies and Heather Warlick.
See additional coverage by The Oklahoman’s M. Scott Carter, Murray Evans and Carla Hinton, Religion News Service’s Bob Smietana and the Washington Post’s Laura Meckler.
The Education Department has updated the Bible purchase plans after the state purchasing agency raised concerns, Oklahoma Watch’s Monies notes.
The final plug
I mentioned “Field of Dreams” up above.
If you haven’t watched the classic “People will come” scene featuring the late James Earl Jones in a while, take a few minutes to enjoy it.
Happy Friday, everyone! Enjoy the weekend.
Bobby Ross Jr. writes the Weekend Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged and serves as editor-in-chief of The Christian Chronicle. A former religion writer for The Associated Press and The Oklahoman, Ross has reported from all 50 states and 18 nations. He has covered religion since 1999.