I'm trying to explain the difference between sacred and profane time in my world religions class, and baseball exemplifies the sacred variety. The experience of a baseball game offers a way out of time: at least for a while, the clock is ticking.
Now that baseball season is approaching and I've been listening to Cactus League games on the car radio while driving around Los Angeles, I feel transported to a different sense of time, a different experience of its rhythms. No clock governs a traditional baseball game, allowing us to escape the tyranny of deadlines and the threat of finality. There is no “overtime,” only the possibility of extra innings extending to infinity.
Listening to the games reminds me of childhood memories of baseball in a neighbor's backyard in northeastern Pennsylvania, games with the prospect of never ending. In the summer evening twilight, mothers call their youngest children home to bathe them and put them to bed. A tie at the end of the ninth quarter could launch us into eternity, with only the darkening sky to remind us of the persistence of time.
Back in Los Angeles traffic, the relaxing rhythms and calming tone of the plays slow things down, including my heart rate. However, between innings, an irritating commercial break forces me to change stations. There's a basketball game (“Thirty seconds left in the third quarter…”) and my heart rate goes up a few beats. I am briefly taken out of eternity and back to the ordinary, outside of kairossacred time, and back to chronoschronological time.
Professional basketball, hockey and football games are subject to the tyranny of the clock. I find myself continually aware of the impending buzzer and the end of the game.
We can go chronos by listening to an absorbing piece of music, spending time with loved ones or relaxing in the middle of a ball game. Kairos It may begin with a bell or some other type of musical signal, including the singing of the national anthem at the start of a game.
Some baseball fans experience a kind of religious nostalgia. The desire to return to the innocence of childhood, to the garden, to paradise, to the source of all being, is formally addressed by sacraments such as the Eucharist, which provides “holy communion” with the “real presence” of God. But you can also satisfy yourself with a good game of extra innings.
Sacred time does not “pass” like profane time but is somehow suspended. Time disappears and is replaced by what religious scholar Mircea Eliade calls the “eternal mythical present”, with its heroes and tragedies. A swing of the bat, a missed catch, or a swinging ball could mean the end.
That is the great tragic and terrifying circumstance of our time, of our lives and of the human condition. It can end at any time; Every second could be your last.
But eternity has no end and sacred time is eternal.
The church recognizes “ordinary time” in the liturgical calendar as the days between the holy seasons of Lent and Advent. Interestingly, the baseball preseason roughly coincides with Lent.
Last season, Major League Baseball adopted rules that essentially attempt to shorten the game, threatening to destroy the sanctity of baseball time. In extra innings, a runner is automatically placed on second base to control seemingly endless games. A new “pitch clock” limits the time the pitcher has to throw the ball: no more than 15 seconds to start the windup or 20 with runners on base.
These innovations represent an invasion of the secular, which misinterprets America's pastime as a way to simply “pass” time. They violate the sacred timelessness of the game.
Baseball has its rhythms, its balls and strikes, its outs and innings. We can relax and enjoy the thrill of the home run, the drama of the double play, the impossible catch, the spectacular pickoff.
After all, baseball is a child's game, and for children, time is never running out. The hope of infinite play means we can all stay up late and savor a delicious feeling of eternity. Let's play ball and hope for extra innings!
Rick Mayock teaches philosophy at West Los Angeles College.
