For a recent family trip to Chicago, I ordered tickets to see the White Sox play the Minnesota Twins in a twilight game at the storied Comiskey Park on the city’s south side. Comiskey was infelicitously renamed Guaranteed Rate Field in 2016, after a thirteen-year stint as US Cellular Field. Their dismal success rate is guaranteeing very little for the hapless White Sox this season. Their record as of this writing stood at an abysmal 13-26, placing them in the proverbial doghouse, next to last in the AL central division, though they did beat the current first place Twins that night in a ten-inning game.
Pulling into the stadium parking lot that evening, I felt a childlike excitement I had assumed was forever lost. My many years of religious leadership have left me little time for simple pleasures like going to watch professional baseball. Yet the anticipation of the Sox game awakened in me my long dormant - though not dead - love of the game. I haven’t followed baseball with anything resembling religious passion since my idol, the Jewish first baseman, Ron Blomberg, hit .329 for the Yankees in 1973. I was eleven then. Still, take me out to the ball game once, and you might as well have taken me out a million times. I was reliving my one exhilarating season of little league, as a first baseman no less, batting a season average of .317 and sporting the signature mitt I had carefully chosen.
As I remembered all of this while eating dinner in the car, I noticed the German shepherd barking loudly and enthusiastically out of the hatchback in front of us. As his owners tailgated before the game, they appeared indifferent to his boisterousness, as if bringing a large, loud dog to a ball game was an everyday matter. I found this strange; but working hard to repress my work-time tendency to see potential sermons in all things, I let it go as the random choice of a dog owner to bring her pooch to the park. Was it a therapy dog or a trained service dog? Who knew? Who cared? It was no business of mine.
As we finished dinner, a car pulled in alongside us, with – you guessed it dear listener – a dog, dressed in White Sox regalia. This was getting curiouser and curiouser. As we got out of the car, my family noticed the canine cascade joyously tumbling over the lot: dogs were everywhere, excitedly pulling their equally joyous but exhausted owners, with the enthusiasm of…well…little kids at a ballpark. It took no more than a quick inquiry to figure out what was going on:
It was Dog Day at Comiskey!
Twice during the playing season, dog owners are permitted and encouraged to bring Fido and Spot to watch the great American pastime. This is a wonderful promo for getting people to buy seats to the game, especially during lackluster seasons when attendance is sparse. And buy seats they do. There were dogs of all kinds everywhere, doing what the White Sox franchise refers to as the “bark at the park.” At one point, I queried one of the security guards about the program’s success; he smiled and said, “Are you kidding me? There are more dogs than humans here tonight!” As we took our seats high up over home plate, I found myself laughing and joking more than I had recently. The frenetic energy of the stadium before the game was infectious, with dogs having their paws waved by their owners at the crowd over the marquee cam. This was so much fun! I really lost it when I found out that the sponsor of Dog Day that afternoon was a well-known vodka producer. I guffawed to my family, “Imagine their tag line: ‘Give your pooch some hooch!’”
I was quickly and happily lost in the sheer pleasure of the experience: the dogs, the aromas of ballpark food, the lighting over the expansive, well-manicured field, the noise, the swag giveaways, and of course, a game rather well played by this season’s White Sox, who possess genuine depth, even if little luck. As is the goal of a vacation, work was well out of my mind, but so it seems was the intensity of my calling: for a couple of hours, I was just a regular American at a ballgame enjoying Dog Day, not a rabbi or a religious thinker worrying about the spiritual dimensions – or lack thereof – of American sports or anything else.
Yet as the evening rolled on, I recalled what the most endearing aspect of spiritual life is: it is not meant to be worn on your sleeve but carried quietly in your team jersey. I don’t need to constantly be thinking about it, personally or professionally, because the divine miracle that is life is always, dependably present: in the smiles of excited fans, young and old, screaming for the team; in the extraordinary skills of young, well-disciplined athletes; and especially in the diverse species of canines cavorting in the bleachers.
God’s name, after all, is written on every creature, great and small.
Dan Ornstein is the rabbi at Congregation Ohav Shalom in Albany, NY. He is the author of Cain v. Abel: A Jewish Courtroom Drama. (Jewish Publication Society, 2020)
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