BUDDHA TAKES THE MOUND

The acclaimed Buddhist scholar discusses how Buddha invented baseball to show us the “path,” which may travel through as much misery as exultation.

In baseball, there is an extremely fine line between delight and suffering (one of the Buddha's four noble truths). Consider: A team that loses 4 of every 10 games during the Major League Baseball season goes to the playoffs, while a team that loses 5 of every 10 never does. Lopez—a professor of Buddhist and Tibetan studies at the University of Michigan who has written extensively on the subject and translated several works by the Dalai Lama—first establishes his bona fides as a lifelong student of baseball and fan of the New York Yankees. Baseball is a Buddhist game, and only those seeking enlightenment ever reach nirvana (the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York). Lopez digs into the eternal truth of suffering by telling us there will be baseball happiness in ample supply and that one of the first avenues to joy is the recognition of impermanence and lack of self (the ego strikes out). Out of the book's dugout and bullpen stream a pantheon of baseball greats, not least Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio, each shouldering a critical lesson from the Buddha. In the process, the author throws a few curveballs in elucidating such things as karma, tantra, sutra, Vajrapani, and other terms almost as arcane as baseball's sabermetrics. Pitching Buddhist and baseball history, Lopez’s amusing contrivance of a book is more than a little tongue-in-cheek, but the author’s aim is to enhance our love of the game by a more profound understanding of its fundamentally Buddhist nature. He also seeks to counsel that impermanence itself is impermanent, that the cycle of birth and death is endless, and that even the gods can't hit .400 anymore.

Though a bit overly detailed and repetitive, the book runs all the bases with aplomb.