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October/November 2007

Is the Nation’s Favorite Pastime Pitching Jesus?

It's a Close Call
by karin tanabe

It was a Sunday morning and Washington Nationals’ players Ryan Church and Matt Cepicky were cavorting around in their shorts in the team’s clubhouse. The team’s chaplain, Jon Moeller, walked into the room and interrupted their fun. “Chapel in 30 minutes” he announced.

During chapel service, Church, then 26, had a conversation with Moeller. The outfielder was concerned because his former girlfriend was Jewish prompting him to ask the chaplain, “Like, Jewish people, they don’t believe in Jesus. Does that mean they’re doomed?”

Moeller nodded affirmatively and Church later exclaimed: “My ex-girlfriend!... Man, if they only knew. Other religions don’t know any better. It’s up to us to spread the word.”

This exchange was reported in a September 18, 2005 story by Washington Post reporter Laura Blumenfeld, who had been in the clubhouse and at chapel, which was held in the team’s video room at RFK Stadium. Some fans of the new Washington, DC, baseball team, were horrified. One of them was Shmuel Herzfeld, founder of the “Hebrew Nationals” fan club. Herzfeld, the Orthodox rabbi of Washington’s Ohev Sholom synagogue, organized a protest and press conference outside the stadium.

Church quickly announced his “sincere regrets” if any quote attributed to him “offended anyone,” but the incident drew attention to the organization known as Baseball Chapel, the non-profit group with which Moeller was a volunteer. Since 1973, Baseball Chapel chaplains have been the official prayer leaders of America’s national pastime—the organization recognized by Major League Baseball to supply chaplains to the major and minor leagues, serving players, wives, coaches, managers and other team and stadium personnel. Its mission, stated on its website, is: “To bring encouragement to people in the world of professional baseball through the Gospel so that some become discipled followers of Jesus Christ.”

In response to the public outcry, the Nationals got rid of Moeller but not Baseball Chapel. Chartese Burnett, the team’s vice president of communications, says she received thousands of calls and emails in support of Baseball Chapel. The organization brought in a new chaplain for the team.

 

Ari Sunshine, the Rabbi of B’nei Shalom, a Conservative synagogue in Olney, Maryland, pulls out the three-page letter he sent to Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig following the “Jews are doomed” episode. Sunshine, a devoted baseball fan, is one of the Nats fans who believe that the deeper issue has not been addressed.

In his letter to Selig, who is Jewish and a well-known supporter of Israel and Jewish causes Sunshine asked: “How many of the 3,000 personnel who go each week to Baseball Chapel realize that they are going to an evangelical Christian service? Is that truly what each of those people is seeking—to better understand one right-wing view of Christianity, which teaches its players that faith in Jesus is the only key to salvation, and that, accordingly, their Jewish ex-girlfriends are ‘doomed?’ Yet as I understand it, this is the only style of Christian worship service made available to Major League Baseball personnel. That is unfortunate, since not all mainstream Christian denominations emphasize ‘faith-based’ salvation to a degree that denigrates legitimate religious alternatives and thus makes it difficult to have meaningful dialogue and healthy working relationships between people of different faiths.”

The very next day, Sunshine received a reply from the commissioner saying that he too found Moeller’s comments “disappointing and offensive.” Selig wrote: “I, of course, share the concerns that you have raised and I will take steps to insure that much of what you have written is implemented into Major League Baseball.” Selig’s spokesperson, Rich Levin, also promised that the commisioner’s office would review baseball’s relationship with Baseball Chapel.

That was two years ago. Selig has not responded to Sunshine or Herzfeld despite many attempts to contact him, and his office turned down numerous requests to interview him for this story. The commissioner’s silence angers Herzfeld, who believes that organized baseball is pandering to the Christian Right. “Bud Selig should know better,” he says. “Why doesn’t he invite Baseball Chapel into his office and let them evangelize him? Baseball is one of the great neutral settings in America and they’re using it to evangelize.”

 

Waddy Spoelstra was a hard-drinking, hard-living, hard-cussing newspaperman. In January of 1958, the Detroit News sportswriter rushed to a Catholic hospital in Michigan, where his college-aged daughter Ann was in a coma brought on by a sudden brain aneurism. He paced the waiting room floor, terrified that if she did not improve she would have to go into surgery.

That night, Waddy got down on his knees to pray for the first time since he was a child and struck a deal with God: If He could heal Ann, Spoelstra promised, he would do something for Him in return. Shortly afterwards, nuns came running down the halls crying, “Miracle, miracle!” When Spoelstra went to his daughter’s bedside, she looked up at him and said, “Hi Dad.” She recovered completely.

The sportswriter was a changed man. But “it bothered him for quite a while to see how to hold up his end of the bargain,” says his son Jon. “He thought of being a missionary, but my mother really didn’t want any of that.”

