Sanctuary There''s an old synagogue in SouthBend, Indiana where they now sell baseball caps and T-shirts and foamfingers. The South Bend Cubs of the Single-A Midwest League play justacross the street at Four Winds Field. The synagogue closed for worshipseveral years ago and it proved too tempting an edifice for Andrew T.Berlin, the team''s owner, to resist; he bought it and had it converted,removing the bimah and the Ark of the Covenant, installing shelving and acash counter, and now it opens to service a different sort of adherent. Thisseems entirely appropriate to me, though I understand how it mightoffend the Orthodox. The ballpark-as-temple notion treads the line ofblasphemy, but does so acrobatically, since in the cases of bothbaseball and religion we''re talking about community endeavours with longhistoric roots, endeavours that call on us to uncover our betterselves. I''ll go further and suggest that houses of worship andhouses of baseball serve similar if not identical functions, namely thepromise of a safe place of assembly from which to organize our effortsto reach something higher. They offer sensations like few other thingsin this life do, a sense of the uncanny, heaping doses of wonder, andthe tingle on the skin that occurs when we find ourselves in thepresence of something that makes possible the miraculous.

There isa feeling I get just before a summer rain interrupts a warm day, asense- and emotion-memory so strong it''s like teleportation: I am justdays shy of my 13th birthday and, in the manner of all people that age,on the cusp of so much I cannot anticipate and yet for which I remainboth eager and reticent. I am with my parents outside Doubleday Field,the tiny brick ballpark just a block from the Hall of Fame inCooperstown, where my parents have taken me for my birthday. Everythinghums. The warm August day has turned dark and the sky threatens. Thepavement smells warm, and seems to know it will soon be wet and blackwith rain. Soon we''ll venture up the little grandstand and watch ahalf-inning of a little league game being played there. In 18 years I''llstand on this very spot holding my first child and point out FergusonJenkins as he signs autographs. That first afternoon, the one when I''malmost 13, the rain is coming but it has not arrived yet, and my motherand father have given this to me.

This place, this experience. Baseballis being played, and I have just seen the Hall of Fame for the firsttime, and Doubleday Field is built of brick and it offers welcome, itsroofed grandstand saying, Even if the sky breaks, I will keep you dry.In the confluence of all these things I locate a feeling like safetysuch as I have not felt since infancy. Twenty-six years later I''mstill there in many ways. Worshipful, reverent, and certain that mylifetime of watching and studying this game has not revealed to me allits secrets; that several more lifetimes would leave still moremysteries. And I''m grateful that, though I have permitted so much wonderto be drummed from me, allowed my capacity for sincere surprise to ebbaway, I have maintained those feelings where baseball is concerned. Ithas not lost any of its ability to awe me; when I watch I''m still thatkid. The ballpark is where my otherwise firm secular humanismbegins to grow soft, to give out at its edges, to take on a porousnessinto which seeps something very like belief.

It''s the place where myweariness and cynicism abate, replaced by an openness and desire forgrace. I''ve followed that feeling to all manner of places. Like a polestar it has determined my direction. I''ve forgone Paris in favour ofChicago, Seattle, and Allentown, Pennsylvania. I''ve passed over Londonfor Milwaukee, Phoenix, and Burlington, Vermont. I''ve tithed it mymeagre funds. I''ve felt wonder at seeing a champion crowned--ascending tothe game''s heaven, as it were--and then known the despair of the seasonending, followed by the reliable joy of the day pitchers and catchersfirst report to Spring Training, and finally registered the elation ofOpening Day, with its unsubtle suggestion of rebirth. It shows uswhat a human being might be capable of, with extreme dedication--for ifwe can''t beatify Jackie Robinson or Roberto Clemente then who among usis worthy? We also learn daily just how complicated our lesser saintsare, how conflicted and human.

Such doubt, of course, confirms faith.Josh Hamilton erred and then righted himself, achieving years ofsobriety before a second slip, which he himself reported. Angels ownerArte Moreno cast him out but the Rangers accepted him back into thefold. After that dark hour, Arlington''s Globe Life Park probably feltlike a sanctuary for Hamilton. He hit a double on the first pitch he sawand two homers the next night. If that''s not grace. Across 9innings, through 162 games, season after season and decade after decade,baseball asks for devotion, attention, dedication, and it rewards withclemency. It hints that faith and patience and penance will eventuallyyield pennants, though some paths to the promised land are more arduousthan others.

