Susan Sarandon, an Artifact Unearthed & the Church of Baseball
50-Year Old Unpublished Baseball History
As Susan Sarandon said in Bull Durham, “I believe in the Church of Baseball. . . It is the only church that truly feeds the soul.”
But decades before that, my friend Sam Pillsbury wrote,
[Both] the church and professional sports . . . share one crucial attribute; they require the faith of their adherence to survive. Both exist in order to allow large numbers of people to reach out and grasp a common creed with which they can order their lives. And professional baseball throughout most of the 20th century has come closest to all professional sports to religion. The ritual of the game is part of the American culture.
This was written at Harvard University in March 1976 in Sam’s undergraduate thesis entitled, It’ll Never Be the Same, Baseball and American Society 1946 to 1957.
Sam Pillsbury is a man of the world and a man of the spirit. He has been a sports reporter, a law school professor, a federal prosecutor, and an Episcopal Deacon who spent years in jail ministry. One of his daughters is a rabbi and the other speaks Swahili and did NGO work in Tanzania. His wife is a therapist who worked with veterans suffering PTSD.
A few months ago, Sam told me about his thesis and then dug it out for me. It is publicly published here for the first time as a PDF, in all its typed 20 lb. bond paper glory, complete with whited-out corrections.
His thesis is a gem, covering both baseball and history, and touching on spirituality. It covers the moving of the early baseball franchises, starting with the Boston Braves to Milwaukee on through the Dodgers and Giants to the West Coast. I’ve read a lot about baseball history, and this is up there with anything I’ve seen before, rich with detail and analysis. There are some great photos and even better political cartoons from the era. The footnotes alone are worth the read. (Check out footnote 33 on p. 95 about Jackie Robinson.)
Thank you, Sam, for letting me share this.
(This post first ran in my pre-Substack email chain.)
Wow. Thanks indeed.