How A-Rod Can Be Saved

In the summer of 1979 I was watching television on a Sunday afternoon with Dave Henion at his house in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Dave was an elder at the Riverside Reformed Church in Paterson, where I supplied the pulpit as a senior seminarian. We were watching the Yankee game, and the pitcher was Luis Tiant, and he was pitching a two-hitter. His fastball was hot and his curve was sharp and he was catching the corners. He was cagey and he spent most of his delivery looking at second base and he was a pleasure to watch. But the Yanks were making errors and they weren't hitting, so they lost it 2-0. Dave said, "And that was the best game he pitched this season."

He should know. Dave Henion was no mean pitcher himself. The Paterson Dutch liked baseball, and Dave, like my father, had grown up on the pitching of John Timmerman, who later taught English at Calvin College, and Johnny Vander Meer, who later pitched for Cincinnati. My dad was known as "Ace Meeter" from his fastball and his good control, but Dave was even better. He was scouted by the Majors and got through a tryout, but he dropped out when he had to start playing on Sundays.

So what was he doing on the Lord's Day with the television on? Well, let me tell you about Dave Henion. That same evening he would head over to Paterson where he and some other Riverside members would lead a Sunday evening service for the elderly at one of the public housing projects. He did this frequently on Sunday nights. He loved the Lord, he loved to worship, and he loved baseball, in that order. The reason he wouldn't play on Sundays was not because of legalism but because he didn't want to give up worshiping on the Lord's Day, twice if he could.

Now here's the wonderful connection in this story. Dave Henion's ministry to the elderly in Paterson's public housing had been started by Johnny Vander Meer's brother Jake. The late Jake Vander Meer was the preaching baker, who was finally ordained in the Reformed Church in America and became Dave Henion's pastor at Riverside Reformed. My dad was friendly with Jake and proud of Johnny.   I could tell that my father believed that somebody to whom God had given such a fastball as Johnny Vander Meer's should be allowed to pitch on Sunday.   My dad told me that because Johnny had to pitch on Sundays he was brought up on charges by the elders at his church in Midland Park, so he quickly joined some other church. In my youth I thought this was very cool, but later on Johnny's niece told me how much it hurt Johnny and the rest of the family. But I could tell that my father believed that somebody to whom God had given such a fastball should be allowed to pitch on Sunday.

Johnny Vander Meer's lifetime ER A was pretty good, but his lifetime wonloss was only 119-121, which is not good enough for the Baseball Hall of Fame. But he was in the Hall of Fame as far as my dad was concerned. When Dad took us to Cooperstown he had to see one thing, and he was almost frantic till he found it somewhere downstairs. It was the special display on the back-to-back no-hitters of Johnny Vander Meer. Johnny was the only major league pitcher ever to pitch two no-hitters in a row, and it is generally conceded that this is the baseball record that will never be broken. For who could ever pitch three no-hitters in a row? His record is sacred and it is safe.

Baseball is peculiar among the sports in its relative emphasis on records and statistics. I have heard it said by disparagers of baseball that this is proof of how boring the game is, and that broadcast announcers need something to talk about during those long stretches when nothing happens. (Longtime Yankee announcer Phil Rizzuto refutes this canard, for he always had something to talk about, and it was never statistics.) But I think it is the game itself that generates statistics.

Baseball is a combination of team play, like football and basketball, with one-on-one play, like tennis. Most of the game is the patient one-on-one drama between the pitcher and the batter, and every pitch with its response is parsed, counted, numbered, and classified. Once the batter puts the ball in play, the game becomes team play. It is the fastest and most explosive team play in sports, simply by the physics of the baseball and the speed at which it can be thrown. Yet every significant team-play action requires the possession, if momentary, of the ball, which makes every action discrete, discernible, and accountable.

There is a remarkable efficiency to baseball play. Everything counts. In football so much of the effort by so many players has little to do with the ball itself and seems wasted and fruitless. Most of the players never touch the ball. They block, they tackle, and they run passing patterns that end up empty, even on successful plays, because only one receiver out of three can catch the ball. In every play, the energy starts and develops until the opposing energy violently overwhelms it. Such an extravagant waste of effort--and for most of the players, such an exaltation of drudgery. Such wasted labor does not bear counting, whereas in baseball, every lowly player gets up at the plate, faces the pitcher, and is accountable.

