Eugene Peterson wrote somewhere that the pastor should view himself or herself not as the star player of the church, but more like a baseball manager, someone whose job is to get other people prepared and in position to succeed.
That notion has stuck in my head for the last few years. Then the St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series and I remembered that I had a book by Buzz Bissinger called Three Nights in August that is an inside look at how Cardinals manager Tony La Russa does his job. So, I thought I would pull it out and see what I could learn about pastoring a church from a book about baseball.
In the preface, Bissinger writes about La Russa as the antithesis of the changes in baseball brought about by MBA general managers who quantify and number crunch their way to winning.
In the fallout of Michael Lewis’s provocative book Moneyball, baseball front offices are increasingly being populated by thirtysomethings whose most salient qualifications are MBA degrees and who come equipped with a clinical ruthlessness: The skills of players don’t even have to be observed but instead can be diagnosed by adept statistical analysis through a computer. These thirtysomethings view players as pieces of an assembly line; the goal is to quantify the inefficiencies that are slowing down production and then improve on it with cost-effective player parts.
In this new wave of baseball, managers are less managers than middle managers, functionaries whose strategic options during a game require muzzlement, there only to effect the marching orders coldly calculated and passed down by upper managament. It is wrong to say that the new breed doesn’t care about baseball. But it’s not wrong to say that there is no way they could possibly love it, and so much of baseball is about love. They don’t have the sense of history, which to the thirtysomethings is largely bunk. They don’t have the bus trips or the plane trips. They don’t carry along the tradition, because they couldn’t care less about the tradition. They have no use for the lore of the game — the poetry of its stories — because they can’t be broken down and crunched into a computer. Just as they have no interest in the human ingredients that make a player a player and make a game a game: heart, desire, passion, reactions to pressure. After all, these are emotions, and what point are emotions if they can’t be quantified?
Of course, the contrast Bissinger draws does not map onto the church. For one thing, we have few thirtysomethings and none of them are in charge. But the spirit of quantifying people and reducing them to units of production certainly sounds familiar in some ways. The appeal to tradition, lore, stories, poetry, and human messiness also sound familiar.
All that said, La Russa’s dislike for the moneyball approach does not extend so far that he does not count some things. Indeed, La Russa obsesses over all kinds of numbers. He breaks down the match ups between batters and pitchers. He constantly tries to tweak situations to get just a little bit more advantage in any given at bat. And for all his love of tradition, he has not qualms about shaking up things in the interest of giving his team a better chance to win.
And, yes, that final number matters. Everything is done to win the game.
We might find talk of winning and losing where the metaphor breaks down. I think it opens up new and interesting questions.
In the church, how do we define a win? What is that ultimate standard by which we judge our efforts? If a baseball manager and team do remarkable things but the team loses, it does not matter what the stat line says. What is the thing we do that serves the same role as wins and losses in baseball?
Bissinger and La Russa remind me that nothing is simple. They remind me that some numbers are fundamental, but we can go too far. They remind me that love and passion are central to what we do. They remind me that I need to know my people well if I am ever going to really help them.
Maybe none of this is all that insightful, but I thank Eugene Peterson for giving me the idea.
I am a part-time local pastor serving 
The doctrine of original sin is surely more humbling to man than the opposite: And I know not what honour we can pay to God, if we think man came out of His hands in the condition wherein he is now.
