THE ANCIENT WISDOM OF BASEBALL

Virtue, courage, beauty, justice—it’s all there on the baseball diamond, according to Sheppard’s lyrical paean to America’s enduring pastime.

In Homer’s Odyssey, the mighty Odysseus returns home from the Trojan War after vanquishing his foes only to find his wife Penelope surrounded by a bunch of pesky suitors bugging her to finally forget him and marry one of them. Definitely not one to shrink from a challenge, Odysseus (in disguise) proceeds to win the hand of his beloved by executing an incredible display of athletic prowess and virtuosity that immediately awes Ithaca’s populace. In the author’s careful estimation, this is the very same kind of excellence baseball legends like Willie Mays, Carlton Fisk, and Andre Dawson once exemplified in ballparks and stadiums all across the country. “Baseball can help us recover this essential sense of excellence. Every ball game tells once more the ancient story about virtue and victory that modern folk can witness with their own eyes,” Sheppard observes. A close examination of the Chicago Cubs’ remarkably dramatic 2016 World Series Championship win yields further authentic insights into baseball’s revelatory power to lay bare the human condition: “Even as we come to credit the truth of our victory, we still ask, what does it mean?” the author muses. Such lofty sentiments might strike some as being overly romanticized if they were not accompanied by Sheppard’s earnest and very personal reflections on what the game of baseball has always meant to him. He shares this love of the game (and of the Chicago Cubs in particular) with daughter Cecilia as she grows, and their dynamic is enough to hook any reader—whether they understand what made Nolan Ryan such an intimidating force on the mound or not. “I have cultivated a connoisseurship of the game and indulged in a fanatical passion for the Cubs,” the unabashed author confesses. “I have given baseball the same quality of attention that priests give to scripture, that Buddhist monks give to sutras, that the ancient philosophers gave to Homer’s epic poems.” Sheppard may have long ago given up his Catholic conception of God, but he still worships the game of baseball.

A thoroughly entertaining exploration of baseball as a font of meaning.