For the Love of the Game is my favorite baseball movie. Ironically, just as an aside, the movie was based on a novel by a writer that anyone who loves Walk Thru History should be a fan of: Michael Shaara (yes, that Michael Shaara). From the Amazon.com review of the novel:

Serious sports novels often fall through the literary cracks simply because of the arena they play in. Michael Shaara earned his battle stripes--and a Pulitzer Prize--for The Killer Angels, a fictional resurrection of the Battle of Gettysburg, as serious a subject as a writer can confront. Yet, it's no more profound, in the end, than the personal dilemmas protagonist Billy Chapel faces in this, Shaara's final novel, found stashed in a desk after his death and published posthumously.

Anyway, this weekend I was thinking about baseball because I was thinking about Greenwich Village and The Church. I posted a couple of times from NYC this week, and while I was there I was in the Village briefly and I recalled something that I had read about the history of baseball. There's some controversy about who first played baseball (and BTW, a lot of people think that whole Abner Doubleday thing was a marketing myth), but one of if not the earliest instances of organized baseball were played in Greenwich Village by a social club in the 1820's that came to call itself the New York Knickerbockers.

In Ken Burns' awesome series on the history of Baseball he shows how it only took a few short years after people started playing baseball in an organized fashion for all the tiresome problems and off-the-field business and legal shennanigans to emerge. As soon as people started playing others started betting. As soon as they were betting they wanted to make sure that their team won, which led to paying better players to play for your club (if not outright cheating like the White Sox scandal). As soon as some players were getting paid other players wanted money as well, and some wanted more money. As soon as all of this money was in the game someone wanted to own the club. Once the clubs had owners there was conflict between the players and owners. Players and owners began to organize to negotiate control of the money and game. Lawsuits and collective bargaining and free agency and the moving of clubs to towns that would provide more financial support all followed. And so on, and so on, and so on...

The smell of the new grass, the sharp crack of the bat or the soft smack of the ball into a glove are such powerful stimuli, and for anyone who grew up playing the game they catalyze a whole reservoir of memory and emotion. But as much as we love the pure essence of the game the reality is that as soon as groups organize to play all the weird human dynamics of power and control and greed and self-interest all rush in.

Which is why I was thinking about the history of baseball and church. Yesterday someone made a comment to the effect that if only the Church could go back to its roots, back to the way it was in the first century, or even in the first generation.

But the church history we actually read in New Testament shows that it didn't take but a few years after Christians began to gather to do something they loved -- just like baseball -- for all the junk of human frailty to bubble up to the surface. In Acts, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, James, 1 and 2 Peter and so on we read that the first generation Church was full of rivalry, conflict and leadership struggles.

Does that mean that baseball or church are not worth doing because they are susceptible to human weakness and failure? Of course not, no more than marriage, parenting, law, government, medicine, war or urban planning. The reality is that as soon as a group of people come together to do anything worthwhile all of their naughty bits start to show (figuratively speaking, of course). But we can't use that as a reason not to endeavor to do great things, like Church (or sports).

Like Billy Chapel in Michael Shaara's story above, we need to play for the Love of the Game...