‘Baseball: Beyond Belief’ documentary explores the “Church of Baseball”

The examination of this well-worn topic is thought-provoking, although it gets a bit long-winded in the late innings.

The stadium is like a cathedral. Attendees devote themselves to their team of choice just as they do their religious tradition, which may well have been passed down for generations. Both pastimes are sometimes associated with miracles.

Fans have been known to pray for certain results, just as they would in a house of worship, and some have even gone through the wrenching process of “conversion.” Many of the great baseball movies like Field of Dreams and The Natural have a religious twinge to them, while Bull Durham has Susan Sarandon’s famous speech about “the Church of Baseball.”

All of these things, and many more, are explored in Baseball: Beyond Belief, a documentary that aired on FS1 last weekend, with rebroadcasts set to come.

It’s a fascinating, if well-trodden subject, although it’s worth a watch for the inclusion of some of the more memorable baseball moments of the past 40 or so years. It does, however, ultimately get a bit long-winded and repetitive after a while, while occasionally shoehorning in the religion topic where it doesn’t quite belong.

Despite the Easter Sunday debut and coming from the Catholic-oriented production company Paulist Productions, Baseball: Beyond Belief does not constrain itself merely to Christian religious belief, as there are plenty of references to Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, and other religions. Ex-Dodger Shawn Green shows up to tell the story of the time he took the Sandy Koufax-inspired step of sitting out on Yom Kippur (Koufax, alas, sticks with his reclusive nature and does not give an interview).

Also, a rabbi who hails from Brooklyn tells the story of (what else?) The departure of the Dodgers from Brooklyn. If the film is parochial about anything, it’s not any one faith; it’s that most of its stories seem to center on the Yankees, Mets, or Dodgers.

The film has a few different authorial voices. The director is John Scheinfeld, who has directed quite a few docs I’ve seen, mostly about music of the past (Who is Harry Nilsson?, What the Hell Happened to Blood Sweat and Tears?, The U.S. vs. John Lennon and Reinventing Elvis: The ’68 Comeback Special) Actor Joe Mantegna contributes some narration, although the main voice is former NYU president John Sexton, whose book, Baseball is a Road to God, served as the source material, and we see Sexton delivering a lecture on the topic.

We also see lots of famous baseball moments, including the Kirk Gibson home run from 1988, as well as an extended section on the post-9/11 baseball moments in New York, between Mike Piazza’s homer in the first game back — which is mentioned on his Hall of Fame plaque — and Derek Jeter’s “Mr. November” shot in that World Series. The latter was also already the topic of an entire documentary, HBO’s Nine Innings From Ground Zero in 2004.

There are plenty of movie clips too, including that Sarandon speech and, of course, the final moments of Field of Dreams. The score, throughout, features a snippet of Randy Newman’s score from The Natural. The story, borrowing a page from Ken Burns’ Baseball, tells its story in “nine innings,” including a “seventh-inning stretch” and “postgame.”

For all its slowness and familiarity, I was fascinated by this topic, and enjoyed the documentary.

Baseball: Beyond Belief has more airings scheduled on FS1 and FS2; check local listings.