Serving God & Baseball

Matthew 6:22-24

“The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If, then, the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!

“No one can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

I’ll start out by saying that I’ve had this sermon planned in my head for months now, and while I’m very excited the Red Sox are in the middle of a phenomenal hot streak, this sermon won’t hit quite as hard as it may have otherwise… but I think it still works.

For the first half of this year baseball season, when the Red Sox were floundering, when they fired their entire coaching staff in what came as a shock to a lot of us, there was a new chant echoing throughout Fenway Park that as sometimes so loud, you could even here in the background watching the games on TV—and that chant was “Sell the team! Sell the team!” This sentiment has been building since the Red Sox traded the beloved Mookie Betts in the winter of 2020; Betts has since continued to be an unstoppable superstar and a loveable team leader for the Los Angeles Dodgers.  (6+ years later, and no matter how good or bad the Red Sox are playing, my stomach still drops every time I see Mookie Betts—it’s like reliving your worst heartbreak over and over). And while the Red Sox ownership and management tried to liken that trade to the somewhat shocking trade of fan favorite Nomar Garciapara 16 years before, that comparison just didn’t hold up— Nomar had had some injuries, was no longer in his prime, and was infamously kind of a drag in the dugout—and that same season they traded Nomar, they won the World Series, breaking the curse of the Bambino. No, the Betts trade was something different. He was a homegrown player, he was in his prime, he was ready to sign his life away to Boston, but the Red Sox ownership didn’t give him the money— despite the fact they had more than enough money, despite the fans dismay, and the Red Sox have been largely disappointing since that trade. So why would they trade their beloved superstar?

Because Red Sox ownership is serving wealth above the players and fans.

Now the scripture passage Sue just read for you seems like it’s just a pair of sort of disparate sayings—but they go together well. Now, I think the not being able to serve two masters is relatively self-explanatory; but the one before it needs a little bit of explanation: unhealthy in this case, can also be translated as “evil.” So instead of “unhealthy eye,” think, “evil eye.” The phrase evil eye, in Biblical days, was synonymous with envy. And what are people most often envious of? Possessions, wealth, power… so from this warning about envy, we go right into this statement that no one can serve two masters, that you cannot serve both God and all that God calls us to, while also giving in to our own evil eyes and doing everything in our power to try to attain wealth and status.  Because this goes against everything Jesus calls us to. We’re called to pool our resources for the greater good. We’re called to deny earthly possessions—I mean, there are radical and difficult to reconcile passages in which Jesus tells us to leave our jobs, our families, our entire lives behind to follow him. Of course, in today’s world, that might be too big of an ask. But at the very least— we are called to love one another as God loves us, which means we are called to love, period. And practicing that kind of radical love is simply not compatible with wealth hoarding, or the exploitation of people and labor that come with gaining that kind of wealth and power.

And with baseball, as with life, if the ultimate goal is to make money above all else, your way of running a baseball team just won’t be compatible with winning.

Now I’m not so naïve as to think that baseball isn’t a business—in fact, I remember vividly Mookie Betts saying something similar when he was traded to the Dodgers—that though he thought he was going to stay in Boston for his whole career, he understood that so much of what baseball is is business and money. But things have been changing in Major League Baseball.

In 2019, the MLB changed its bylaws so that private equity firms could buy stakes in MLB teams and franchises. Now, private equity isn’t inherently evil—the idea is (and I am so far from being an economist of a business person, so please take my explanation with a grain of salt) that investors pool some resources together and, traditionally, buy struggling businesses to try to improve or fix them and then often sell for a profit… but over the past decade or so, private equity firms have really expanded their repertoire. You can now find private equity companies buying up nursing homes, even hospitals; childcare centers; most recently, there’s been a lot of hubbub about private equity investing in youth club sports; in fact, I just read about how private equity is taking over bowling alleys now. There have been myriad studies and exposes that show how when private equity buys these kinds of organizations, with their main goal being profitability, (yes, even in healthcare, profitability is the goal), there are major consequences, sometimes really dire, life-threatening ones… but that’s fodder for another sermon.

Right now, we’re talking about what this new type of ownership is doing to baseball. And I think this quote from a representative of PE firm Arctos that owns a minority share of the Red Sox explains a lot: “If teams want our help reimagining the fan experience, the venue, or sponsorship strategy, we’ll help. But our job is to serve the owners we partner with.”  That’s a big but. And notice there’s nothing about teams actually winning, nothing about getting the right players. No, because that would be up the to the general management and John Henry, the owner of the Red Sox… but what happens when John Henry’s company, Fenway Sports Group, is partnering with Arctos? What happens when a company whose primary goal is to make money has so much sway when it comes to team decision? What happens as John Henry, in the interest of building on this sports empire he’s started and making even more money, expands by buying the England’s Liverpool football club as he did in 2010? At a certain point, you begin serving wealth and the exponential growth of it that our economy demands. And at that point, you can no longer serve the players or the fans. At that point, winning no longer matters if you’re gaming the system by raking money in regardless of wins or losses. And it should be noted that John Henry has not participated in a press conference or answered any questions publicly since the Betts trade over six years ago. I think it’s clear who, or rather, what he’s serving—and it’s not the fans.