Spoelstra, who died in 1999 at the age of 89, covered the Detroit Tigers at a time when sportswriters maintained relationships with players and management, often riding on the bus with them to away games. He knew full well the temptations of the traveling ballplayer, the extramarital affairs and drinking that had wrecked many marriages and careers. Realizing that his own Tigers, like most ballplayers, were unable to attend church services on Sundays, he saw his chance to pay God back. Baseball Chapel was born.

Its beginnings were modest. With the help of his friend, legendary baseball announcer Ernie Harwell, Spoelstra orchestrated a brief chapel service for players when they had a home game on Sundays. Spoelstra’s daughter Ann Kimberly says, “It was all a labor of love. My Dad paid for everything out of his own pocket, and a sportswriter was not exactly a wealthy man.” What started as a service specifically for the Tigers and their opponents soon gained grassroots momentum.

In 1973 Spoelstra approached then-Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, a devout Catholic, hoping his seal of approval would help give Baseball Chapel a more formal structure. Kuhn agreed and granted him $5,000 in official funds. By early 1975, all major league teams had a chapel program run by Baseball Chapel, and by 1978 the organization was also working in the minor leagues.

“While I normally tried to reach conclusions in a thoughtful way,” Kuhn wrote in his 1987 autobiography, Hardball, “occasionally I followed hunches. I did so in 1973, when Waddy Spoelstra of the Detroit News, a recovering alcoholic, called and asked me if I would fund a program of Baseball Chapel services for each major league club…. My answer was yes, and today, there are weekly chapel services across the major and minor leagues.”

Though Bowie Kuhn gave Baseball Chapel the official blessing, Ernie Harwell, now 89, recalls that some managers resisted. “Many made fun of the Christians. But our view is that God wants you to do your best and that you should do it for His glory. A lot of the Christian ballplayers recognize that they have a great platform and can influence more people than a preacher can.”

Joseph L. Price, a professor of religious studies at Whittier College in Whittier, California, says that Baseball Chapel’s presence provided the baseball community with positive values. “Baseball Chapel was not started by fundamentalists for the purpose of converting or anything like the Ryan Church incident.” Price emphasizes that “the identity of the group has been one of conservative evolution most institutions undergo.”

 

Vince Nauss, the current director of Baseball Chapel, grew up in Philadelphia and began his baseball career as an intern with the Amarillo, Texas, Gold Sox, which at the time was a Class AA Texas affiliate of the San Diego Padres. Nauss also was the team’s mascot, “The Original Ball Park Frank.” He later worked under Bowie Kuhn, before heading back to Philadelphia to do public relations for the Phillies.

It was there in 1983 that Nauss started attending Baseball Chapel services, becoming the team’s chapel leader from 1986 to 1989, then doing the same for the Chicago Cubs from 1991 to 1993. A licensed minister and a close personal friend of Spoelstra, Nauss eventually took the reins of Baseball Chapel in 1995 after the 13-year tenure of Dave Swanson.

The dynamic Nauss, 48, has been credited with significantly extending Baseball Chapel’s reach. Today, the organization has a network of approximately 500 volunteer chaplains, overseen by eight full-time staff members. Its ministry now extends to professional leagues and academies in Mexico, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic as well as Japan, where, since 2005, it has served players in the Nippon Professional Baseball League. Plans to expand into the Korean professional leagues are in the works.

The group’s funding has also increased steadily since 1995: In 2006, Baseball Chapel raised over a million dollars in contributions, gifts and grants, mostly through individual donations from people associated with the game, according to the group’s 2006 Form 990, required of nonprofits by the Internal Revenue Service. Overall, donations have grown by 25 percent in the last four years. Its net assets totaled more than two million dollars in 2006.

Nauss calls the Ryan Church episode “an unfortunate incident,” adding that the “situation does not represent us.” Nevertheless Baseball Chapel has never publicly apologized or condemned Moeller for his actions. It was the Washington Nationals who asked Moeller to leave, not Baseball Chapel.

“Players are never pressured to attend and there has never been any opposition to holding chapel,” Nauss emphasizes. “There are definitely players who don’t want any part of the chapel service. Our people know that they are guests and that only some people want what they have to offer. They’re told not to be intrusive or condemning.”

According to Nauss, Baseball Chapel volunteers receive limited instruction. Since the Nationals incident, however, he says, training now includes teaching that what may be acceptable for one player may be uncomfortable for another. “The chaplains are urged to pray for wisdom and discernment,” he says.

Baseball Chapel’s response has not satisfied its critics. Waddy Spoelstra’s friend, Episcopal deacon Malcolm M. Barnum, was shocked by the role of the Baseball Chapel chaplain in the 2005 episode. “Most of us Christians who have studied begin with the Old Testament, building our faith on the Jewish faith,” he says. “When they make a statement like that they are so out in left field that it is embarrassing, and I think Waddy would have said the same thing.”

