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| Photo by Beowulf Sheehan |
Christian Sheppard is the author of the new book The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball: Lessons for Life from Homer's Odyssey to the World Series. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Q: What inspired you to write The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball?
A: My inspiration was my daughter. When she was born, I was “all-but-dissertation” in pursuit of a Ph.D. in religion and literature.
I’d been raised in a strict religious tradition myself and had spent nearly a decade at the University of Chicago surveying and studying all varieties of dogma and ritual and theory and practice, but when personally confronted with the question of how to live, in other words, what was going to tell this rapidly growing baby girl about how best to pursue happiness, I didn’t know.
My answer came to me at the ballpark. Spring and summer afternoons I took my baby daughter to the park. There it occurred to me that every ball game told an old story, a mythic story, with a time-tested moral: the best pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of excellence, what tradition, after the ancient poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome, called “virtue.” This is the same lesson taught by Homer’s epic poetry, his Iliad and Odyssey.
Q: You begin the book with a description of Wrigley Field. Why did you decide to start there?
A: My opening homage to Wrigley Field, my sacred place in the middle of the busy city, I wrote in response to a direct question from my wife.
I was constantly talking about ballplayers as heroes and the game as a myth, waxing lyrically about the ballpark as a sacred place, when she burst out, “What are you talking about? How is a game religious? How can a ballpark be a sacred place?”
I opened my laptop and typed out that little rhapsody on Wrigley Field. She read it back to me, nodding about how people make their pilgrimage to the park and how games punctuate our lives, and when she got the part about the wounded soldier returned from war kissing the earth in front of the pitcher’s mound before throwing out the first pitch, she wiped away a tear and said, OK, I get it.
Only later, after I saw the book in galleys and reread the section for myself, did I realize, Oh wow, that soldier, he’s another Odysseus, a hero returned home! The game works in mysterious ways.
Q: Have you always been a baseball fan, and what is your favorite baseball moment?
A: I have been a baseball fan since before I can remember. My grandfather recalled for me stories of ballgames witnessed sneaking a peek through knotholes in the outfield fence of old Fenway Park. My father tucked me into bed at night with stories about his boyhood hero Ted Williams.
My own favorite baseball moment was at Wrigley Field, witnessing the 2016 Cubs win the National League pennant, punching their ticket to go to the World Series.
I never screamed so loud in my life—and in college I sang in a band that did AC/DC covers—but my voice was lost in the thunderous roar of everyone around us. Such a cathartic moment, an exorcism of communal demons and a rapturous joyful noise in celebration of well-earned victory.
Q: What are some of your other favorite books about baseball?
A: Two books that I don’t mention in The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball but that have informed my appreciation of the game are Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld, specifically his opening tour de force “Pafko at the Wall,” which recounts the 1951 National League Pennant and Bobby Thomson’s famous homer, “the shot heard round the world.”
It captures the feel of being a part of a large, diverse crowd—a quintessentially American experience—as well as a crucial historical moment, the beginning of the Cold War.
I also love Satchel Paige’s memoir, Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever, telling his life from a star in the Negro League to MLB’s oldest rookie. Paige is an American original, a self-fashioned figure as essential as Mark Twain. He makes me laugh, makes me think. He’s inspirational. And I wish I could have seen him pitch.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: At present I am finishing editing a historical novel about witchcraft and chariot-racing in Byzantium during the Dark Ages. It’s kind of like Gladiator meets The Exorcist. It’s set in the Hippodrome in Constantinople, one of the greatest sporting venues of the ancient world, indeed of all time.
It was first inspired by a class I taught at the University of Chicago on Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I’ve since visited Istanbul a couple of times for research. The ruins of the places I write about are still there.
But really my research began as a kid when my grandfather “babysat” me by taking me with him to the horse track, a place he went every day. The track is a pretty seedy place, a den of gamblers and grifters, but at the same time, if you’ve ever seen a stallion at full gallop across the open earth, the green grass becoming a blur, the blue sky smiling down from above, well, you know, it’s magnificent…
The story features demons and sea-monsters, massacre and intrigue, heresy and atrocity—and it is all “true,” or at least corroborated by primary contemporary accounts as well as by archeology. There’s also a love story.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Thank you so much for your interest in my work… Go Cubs!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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