This week three of my boys started little league practice.  Literally, every night of the week we will soon be running from field to field.  If you look in the back of my Suburban in the next four months you will likely find baseball gloves, bats, baseballs, chairs, and blankets.  In a couple of weeks we will be living at the ball park every Friday night and Saturday.

But there is nothing like it.

In the past, baseball has always provided a unique way to bond with my oldest son.  In the back yard, while we work on a four seam fastball and fielding grounders, a connection is made that would not otherwise be there.

But this year, working on technique in the backyard has a more significant meaning for me.  With the addition of 3 more boys to our family by adoption, baseball has been a catalyst for building a father–son relationship.  When I walk in the door to pick them up for practice, I can hardly get a word in before they start asking if their grip is right, or if their stance is correct.

I now have something in common with my sons that I didn’t before.  And now, through baseball, I have many opportunities to teach them lessons about biblical manhood.

I started thinking about this yesterday when Baptist Press published an article that connected baseball to fatherhood by David Prince, pastor of Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky.

Be sure to read the entire article, “Pitchers and Catchers report–will Dads?” Here is an excerpt.

“Without fathers, there is no baseball, only football and basketball” (Diana Schaub, “America at Bat,” National Affairs). It was one of those lines that paralyzes you when you read it. As a former high school coach I began reflecting on just how true that sentence was in my experience. In football it was common for a young man with superior brawn or athletic ability to begin playing the game successfully at an older age with no background or former tutelage in the sport. Height alone can equate to some measure of basketball success at younger ages and skills can be honed in isolation with nothing more than a ball and a hoop. None of this is true with baseball. In most cases, the way a love of baseball is transmitted is through dads.

Baseball is a sport of fathers and sons. When Willie Mays speaks of his dad teaching him how to walk when he was six months old by enticing him with a rolling baseball, he is telling the story of baseball. It is not uncommon for friends to ask me how I can continue to love the game in light of exorbitant salaries and the shame of the steroids era. My passion and love for the game did not begin in multi-million dollar parks with 40,000 seats and it cannot be taken away by what happens there. It began with my dad rolling a baseball to me at six months of age and grew with countless times of catch, ground balls, and batting practice with my father.

I fear that the diminishing popularity of baseball in recent years has less to do with the sport and more to do with the diminishing popularity of intentional fatherhood in our culture.

As a Christian father I try to remember to pray every time I drive past a little league baseball park. I thank God for fathers who are intentionally investing time in their sons and I pray that the game of baseball would remind Christian fathers that calling the next generation to hope in God (Psalm 78:5-7) works in a similar way. It takes time, effort, diligence and never-ending conversations about God and His grace (Deuteronomy 6:4-9).

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