Baseball and the Fatherless Generation

I’ve had the chance to catch a lot of baseball in the last week – from the always-exhilarating trip to Busch Stadium in St. Louis to see my Cardinals play, to watching both the Home Run Derby and the MLB All Star Game in their entireties for the first time in probably five or six years. It was refreshing, to say the least.

Baseball has always held a mystical quality for me, as it has for innumerable others. There’s a magic in the game that many have tried to capture in words, yet I wonder if any of us have ever really succeeded. Jason Morgan comes close in this article over at First Things, posted a few months ago on Opening Day. Here are some excerpts:

[B]aseball will, by the unchangeable truth of its geometry and the eternal vectors of its freedoms, speak to you, call you by name, and—not teach—but allow you to remember who you have always been. That’s what draws boys to the game, makes knights of them and tutors them, inducts them in the ways of men that no one can enumerate, or even guess at. It’s the very wordlessness of it all. 

There is a reason that the Vikings imagined their heroes locked in eternal combat in Valhalla. It wasn’t because they were belligerent or bloodthirsty or deranged—no, far from it. It was because they knew that there is goodness in the striving. And it is on the baseball field that we remember this, and understand.

But for me, at least, the game’s magic goes much deeper than just the “goodness in striving.” Perhaps more than any other sport, I cannot think of baseball without simultaneously thinking of my dad. The two are, in my mind, inseparable.

Dad was the one who threw countless hours of batting practice to the three-year-old hacking away with the big red plastic bat that was nearly twice his size. He was the one with the patience to watch hundreds of grounders bounce through my legs in the street beside our house, the one who chased down the tennis balls I cranked across several neighbors’ yards. He was the one who took me to my first major league game at Camden Yards and the one yelling and waving me around first base when I broke up a late-inning no-hitter against the best pitcher and team in the county. Dad was also the one with the audacity to ask me later, “You closed your eyes when you swung, didn’t you?” (Of course I did.)

My dad is my hero – always has been – and I look back now with unspeakable gratitude at the ways he used sports, and particularly baseball, as a medium to teach me perseverance, discipline, teamwork, and a love for the “goodness in striving.” More than that, those countless hours of practice with him serve for me as a sterling example of the need for consistent and unconditional intentionality in fatherhood. I only hope and pray that I can be half the dad he has been and continues to be.  

Moreover, I wish with everything in me that every boy on the planet could have a father like Andy Williams, a dad who would willingly spend every last summer night coaching his son’s games or throwing him batting practice in the back yard, merely for love of his child. Sadly, there are 25 million American young people growing up without a father at all – a tragedy that adversely and indelibly affects many of them for the rest of their lives.

Thank God there are those who have taken up the cause of the “Fatherless Generation” with zeal and courage. In this week’s nonprofit spotlight, I’d encourage you to visit my friends over at The Mentoring Project, a tremendous organization founded six years ago by Donald Miller that seeks to “rewrite the story of the fatherless generation” by “by inspiring and equipping faith communities to mentor fatherless youth.” You can find out more about their work to champion the cause of the fatherless here.

I wish I had time and space to write at length about these subjects – I’m sure the same themes will crop up again soon. For now, at least, let us all pray for those without fathers and then ask what we might do to reverse this tragedy and begin writing stories filled of love, hope, and joy.