Donna Halper, a journalism professor and former Jewish chaplain at Emerson College in Boston, still finds Moeller’s response to Church hard to swallow. “Are we raising the next generation of anti-Semites, with the full co-operation of Major League Baseball?” she asks. “Baseball Chapel doesn’t even represent the average Christian—the majority of American Christians no longer believe the Jews (or other non-Christians) are damned to hell, and for those of us who teach tolerance, we all worked hard to get things to that place.”

The Reverend Mary Whetstone, president of the Association of Professional Chaplains, is concerned about the impact statements like Moeller’s will have on sports players who are not Christian. “In a hospital setting, if a patient were to ask me that question, I would not give them a proclamation from my own faith tradition,” she says. “As chaplains we don’t give definitive answers, we lead through listening” and help people get in touch with “their own spiritual core to discern the answers themselves.”

The attitude of the chaplain, as well as the religious make-up of a team varies from season to season, and team to team. But Tom Krattenmaker, a frequent USA Today contributor, questions whether chaplains, who as evangelical Christians are taught to actively spread the news to others that they can be saved via Jesus Christ, can provide players with non-evangelical counseling.

Krattenmaker, who is working on a book that explores the work of evangelical ministries in sports and why professional sports has become such a hotbed of evangelical activity, believes not. “The chaplains are not on hand to support a Jewish player’s Torah study or to counsel a Muslim in his daily prayers to Allah,” Krattenmaker wrote in a 2005 USA Today article. “The ministries’ message is strong and exclusive: Accepting Jesus as your lord and savior is the one and only path to salvation.”

 

Long before there was Baseball Chapel, there was the Young Men’s Christian Association. “The key to understanding religion in sports is the YMCA,” says Bentley College professor Clifford Putney, author of Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920. “It was really the YMCA that combined the two.”

Founded in London in 1844 by George Williams, a 23-year-old cloth merchant, the YMCA hoped to save the masses of young men flooding into England’s cities, heeding the call of the industrial revolution and a life of sin. Until the YMCA crossed the Atlantic in 1851, most American churches staunchly opposed baseball because games were held on Sundays in violation of Christian-based Sabbath statutes or civic blue laws. In particular, Methodists and Baptists regarded the game as the work of the devil. This changed when the YMCA opened up gyms to lure people to come to their Christian reading rooms. “The Y felt that having a strong body meant you could be a tool for Jesus’s work in the world,” says Putney.

Billy Sunday was known for his ability to fly down the first base line for the Phillies until he traded in his baseball career to preach fire and brimstone. He would become one of the YMCA’s most popular sports ministers. But after the 1920s, when the YMCA became more secular, others stepped in to fill the void. The most influential was Billy Graham, the evangelist who has served as an unofficial spiritual advisor to 10 U.S. presidents from Harry Truman through George W. Bush. At his first crusade in 1947, Graham pioneered the idea of bringing in current sports heroes to provide witness for God. That the idea coincided with the mass introduction of television broadened Graham’s platform, providing sports missionaries with a way into people’s homes via stadiums. Bobby Richardson, the Yankees infielder, is credited with first bringing Christian faith into the clubhouse. Richardson hosted informal Bible study groups for players in the 1950s and is now a leader with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

Evangelical Christians followed his lead onto the sports bandwagon. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), founded in 1954, is still the largest Christian sports organization in the country. Its mission, according to its website, is to challenge “coaches and athletes on the professional, college, high school, junior high and youth levels to use the powerful medium of athletics to impact the world for Jesus Christ.”

Athletes in Action (AIA) was established 41 years ago and has a presence on almost 100 college campuses, and provides chaplains for the National Football League, the Women’s National Basketball Association and Major League Soccer. The Pro Basketball Fellowship does the same for the National Basketball Association, and Canadian-based Hockey Ministries International takes care of the National Hockey League.

Occasionally, chaplains in these groups overlap. Two Baseball Chapel chaplains, those of the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, for example, are on the payroll of Athletes in Action. This means that they follow the AIA doctrine, described by Tim Pitcher, a spokesman for the group, as evangelical.

Joseph Price doesn’t think that Baseball Chapel has as wide as reach as the FCA or AIA. “Baseball Chapel does not have campus-based groups and is not focused on youth,” he says. “That is where the FCA and AIA have much more expansive influence.”

 

Mark Gilbert, a Jew who was a Chicago White Sox player in 1985, started out in the minors in the 1970s. During his years in the minors, he became extremely concerned about peer pressure from Christian groups, in particular the FCA. “I had no problem with someone’s religion, but they were trying to solicit other players to come to meetings, saying if they did not embrace Jesus they would not be successful ballplayers,” says Gilbert, who may be the only former major leaguer to have served as the president of a conservative synagogue. “On some of the teams almost everyone participated in these prayer meetings. As the only Jewish player, it bothered me that they were pressuring me.”