I could have, (maybe should have?) included another Bible verse for our scripture reading today: 1 Timothy 6:9-10:

…those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.

It seems that once you’ve given into that evil eye, once you’ve gained so much of that wealth and status you’ve singularly strived for, it’s just never enough. So you buy more, you accumulate more, and you begin to lose sight of what really matters. As Bill Shaikin of the LA Times writes, “Firms such as Arctos are not about civic involvement, or the joy of ownership. They evaluate opportunities on a ‘Can we make money?’ basis.”

One of the reasons I decided to do this sermon series is because I’ve seen how sports bring people together, and baseball in particular, as I talked about in my first sermon on baseball being within a version of sacred time, has a way of uniting people in an especially poignant way; it brings people together, outside of ordinary time, brings them into a different world, in which everything else kind of stops— during a baseball game, time moves differently, and for a time, nothing else really matters, except your team, your players, the baseball stadium that’s taken the form of a cathedral… but when team ownership is so focused on analytics, so focused on the best bang for their buck (because it’s certainly not ours when you look at ticket and concession prices), when there are constant strategic machinations going on behind the scenes, and when you’re constantly on edge, wondering if your favorite player might get traded away at the drop of a hat, it kind of takes you out of the game. It can make you kind of cynical. It breaks the spell a little, and we begin to see who and what the powerful are actually serving, and it’s not the fans… it’s not even the players. A baseball game then, instead of being a sacred time that takes you out of this world for a couple hours, it just becomes emblematic of everything that is wrong with the outside world. It becomes another money-making scheme, another way for the rich to get richer.

Now, even if you’re not a baseball person, I would incline you to pay attention to what happens with the MLB in the coming months, after the season is over. Players unions and owners will be negotiating contracts and in a recent poll of players from The Athletic, almost 80% of players said they believed there will be a lockout, or a strike, and that it will last into the 2027 season. The main thing that ownership will be pushing for and that players will be pushing against, is a salary cap, which all other major professional sports have. Salary caps, in theory, are to ensure some semblance of equality and competition. There will be a lot of propaganda about the players being greedy, about how salary caps are an obvious solution to bloated payrolls. But when all that happens, remember who’s really calling the shots now, and remember who those shot-callers are serving—now it’s not just wealthy individuals… it’s also private equity firms influencing decisions, with no loyalty to players or fans.

Normally in my sermons, I try to have a bit of hope or some actionable advice—but when it comes to the economics of baseball right now, I don’t know that I can give either of those things! You can’t vote out owners (the best you can do is maybe chant ‘sell the time’ after you pay $100 for a ticket to watch the Red Sox lose). Maybe you could boycott, but then you feel like you’re punishing yourself too, missing out on America’s summer pastime—and really, what difference would it make?

I guess, ultimately, we can simply see that the way Major League Baseball is currently being run is really a microcosm of all that’s wrong with the way our country is being run, and also an example of everything Jesus preached against— just as this nation is being run by corporate interests and ego over the needs and wants of regular people, so is baseball being run as a money mill for owners over the loyalty and love of the fans. Jesus makes it clear: if the eye is focused on the wrong thing, the whole body goes dark, and we can no longer see what really matters. If the eye is focused on wealth and power, it can’t be focused on anything else.

Maybe this is why I get a pit in my stomach every time I see Mookie Betts in a Dodgers uniform, with that infectious smile on his face—it’s a reminder of what could have been, what should have been, what should be. It’s a reminder of what the powerful really care about, who they’re really serving. It’s disheartening and discouraging.

As a frustrated Red Sox fan, I guess I don’t have much advice for keeping the faith during these times… but as a Christian, I always do. No matter how dark things may seem, we know how to keep the light alive within our hearts. We have Jesus making it clear as day who we’re meant to serve—God, and one another. Love God, and love one another as God loves us. And so in our lives, we lead by example. And by Jesus’ example, we know right from wrong. And maybe the powerful will allow their bodies and their paths to be full of darkness for the sake of more wealth and power; but we won’t. We will lead with light and love, and stubborn hope… whether or not our team makes it to the playoffs. Amen.