With their out-of-nowhere winning streak, the Colorado Rockies are reminding us what sport can be at its best: exhilarating, uplifting, even inspiring. The Rockies enter the World Series tonight after 21 victories in their last 22 games.
One might even call such a streak miraculous, a description much of the team would happily accept. The Rockies have become known as the closest thing Major League Baseball has to a faith-based club. The front office runs the franchise based on what it describes as Christian principles, and it consciously recruits players judged to have "moral values" and "character."
"I think character-wise we're stronger than anyone in baseball," Chief Executive Charlie Monfort told USA Today in May 2006. "Christians, and what they've endured, are some of the strongest people in baseball. I believe God sends signs, and we're seeing those." Among them: a team refreshingly free of off-field misbehavior and a clubhouse where there are more Bibles than issues of Maxim.
Many religious baseball fans have embraced this formulation as well. "I think God's promise is that regardless of the outcome, he is with you," one Rockies supporter said. "But I also know that he has power to take seemingly hopeless situations -- a cancer patient being healed, a marriage restored or an average team winning 21 of 22 -- and intervene to make something very special happen so that people might recognize that something beyond just people was involved."
The Rockies' playoffs triumph is almost enough to make believers out of sporting heathens too. But faith and sports are not the match made in heaven some would have us believe -- as moments from the Rockies' storybook season make clear.
You might recall this play: Left fielder Matt Holliday slid safely at home plate to score the winning run in the 13th inning of the crucial, one-game playoff with the San Diego Padres that sent his Rockies into the postseason. The problem, as replays made clear, was that he never touched home.
When asked about the call after the game, Holliday apparently felt no duty to confess. That's in keeping with the values and norms of professional sports, where competitors never give an inch, even to the truth. But Holliday went on to implicate God in the umpire's error by publicly thanking the Lord for the victory and the season's many blessings.