In this devising, Chicago Cubs fans represent the mosthardcore of ascetics. Here is where that old synagogue in South Benddoubly proves its provenance, for those Midwest League Cubs are butseveral rungs down the same ladder as the long-suffering North Siders,and the world the Cubbies inhabit is most certainly an Old Testamentone. What other aspect of contemporary life is so imbued with asmuch quasi-religious ritual as baseball? What other game or pursuit ordistraction offers so many symbols? It even has consecrated ground--howelse to explain why on a tour of Fenway the groundskeeper insisted wenot step on the grass? That, we understood, was turf made hallow by thefeet of Jimmie Foxx, Ted Williams, Jim Rice, Carl Yastrzemski. Interms of both its textual record and the imagery it produces, provokes,and inspires, the richness and abundance of baseball is hard to matchoutside the ecclesiastical realm. In Bull Durham, Susan Sarandon''s Anniespeaks of "the Church of baseball," and she''s right in locating thepart of the soul touched by the game as the same one that makes prayerso satisfying. Baseball readily and reliably offers a feeling ofreverence so clear and deep it can''t be discounted. The brainseeks defense mechanisms to inveigh against all manner of threat, fromboredom to suspicions of futility, so it might be that in the face ofbaseball''s sheer volume--its frequent lulls, the endurance that''srequired to withstand an entire campaign--we have become adept at imbuingit with unearned meaning and significance. It might be that the onlyanswer to the question, What is it about this game? is that it grinds usdown long enough to render impotent our otherwise sharp and clinicalsensibilities.

But I don''t think so, and I suspect that if you do, youmight as well quit reading now, because most of these essays spring fromthe tacit awareness that baseball vibrates with something a littlestrange, that it trembles with a bit of stuff we might as well callmagic for our inability to fully articulate it. This conviction isnecessary to me, as it keeps me going during a blowout in early Junebetween two teams whose lacklustre fates have been determined sincemid-April; the deep belief that even if this game means nothing, thisgame still means something. It shouldn''t be necessary to state afact so obvious, but just to be safe let me underline it: I watchbaseball a certain way, but that doesn''t for a second have any bearingon how you take it in. No interloper is required to intervene betweenyou and the object of your devotion, no member of an ordained class needshape your relationship to the game. You''re free to love it in your ownway, and you don''t need homogeneous talking heads or beat reporters toconfer their blessings upon you. You don''t need bloggers, stat-heads,season-ticket holders or self-appointed experts, and you sure as helldon''t need me. It''s yours as surely as it is mine, and it asks chieflyfor your attention in whatever form that takes. But for me,baseball is epiphanic, a contemplative tedium interrupted by bursts ofsignificant action.

It''s the impossible made infrequently possible. Longintervals spent wandering the desert and sudden inexplicable miracles.I''m willing to concede there''s some Plato too in the symmetry of thedimensions, the cleanness of the rules being as close to perfection aswe''re permitted to get, echoes of an ideal that exists off-camera and isultimately untouchable. The exercise, or indulgence, of all thisrequires a steadfast refusal to permit corruption in Major LeagueBaseball''s organizational structure to mar said belief. It requiresmaking allowances for the earthbound politics and prejudices of thepeople who run the game while maintaining the divinity and perfection ofthe game itself. Collusion, tax dodging, inequality in hiringpractices, the exclusion of women, the "gentleman''s agreement" thatprevented non-white players from participating, rule changes includingbut not limited to the designated hitter, the movement of franchises,the invention of Astroturf. all are regrettable but attributable tohuman fallibility, while the game itself continues unhampered. Whateverour clumsy efforts, however we might muck it up, I tune in to a game tosatisfy the desire to witness something uncanny, a desire so fervent itbecomes need.

And I suppose that''s as likely an inspiration forreligion as any other you might conjure. And like religion, thefeeling is strongest within its designated houses of assembly. My "home"ballpark--90 minutes away from my house, give or take--is the RogersCentre in Toronto, which is only proof that some houses are morebeautiful than others. They can''t all be the Sistine Chapel. Whatevertheir form--tiny or massive, domed or open, concrete or wood or brick, orblea.