“Welcome to the Crystal Cathedral of baseball,” says Pat Richie, chaplain of the San Francisco Giants baseball team. It is 9:00 A.M. on a foggy first Sunday of summer, and the Giants’ chapel is about to begin in a small, dingy room, buried under tons of concrete in the bowels of Candlestick Park. The room has a sofa and a few institutional chairs; the carpet is stained, and the ceiling is hung with plumbing. Richie, a large, easygoing man, laughs about the room. “It has a first-century look,” he says. “Like the catacombs.”
As half-a-dozen Giants straggle in, they are still pulling up pants and tying shoes; when the seats are gone, these young millionaires plop down on the floor. Richie makes announcements, offers an opening prayer, and then introduces Tom Eisenman, a local pastor. He talks earnestly for ten minutes about the courage men need to put up a fight against temptation. “I want to learn to play hurt,” he says, “and come back from injury in the Christian life.” When the meeting ends, the players do not linger. Batting practice begins immediately.
This is Richie’s seventh year as the Giants’ chaplain; he is in his twelfth year as chaplain for the San Francisco 49ers football team. Later, while watching batting practice, he explains that Sunday-morning chapel services are only the visible tip of his ministry. “I see the services as a place to acquaint people with Christianity,” he says. “If a guy comes to chapel, I can call him for a meal or a game of golf.”
The more productive time in his ministry comes in the couples’ Bible studies he organizes for players and their wives, and the wives’ Bible study his wife, Nico, leads. He also helps facilitate ministry for players who are committed Christians. For example, Jeff Brantley, a relief pitcher for the Giants, sponsors two Little League teams for poor kids in the Bay Area.
“Basically, I’m a missionary to 65 people—40 in football, 25 in baseball. These are men who need Christ, and Christians who need to be discipled. I know a guy in Indonesia who is responsible to reach 750,000 people. Sometimes I ask myself how I can justify what I do compared to what he does. I come down to this: they need to know Christ, too.”
By permission of the baseball commissioner’s office, Baseball Chapel, a nondenominational ministry, organizes Sunday-morning chapels for all 28 major-league teams, as well as for more than 160 minor-league teams. It is one of dozens of other organizations, large and small, that spring from the powerful American affection for sports. In the face of scandal, greed, and churlishness, Americans cling to a childlike faith in athletics. Translate that into ministry, and it seems natural to have a full-time chaplain for a team with 25 members and only a handful of believers.
Baseball Chapel is a small organization with a $200,000 budget. It does not work alone, however. Like many major-league chaplains, Pat Richie is employed by Athletes in Action, a division of Campus Crusade for Christ. He raises his salary and expenses through churches and individuals.
The president of Baseball Chapel is Bobby Richardson, an outstanding second baseman for the New York Yankees during their heyday in the fifties and sixties. He traces the organization’s beginnings to a Sunday morning in Minneapolis. He, shortstop Tony Kubek, and Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle wanted to attend church, something they rarely could do during the six-month baseball season. Richardson knew a pastor whose church was near the team hotel. The players took a cab, arriving unannounced. After sitting through most of the service, they tried to slip out just before the altar call, to minimize any fanfare.
“Half the congregation got up and came out with us, because they wanted Mantle’s autograph,” Richardson remembers. “We were laughing about it later. [Yankee broadcaster] Red Barber said, ‘I’ll tell you what, let’s just have church right here at the hotel.’ ” Richardson began to organize Sunday-morning services, inviting speakers to address the players. At about the same time, other clubs began doing the same thing. In 1973, retired sportswriter Watson Spoelstra took the idea and, using his contacts with baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, formed Baseball Chapel.
“It was real uncommon in those days for someone to give a testimony for Christ,” Richardson says. “Now it’s almost the norm.” One reason for the change, he says, is that chapels in the minor leagues have led many baseball players to Christ. By August, when some Giants and their wives meet for Bible study, the team is floundering 17 games out of first place. Worse, they are caught in one of those confusing financial and legal binds that bedevil modern sports. Owner Bob Lurie has accepted an offer from Tampa Bay, Florida, to buy the team. The players want to focus on baseball, but they cannot. Reporters are clamoring to know their reaction to the move. In truth, their feelings are mixed: few have permanent homes in the San Francisco area; they are as attached to it as a traveling salesman is to his Days Inn. They just want to get on with playing baseball. But they can’t tell reporters that; it would be treason.