Groups like the FCA, Baseball Chapel and AIA are not breaking any laws by providing professional sports teams with chaplains, but they need to be careful that players like Gilbert don’t feel pressured to attend religious meetings. Professional athletes are entitled to the freedoms under Title VII of the 1965 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination against an individual due to race, color, religion, sex or national origin. But Steven Sheinberg, associate director for legal affairs of the Anti-Defamation League, says things start to get sticky when “coaches and people you want to have access to participate in those things. It is not unlawful, but it may make people think.

“The question is, does it have any impact beyond the [worship] room, are employees being harassed for not going or are their workplace conditions being changed? If a pitcher does not get to pitch because he did not go to chapel, then that is a problem.”

Deborah Lauter, the ADL’s national civil rights director, points to an example of how the line can be crossed. In 2004, University of Georgia cheerleading coach Marilou Braswell came under fire for leading what was seen by some as a “God Squad.” Jewish cheerleader Jaclyn Steele believed that discrimination kept her from being on the prestigious football squad for a second year and filed a complaint with University of Georgia officials. She stated that she felt obliged to participate in pre-game prayers and was pressured to go to Braswell’s home for a Bible study group led by Braswell’s minister husband. Steele turned to the ADL for help, and Braswell was eventually fired.

“The issue of religiosity in the workplace is one of the fastest-growing categories of complaints that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission gets,” says Sheinberg. “There are big monetary damages involved. It is taken seriously and will continue to be.”

 

No one seems to bat an eyelash when Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling kneels down before a pitch or when batters point to the sky in gratitude after they get a hit. But what would happen if an Afro-Carribean player who was Santerian sacrificed a chicken, á la the character Pedro Cerrano’s devoutly religious antics in the satirical movie Major League? Or if a Muslim pitcher caressed his prayer beads and placed his prayer rug in a corner of the dugout?

The day could be approaching, as the religious make-up of American baseball players becomes less monolithic, reflecting cultural changes throughout America. Today, approximately 25 percent of major leaguers, and nearly 45 percent of minor leaguers, are foreign-born. In 2007, there were 12 players from Japan, eight from Korea, three from Taiwan and three who have officially stated that they are Santerian. And with over 200 players in the majors from Latin America, Catholics are well represented. There were 16 Jewish major league players in the 2007 season.

The Nationals and many other teams say that if a Catholic or Jewish player wanted to set up a meeting with a priest or rabbi, he would have the right to do so. But for there to be organized chapel services, says Joseph Price, “there needs to be at least a cluster of players who want to address common issues of faith.”

Ari Sunshine, the rabbi in Olney, Maryland, thinks the time to expand the field to religious groups beyond Baseball Chapel or other evangelical organizations is now. “There should be opportunities to interact with figures from other Christian denominations. Give Baseball Chapel a chance to keep working, but bring in other faiths.”

In his 2005 letter to Bud Selig, Sunshine pointed to the Carolina Panthers football team’s rotating chaplain program as one way of keeping religion in the stadium while making it more inclusive. “Have the teams arrange for rotating chaplains of varying faiths on a weekly basis, providing ecumenical religious forums for people to pay homage to God before the game,” Sunshine suggested. Selig’s response called Sunshine’s letter “a wonderful articulation of what we should be doing in baseball” and promised to implement such reforms. The rabbi is disappointed that the commissioner has apparently not yet made any changes. To this date, Baseball Chapel head Vince Nauss reports the Commissioner’s office has not requested any information from Baseball Chapel that would indicate that an evaluation is underway.

The Panthers, who have a full-time Athletes in Action chaplain for their players, bring in invocation speakers from a range of Christian denominations but also include rabbis. As for what can be said, all prayers must be 100 words or less and must be submitted ahead of time. “We require folks to be ecumenical,” says Annie Hodges, who oversees team events. “There can be no mention of Jesus Christ or the Lord.”

However, what works for invocations may not for full-time chaplains: the establishment of a long-term bond with a religious leader is an important consideration. One possibility is for other religions to form organizations that can provide baseball with chaplains at little or no cost.

That might please one Nationals fan, Washington Post sports columnist Tony Kornheiser, who had more than a little fun with the Ryan Church incident.

“I’m one of those people Ryan thinks is ‘doomed,’” he opined in a September 22, 2005, column. “I won’t have salvation. Of course, wherever I wind up, I’ll be joined by Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg, so at least I’ll have some restaurant quality entertainment to console me.

“It’s great to read that the Nats in-house chaplain takes the view that not all of us are getting aboard the love train,” he added. Then Kornheiser, who generally writes in a humorous vein, turned serious:

“I propose this: The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, is coming up soon. Maybe Ryan can go to temple and learn a little bit about people he has written off.”

 

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