Baseball has three other peculiarities that add to its knack for statistics. First, it is the only major game in which the defense has possession of the ball; this serves to increase the number of actions that can be counted. Second, the season is so long, with so many games played. Championships are not decided by a single game but by a number of games, which makes victory more connected to averages. Third, it is the only major sport that includes infinity. Fair territory is infinite. You could hit a long home run out of the park, even into the next county, and it's in fair territory as long as it flies out between the foul lines, which are infinite. Each inning is timeless, as long as you can keep from making that third out. Each game is timeless, as long as you can tie the score. (Once I watched a Mets game for twenty-two innings; amazingly, they won.) The clock will not relieve you, so you have to keep count. Statistics give definition to the infinite.

But statistics are the law and not the gospel. Johnny Vander Meer's record will never be broken, but statistically he was a middling pitcher who lost more games than he won. Don Larsen's lifetime record is only 81-91, but he pitched a perfect game in the World Series, for which we rightly remember him. On the other hand, Luis Tiant was a magnificent pitcher, but he had the bad luck to play for the Red Sox and then for the Yankees when they finished fourth in their division. His statistics registered a loss that Sunday afternoon, but it was a joy to watch him pitch and to watch the classic tragedy of the lonely champion being overwhelmed in battle by the barbarians.

Ted Williams is the last modern player to finish with batting average above .400. I must confess that I have never liked him. The Red Sox employed him but he played for himself, certainly not for the fans. After his very last home run he infamously refused to come out of the dugout and acknowledge the cheering of the crowd. To his credit he served his country in the Korean War, but notice that he was a solo fighter pilot. I consider him a failure because he never led his team to a pennant, much less a World Series win. His poor performance in the post-season of 1946 only proves my point.

The most important statistic in baseball is the RBI, the "run batted in," and the highest compliment for a batter is "clutch hitter." A clutch hitter doesn't just get RBIs, he gets them when they're needed. Which brings us to A-Rod, Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez, who is a phenomenally good batter but not a clutch hitter. His promise is undoubted, his statistics are astounding, and he's on track to hit the most home runs ever, but he tends to produce the most when it's not critical. The Yankees haven't won a World Series since he joined them.

A-Rod has now admitted to having taken performance-enhancing drugs before he joined the Yanks. His statistics are tainted. His record of home runs is now suspect. But so far he has not been penalized. People were saying that "everyone was doing it" until his erstwhile friend, Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter, righteously protested that everyone was not doing it. Meanwhile A-Rod has refused to be accountable. He wants to put it all behind him and play on. He has assumed our sympathy and presumed upon our mercy, pleading the extra stress he was under from the very high expectations laid upon a player of such promise as himself. Baseball prowess is not a predictor of moral prowess. Unfortunately, the owners and the commissioner of Major League Baseball seem to have no greater moral expertise than do their players. They don't know what to do with A-Rod. And the New York fans, who have never really warmed up to him, are content to take a perverse pleasure in his misfortune. Everyone is stuck, like armies in the trenches or, horrible to say, a line of scrimmage.

I think there is a moral solution. It comes from seeing baseball in Reformed perspective. Give A-Rod judgment mixed with mercy. Let him surrender his lifetime records and just play for the love of the game. Let him play for the team. See if he can let go of himself and be a clutch hitter.

Here's what we offer him. He can have a whole new set of records that would distinguish his repentance. Let him keep only the statistics he records on Sunday games. Every home run he has hit or will hit on Monday through Saturday gets erased from his lifetime totals. He gets to keep only those he hit on Sundays, and so on into the future. The same for all his other lifetime records. Why Sunday? Because Sunday is the day when you confess your sins in public, but also, as Dave Henion knew, you do what you do for love and grace and joy. And then Monday through Saturday you bear fruits that befit repentance.

So let's say he finishes with more than one-seventh the home-run total of Barry Bonds. People can do the math. His record and its story would be as unique and irreplaceable as Johnny Vander Meer's. And that statistic would tell a story--a moral story. I think that one of the reasons Dave Henion and I enjoyed watching Luis Tiant pitch that Sunday afternoon was because he pitched his heart out even in a losing game and for a losing team. A-Rod, why are you playing baseball, after all? Can you lose your life to save it? If you could do this, you might even save baseball too.