For the players who come to the Bible study, things are not going so well individually, either. Kevin Bass, a veteran outfielder, has been traded since the last Bible study, whisked off to New York on a day’s notice. (Richie launches the study time by joking, “I’m disappointed that the Basses aren’t here. No commitment, apparently.”) Jeff Brantley, a young pitcher, is feuding with manager Roger Craig. Scott Garrelts, another pitcher, has been recuperating from major arm surgery for a full year.
The “Bible study” is really a talk about stress from psychologist Sonny Arnold. The subject clearly interests the players and wives; the latter talk volubly about their difficulties with moody husbands, with pregnancy, with construction projects in their off-season homes. Kathy Garrelts tells about losing sleep with a new baby and a husband whose future is uncertain. Jeff Brantley describes a recent temper tantrum when he threw water coolers on the field after losing a game; he says it was hard to act that way and then to invite other players to chapel the next day.
While the stresses they discuss seem normal, it is doubtful these couples could talk so openly anywhere else. As one of the wives says, it’s hard to be comfortable even with old friends when they have seen you on TV and think you’ve changed.
“Muscular Christianity” was the phrase that first wed sports to Christianity, beginning in about 1857. According to sociologist James Mathisen, Christians had generally thought of games as a waste of time or a devilish distraction. Then two British novelists, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, came up with the idea that sports were a training ground for morality and patriotism. The idea quickly spread to the United States. Billy Sunday, a baseball-player-turned-evangelist, became a prominent role model.
By the 1920s, muscular Christianity had virtually disappeared, Mathisen says, only to be rediscovered after World War II. As evangelicalism rose from the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, it devised a panoply of innovative methods for reaching youth. Anything that would draw a crowd was worth a try, which is how evangelist Jack Wyrtzen came to invite Gil Dodds, the top American miler, to a rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden. Other evangelists took the cue; in 1947, Dodds ran six laps around a North Carolina audience before Billy Graham delivered his sermon. A few years later, Youth for Christ began sending amateur basketball teams to play and evangelize in Europe and Taiwan, which led to the formation of the first sports-ministry organization, Sports Ambassadors. Fellowship of Christian Athletes soon followed, and in the sixties, Campus Crusade launched Athletes in Action. All three groups used sports to attract an audience for evangelism.
Eventually athletes themselves became targets. Baseball Chapel, for example, focuses mainly on the spiritual needs of the players; so do chaplaincies in many other professional sports. They still, nonetheless, encourage Christian athletes to use their celebrity to draw crowds for Christ.
Sports and ministry work well together. Both sports and Christianity are activistic, cheerful group endeavors believed to build character; both seem to offer a simpler version of life in which standards are unchanging, hard work is generally rewarded, and results are unambiguous. The clean-living, disciplined athlete is a paragon of evangelical virtues.
As the season wears down to its end, Jeff Brantley, Scott Garrelts, and Brett Butler, their former teammate who now plays with the Los Angeles Dodgers, show up at San Quentin prison bearing a box of signed baseballs and a bat. It is an event Baseball Chapel arranges every year: a special prison chapel service featuring the players.
The three are in a good mood, particularly Brantley, who today won his first game ever as a major league starter. He and Butler kid about the at-bats Butler had against him, and joke about “the book”—the standard oral testimony on how to get a particular batter out by pitching him a certain way. “Don’t you think I know the book on me?” Butler asks with a laugh.
Chaplain Earl Smith gives the players a sobering tour of the grim, crowded prison, which dates from before the Civil War and houses 5,800 prisoners. Most of the 300 men who come to the chapel service are African-American. The singing is black gospel: full-throated, heartfelt, soulful. Jeff Brantley gets up to speak and says he had come to the prison two years before, and really wanted to come back: “It’s one of the most moving things I’ve ever done.” He tells how he became a Christian and says he is playing first and foremost for Jesus Christ.
Scott Garrelts also gives his testimony but spends most of his time talking about the struggle he has had with his arm. The latest news is that doctors think they will have to operate again, reattaching a tendon they replaced over a year ago. If that’s so, he’s unlikely to pitch for another year.
He is a tall, lanky man with a gentle, boyish manner. Usually hesitant to speak, tonight he seems determined to get something off his chest. He says he has spent the whole year focusing on himself, thinking about getting back on the mound. He is just realizing how much he has taken his eyes off Jesus. He tells the blue-jean and workshirt—clad prisoners that he has prayed for forgiveness. “For the first time in quite a while I’m able to be at peace with myself,” he says. “People see the uniform. But when the uniform is off, I’m going to be just Scott, and what am I going to do with myself?”
