It's been decades, but I vividly recall the day I mistakenly hit “Show Invisibles” on my old PC. A bunch of figures denoting line and paragraph breaks, tabs, and such jumped from behind the veil. They’d been doing their quiet work all along. And, oddly enough, I thought back to that day as I watched the just-concluded World Series between the Dodgers and Blue Jays. But instead of pilcrows and arrows, I find all sorts of religious contexts and commitments in play behind the play on the field.

Some are out there for us to see and hear as, for instance, batters point to heaven when they hit home runs or stars give credit to God in post-game interviews. But so much of it is out of sight in the form of heritage connected to matters of faith and fellowship, a collection of events and notions that has brought us all to “The Big Show.” Here’s a sampler:

When we hear the names Hernandez (Enrique and Teoscar), Rojas, and Pages, we think of Christopher Columbus’s impact, instrumental in supplanting Aztec, Mayan, and Arawak animism/paganism with a faith pledging allegiance to the Bible. Sad to say, some American states (and most perversely, the District of Columbia) have labeled his work a colonial “atrocity” and so have chosen to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day. They assure us that accounts of pre-Columbian human sacrifice are inflated, but it doesn’t take much of this savagery to raise questions about animism’s long-term helpfulness as a religion. As things worked out, we notice the tendency of Hispanic players to wear the Christian cross, e.g., Los Angeles’ Andy Pages, who also sports a “Yeshua: Lord, Redeemer, Savior T-shirt.” (Incidentally, those animist cultures would never have come up with the team jet ferrying them between LA and Toronto.)

And who would have dreamed that a fellow named Yamamoto would be named the MVP of the Series. Wasn’t Admiral Yamamoto the one who attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941? What’s next, a catcher named Goering or a bin Laden at shortstop? I knew a World War II vet who refused for decades to buy a Japanese car, and now the Titans play in Nissan Stadium. What gives? Well, we’ve gotten over it thanks to some gratifying developments, one of them being the assistance of General Douglas MacArthur in leading the Japanese emperor to renounce his divine status and in prescribing a parliamentary system for the nation. The economic and cultural interplay between our nations has been dramatic, with, for instance, the Coppengers’ enjoying both Tokyo Disneyland and their Honda Pilot, imbibing sushi from Publix and Coca Cola in Osaka. 

Yamamoto and his countryman, a “unicorn” of a player, Shohei Otanhi, enjoyed home field advantage in Los Angeles, the “City of Angels” (a shortened version of a Catholic name honoring the Virgin Mary). During the middle three series games in Los Angeles, the camera turned repeatedly to Dodger great and Hall of Famer, Sandy Koufax, a Jewish pitcher who took himself out of play to observe both Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. 

And then there’s Mookie Betts, who went to high school in my South Nashville neighborhood. Alas, in Arkansas I didn’t go to an integrated high school (1963-1966), but I was the child of parents much committed to racial integration, and I was well aware of the signal contributions of such giants as George Washington Carver and Jackie Robinson. When, years later, I was able to visit Carver’s birthplace (a National Monument) in Diamond Grove, Missouri, there I saw correspondence from both Henry Ford and Joseph Stalin seeking to enlist his help. They knew genius when they saw it. Both Carver and Robinson were professing Christians, as is Betts, whose excellence is such that both the Red Sox and the Dodgers have turned to him for help in winning four World Series.

As we make our way down the Dodger roster, we find a host of names passed down from European Christendom—Glasnow (Slavic); Kershaw, Smith, Muncy, and Snell (English); Sheehan (Irish), and Wrobleski (Polish). Tommy Edman’s mom is Korean, born in the nation where Billy Graham, in 1973, preached to his largest audience, over a million in Seoul’s Yoido Plaza. Edman declares, “Obviously, as a baseball player, your goal is to win the World Series. But I think for me, my goal is to be able to use the platform that I have to impact as many people as I can. It’s important for me as a Christian to be able to spread the word of God as much as I can.”

Let me also mention the Amsterdam connection. When I was a kid, the Brooklyn Dodgers were my favorite team. Ebbets Field sat in one of a cluster of New York’s Dutch-named neighborhoods, including Harlem, the Bronx, Flushing, and the Bowery. Their Dutch capital was a place of refuge for groups fleeing religious persecution in Europe—Mennonites from Switzerland, Jews from Spain, Dissenters from England. Holland was a land of toleration, the nation from which the Pilgrims sailed in 1620, and the sort of nation we became. 

Thanks go to the New World Dutch, who are credited with staging the first recorded baseball game. It was June of 1846 when the Knickerbockers (named for their loose-fitting britches) squared off against the New York Nine at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey. (Sorry, Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, but Alexander Cartwright was the man.) Thus began the “national pastime” of arguably the greatest nation on earth.

Nikole Hannah-Jones has beguiled knuckleheaded and tendentious sorts with her crackpot The 1619 Project, attempting to tie a perennially deplorable America to the revolting institution of slavery. On the contrary, I suggest that we do better to link the national character to baseball, where the melting pot has cooked up a tribute to color-blind meritocracy, featuring the exhilarating wedding of athleticism and ingenuity, generating both the joy of victory and the agony of defeat as high drama staged before a peaceful assemblage of fans—the whole affair marinated in spiritual perspectives. Call it “The Knickerbocker Project.”