Annual baseball ritual will be missed

The baseball gods are grieving. Mount Olympus is forsaken.

The annual Baseball Hall of Fame Game in Cooperstown, N.Y., is no more. The mortals who control the game have deemed Cooperstown's Doubleday Field too remote, too distant, too unprofitable to sustain the annual pilgrimage.

Rural Cooperstown is so far off the beaten path, they argue, and its rustic ballpark can't seat even 10,000 spectators. It can't accommodate the press or video entourage. Besides, the game itself is meaningless in the greater realm of things.

The 69th and final Hall of Fame Game was scheduled for Monday. The San Diego Padres - a 2007 division champion - and the Chicago Cubs - currently baseball's most winning team - were supposed to play. But there was nasty weather. There was heavy rainfall. There was lightning, even hailstones - icy teardrops from heaven.

The game won't be rescheduled. They're all too busy to fit it in.

Baseball's not coming back to Cooperstown. And baseball is poorer for the decision.

I look back fondly on my own Doubleday Field summer. It was the summer after my high school junior year. I grew up in a town just over the hill from Cooperstown, one valley away. I played first base and pitched for an American Legion team in a little town just east of Cooperstown. On weeknights my teammates and I played our league games on the high school diamond; but on Sundays, we'd come home from Mass, put on our uniforms and head for Cooperstown, where Legion teams from all over visited to tour the Hall of Fame and to go back home with stories about playing at Doubleday.

My team got to play host against some of those teams. We played two, sometimes three games a Sunday. We all took our turns pitching. Everybody got their share of at-bats.

Looking back, I realize we didn't fully appreciate the presence of lore, the ghosts of all those Major League legends whose cleated shoes had toed the rubber of that very same pitcher's mound through the decades. I don't think we fully appreciated the honor of calling Doubleday our home field. We simply loved to play the game. We loved the dugout camaraderie, the lazy summer Sundays, the attention of the spectators - especially the female spectators. We were kids. What did we know?

There are places that seem weighted by the significance of their history - locations, the late Pope John Paul II once wrote, "in which God chooses to pitch his tent among us." John Paul wrote that in 2000, exhorting the faithful to welcome the new millennium and celebrate a church jubilee with pilgrimages to the Holy Land, to walk the paths of Abraham, Moses and Christ himself.

I went on one of those pilgrimages in 2000. I stood atop Jerusalem's Mount Moriah inside the Dome of the Rock Mosque, where Abraham came within a hair's breadth of sacrificing his son, Isaac. I ascended the Mount of Olives, where Jesus gave us the Lord's Prayer; and Mount Tabor, where he rubbed shoulders with Moses and Elijah. There were the cliffs near Jericho; and Mount Carmel, high above the plain of Jezreel and low hill Megiddo, where some believe that a massive final conflict is foretold.

I've been to the places "where God chooses to pitch a tent among us," and I believe I got a taste of what John Paul described.

But I've found traces of it elsewhere: at Gettysburg, high on Little Round Top, and down in the Devil's Den; in Arlington National Cemetery, at the Tomb of the Unknowns and before the flame at JFK's grave; and to a far lesser extent, on the basepaths and in the dugouts at Doubleday Field.

Yes, I know. Baseball isn't a religion, the apostles weren't a baseball team and Jesus wasn't Casey Stengel. But a presence of something greater than us exists there. As John Paul's essay on pilgrimage also points out, "There is no place where God cannot be found."

And that presence of something greater - something purer - is what baseball has forsaken. It's a shame we've lost the ritual.