Brett Butler speaks last. He is a 12-year veteran of the major leagues, a certified star who speaks with deep emotion about his son, Blake. “I love my son like nothing else, but God gave his only son to die on the cross because he loved us.” Butler appeals to the men to commit themselves to Christ, and dozens do, forming close-knit huddles to pray for each other. As the players leave, there are spontaneous outbreaks of singing: “I’m going to stay on the battlefield until I die.”
The 1992 season ends with the Giants in next-to-last place, 26 games behind the Atlanta Braves. “Ministry with the Giants was disappointing,” Pat Richie sums up. Just three years ago he had one of the strongest groups of Christians in baseball, but teams change quickly. “We didn’t have a lot of players involved, and we didn’t break much new ground with players who didn’t know the Lord. Chapel attendance was low, Bible-study attendance was low. The ministry revolved around the few players who were committed.
“It’s a tough audience to witness to,” he says of professional baseball players. It is a theme the players often repeat: they say it is impossible to “preach.” Former Giant Dave Dravecky puts it bluntly: “In the major leagues, you witness by your lifestyle.” He says that when he was playing, other players told him pointedly that God-talk was not welcome in major-league locker rooms.
Richie says that something unusual happened after the season: one player’s wife wrote a note to thank Richie and his wife for what they had done through the year. That happens to him, Richie says, about once a decade. “Athletes are often very self-centered people,” he says. “You rarely get a sense of gratitude back from players.” But then, he notes, it’s not really their fault. “I had a football player tell me, ‘Just once I wish I had a next-door neighbor ask me, “What did you do to make those petunias look so good?” Instead, it’s always, “What happened to you guys in the game last week?” ’ Athletes feel that everybody is thinking, ‘I’d like to get a free ticket out of these guys.’ Almost everybody wants something from them.
“Lots of Christians say to me, ‘You have the best job in the world.’ If I were to communicate to the American church about pro-sports ministry, I’d say it isn’t nearly as glamorous as they think; the initial euphoria they would feel in speaking to professional athletes wouldn’t serve them well. Players need someone who can get by that; but I find few people in the church who can. We’ve been trained to idolize.”
That raises a fundamental question about sports ministry: is it really about ministry to needy people, or about the pleasure of associating with American gods? The answer is: surely, some of both. Part of sports’ ministry’s sustaining energy comes from the thrill of rubbing shoulders with adored, inaccessible ballplayers. Otherwise, why would the full-time chaplains all be in the major leagues? It is the minor-league players who are most open to the ministry.
Richie says his own commitment to pro sports comes from the impact Christian stars can have. “We estimate that we share the gospel with 75,000 to 100,000 people each year, through speaking opportunities for our athletes.” The pro locker room is a strategic place to minister, Richie says, just as Rome and Philippi were for the apostle Paul. College or high-school athletes are more receptive to ministry, but their impact on a wider audience would be minimal. In short, ministry to the pros is built on faith in celebrity evangelism.
Yet celebrity evangelism seems to endorse our culture’s belief that the rich and famous matter more. It supports the very mindset that keeps many major leaguers from listening to the gospel: their belief that they really are special. Besides, celebrity in sports depends on winning, not character; it does not fit neatly with a Savior whose life goals included crucifixion. Having said all that, one has to remember those black San Quentin prisoners thronging to hear young, white millionaires talk about the meaning of life. Does anybody doubt that celebrity evangelism is sometimes innocent and moving, and can lead to unthinkable breakthroughs?
Questions about celebrity evangelism aside, Baseball Chapel stands or falls by its effectiveness in reaching a subculture of very isolated human beings. If anything, Baseball Chapel offers these ballplayers the only kind of ministry where their fame does not get in the way. The locker room continues to be hard, agnostic, pragmatic. Yet, on nearly every team in the major leagues, one finds a few solid Christians, and often on Sunday half the team will be at chapel. It didn’t used to be that way.
Some call the chapel talks simplistic. Mathisen refers to them as “an amalgam of biblical aphorisms, pop psychology, and training tips.” Those devotionals do not often feature warnings about greed or calls to self-sacrifice.
When you think about the Giants’ 1992 season, however, it is hard to claim that they avoided being challenged. Those who attended chapel were not really superstars gliding above life’s difficulties. Rather, in a little back room they were reminded on a weekly basis that something mattered besides their success on the field. Maybe the message was lightweight, but these guys are not intellectuals, either. The difficulties of life poked them, and so did the chapel messages. They were reminded of family, of integrity, mostly of God. If they were not prodded at all the levels they might have been, they were more than they wanted to be. Compared to the alternative—nothing—Baseball Chapel did a lot.
Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
