Who's first?:
Holland, Keating
THE NATIONAL PASTIME WHO'S FIRST? GOOD CATHOLICS, GOOD FANS If recent polling data are correct, American Catholics followed this year's baseball season with particular interest. It's not news...
...Maybe it's the intangibles...
...habits become rituals...
...Protestant men who go to services regularly are less inclined to follow baseball than those who go occasionally...
...The same pollsters asked the same question in 1985, during that year's brief players' strike, and found that Catholics led non-Catholics back then, with the sport just about as popular among Catholics as it is today...
...But Catholics pay more attention to the game than just about anyone else in America...
...But look only at Midwesterners, for example, or city dwellers, and the same split between Catholics and Protestants appears...
...It's not news that Catholics like baseball...
...Catholics in nearly every part of the country are more interested in baseball than their Protestant neighbors...
...Perhaps the ties are even more mystical than that...
...Questions on religion were included because the Supreme Court was about to hear oral arguments in the Webster abortion case...
...Americans who are geographically closer to baseball are also more interested in the game, and that is where Catholics are most likely to be found...
...Consider which industries buy time for commercials to run between innings...
...What makes good Catholics into such good baseball fans...
...No one has an entirely satisfactory explanation of Catholics' interest in baseball...
...I think you'd have to ask [Catholics] themselves why they like the game...
...The CBS News//Vew York Times survey is no help: It did not ask respondents why they follow the sport...
...The slogan of the 1973 New York Mets says it all: "Ya Gotta Believe...
...And the more devoutly Catholic you are, the more likely you are to follow the sport: Practicing Catholic males are the country's biggest big league fans...
...Traditions are sacrosanct...
...There's something about being a Catholic that encourages interest in baseball, and geography has little to do with it...
...Curiously, church attendance has just the opposite effect on Protestants...
...This level of support is matched in America only by black men...
...Who knows what other invisible connections exist...
...Or is it just geography...
...The data may provide grounding for a new mark of the one true church...
...Patience is a virtue...
...The pattern isn't new...
...I'd rather not speculate on that," said Cindy David, a spokeswoman for major league baseball...
...Just possibly, there is no great mystery...
...Both the game and the faith require detailed and early knowledge of an arcane set of rules...
...Five out of six of them express at least some interest in major league baseball this year, a figure significantly higher than the one for Catholic men who do not attend church regularly...
...Nor can the Catholic penchant for baseball be chalked up to the number of Hispanics who follow both the faith and the sport...
...It was conducted in April at the start of the Pete Rose scandal, and additional baseball questions related entirely to gambling...
...Interest in the sport dwindles in areas-like the South and rural regions-that are the farthest from big league ballparks and broadcasts...
...The major leagues posted record attendance figures this season for the fifth straight time, and TV ratings have never been better...
...The next survey should look for a correlation between the number of beer-drinking baseball fans and the number of Catholic beer-drinkers...
...According to figures from a CBS News/New York Times survey, more than two-thirds of all Catholics, and more than three-quarters of all Catholic men, say they are "very" or "somewhat" interested in major league baseball...
...Non-Hispanic Catholics still maintain a measurable edge over non-Catholics in their love of the sport...
...In this country, most people do...
...A character in the movie Bull Durham says that the number of beads in a rosary is the same as the number of stitches in a regulation baseball...
...The national pastime, after all, is not equally popular all across the country...
...Certainly not the National League or American League front offices, which do not conduct surveys of fans...
...KEATING HOLLANDKEATING HOLLAND...
Vol. 116 • November 1989 • No. 19
