Baseball Q&A with John Sexton

We ran a version of this piece in the May 14 issue of NJ Jewish News prior to the appearance of Sexton, former president of New York University, at a local synagogue:

John Sexton, the outgoing president of New York University, can often be seen sporting the baseball cap of his favorite team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. A die-hard fan of the game, Sexton has frequently taught an undergraduate seminar on the connection between the national pastime and religion. In 2013, Sexton published Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game in which he describes the surprisingly large number of mutual concepts shared between baseball and religion: faith, doubt,  conversion, miracles, and even sacredness, among others.

Constantly on the move, Sexton — who will retire after 13 years as president of NYU — responded to some questions about the link during a recent trip to China and the Middle East.

NJJN: Baseball touches on so many aspects of society, what is it that lends itself to religion? Is it a question of faith in a player or team?

Sexton: I examine baseball’s connection to spirituality through a different lens, through one’s own experience and the emotions that can be evoked. Occasionally we find within secular life some surprising similarities with feelings that we associate with the sacred. Some people are transported by art, or poetry, or music, or nature. For others, it can be a Sandy Koufax breaking ball. Baseball also is unique among sports in its timelessness: a game is not limited by a clock ticking down to triple-zero, and its field of play, if you think about it, stretches forever. These attributes lend themselves well to a discussion of the building blocks of religion.

NJJN: This falls marks the 50th anniversary of Sandy Koufax sitting out Game One of the World Series against the Minnesota Twins because it fell on Yom Kippur. When Hank Greenberg made the same choice some 30 years earlier, it was such a to-do it was noted widely in the gentile community. Do you think Koufax’s decision had a similar impact, or did the fact that Greenberg’s decision came in the face of increasing global strife somehow lessen Koufax’s lesson?

Sexton: To the contrary, I think the two events work in concert with one another. Koufax’s decision has held great resonance for five decades now, inspiring a generation of Jewish athletes and fans. One of the reasons why the Hank Greenberg episode was explored in my book is to draw a direct line from him to Koufax to players from more recent eras. Much is still made of Koufax’s courage, inside and outside of baseball circles, and rightfully so; but my book shows how long before Koufax, to a generation of Jewish Americans, there was Greenberg, the hero.

NJJN: Do you consider yourself “old school?” Do you lament how the game has changed, how people are calling for speed-up rules and the like? Or are you hip to the innovations that have been and continue to be introduced in an effort to energize a new generation of fans?

Sexton: I guess it would be fair to call me “old school.” But I am not inherently against change, particularly if it addresses an issue that speaks to the integrity of the game, such as performance enhancing drugs. But I am against change for change’s sake  and am curious to see whether some recent efforts to “enhance” the game end up doing so.

NJJN: As a fan of a “certain age,” how do you convince the younger fan to relax and just enjoy the slow-paced nature of the game?

Sexton: The pace of the game, of course, is one of baseball’s great attributes: how tension can slowly build over a game, even a  season, to the point where a single pitch can determine everything. Baseball calls us to live slow and notice — attributes that my students in my “Baseball as a Road to God” seminar have embraced over its dozen or so years. I think reports of the death of baseball’s younger fans have been greatly exaggerated.

NJJN: If you were commissioner of baseball, what three things would you want to see come to pass?

Sexton: I think what has changed most in recent years — and not for the better — in terms of the experience of going to the ballpark, is the constant bombardment of noise. This is not unique to baseball but it makes it difficult to take in the rhythms of the game…. So, the first thing that I would do is review the game-day experience, thinking in terms of subtraction and not addition.

Second, I would make sure that replay is not expanded any further. There was a slippery slope, as we have seen, from reviewing boundary calls to reviewing most other calls. I hope this does not one day extend to balls and strikes. Somewhere in umpiring is the poetry of human judgment over the science of the photo finish.

Finally, I would open the World Series each year with a day game. I understand how undesirable this would be for television partners but think baseball would be the better for it; the start-times are too late for most kids on the east coast and this would
be a step in the right direction.

Tagged as: John Sexton, New York University