By Dr. Douglas Groothuis
Tears and Baseball: Elly De La Cruz as a Signal of Transcendence
The glory of young men is their strength.–Proverbs 20:29
Over twenty years ago, I attended a seminar on how to grow in the exercise of prophetic gifts. I want as much power and ministry anointing as possible from the Holy Spirit, but I am “a charismatic with seatbelts on” (as Wayne Grudem puts it). The Scriptures, logic, and commonsense are the seatbelts. The seminar teacher, whose name I have forgotten, kept anchoring the truth of what he was teaching in his personal experience of crying. He said that every time he put this prophetic ministry principle into action, he saw results that made him cry.
The Epistemology of Tears
At the time, as a philosopher, I thought, “What is the epistemological significance of tears?” That is, what does weeping about something say about our knowledge in specific situations regarding specific questions? For this man, tears were a verification of God’s guidance in ministry situations. Rather than address the thorny question of prophetic gifts today, let us consider what tears might tell us about reality, even transcendent reality beyond the constitution of tears. I start with myself and baseball.
My calling has not been athletic. I am a stodgy academic and I seldom write about sports.¹ I stopped playing competitive sports after my last year of Babe Ruth baseball in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1972. (I batted .319.) However, I remained something of a sports fan, mostly of baseball, for years after that. But I have not seen a live baseball game in about thirty years and seldom watch any baseball (or any other sport) on video. It takes up too much time and the on-field screens ruined the baseball field for me that last time I saw the Colorado Rockies in about 1995. I do not have a favorite team in any sport. But then along came Elly De La Cruz.
Facebook Reels, Baseball, and Eternity
I confess to watching Facebook reels on occasion. What comes up on the algorithm tend to be cute dog videos, Jimi Hendrix tunes, Steven Wright clips (“Isn’t this a nice night for an evening?”), Tonight Show excerpts (with Johnny Carson, of course), and some baseball selections. I have recently noticed short clips of a tall rookie shortstop playing for the Cincinnati Reds named Elly De La Cruz. He is twenty-two years old. What we see are highlights, of course, and not full games. But what remarkable highlights they are. This man from the Dominican Republic is beyond “a force of nature,” since sheer nonaugmented nature could never accomplish what he does. He makes some spectacular plays at shortstop and has a cannon arm. (He also makes quite a few errors on routine plays, at least for now. I wager he will improve at this.) He hits for power as well, which is rare for a shortstop. He has hit some long home runs, which demonstrates his strength. He has twenty so far and has “bit for the cycle”—he hit a single, double, triple, and home run in one game, which is exceptionally rare.
But Elly’s most astonishing ability is how he uses his blinding speed on the basepaths. It is not simply that he is phenomenally fast; he uses his speed brilliantly on the basepaths, beating out routine infield ground balls for hits, sometimes sliding into first base headfirst. It is not merely that he steals a lot of bases (as of August 10, 2024 he has fifty-nine steals). That is exciting enough. More than that, it is how he steals bases. In one inning, he stole second, stole third, and, most spectacularly, stole home because the pitcher wasn’t watching him. He didn’t start running during the pitcher’s wind-up, which is common, but while the pitcher was looking away before getting on the mound. He also stole second base as the catcher was throwing the ball back to the pitcher. This is even beyond a “delayed steal.” Who does this? Elly De La Cruz does this. This young man is the most exciting player in baseball and is bringing crackling energy to the basepaths not seen since Jackie Robinson.
Signals of Transcendence
Now let us return to the epistemological worth of tears and to transcendence. Like some of you, I tear up more easily as I get older. It sometimes surprises me. I had cried once during a lecture or sermon in my entire ministry up until about a year ago when I noticed myself having to stop and compose myself, or even weeping a bit in class. This happens outside of class more often also. A good friend said, “Don’t worry. It’s good to feel life more deeply now, since you’ve lived so much of it.” I agreed.
The athleticism and competitive spirit of Elly De La Cruz makes me weep. When this first happened, it surprised me and caused me to ponder the cause. These were not tears of sadness. nor were they tears of joy, since I was rooting for the Reds. They came from a different place, answering a different reality. It especially hit me when I saw a longer reel that recounted his fielding, hitting, and basepath mischief and marvels. Why should an old grumpy philosopher, who never attends sporting events and who doesn’t root for any teams, be brought to tears by a baseball player? Is it because I am becoming a sappy fool? Perhaps, but maybe not. The athletic genius of Elly De La Cruz is, I take it, a “signal of transcendence,” to use sociology of religion professor Peter Berger’s phrase from A Rumor of Angels.
In commending the reality of the supernatural in a secular age (he was writing in 1970 at the height of the “God is dead” theology and when natural theology was decidedly not in favor)², Berger argued that some common human experiences opened us up to something beyond the natural world. He writes this:
By signals of transcendence, I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our “natural” reality but that appear to point beyond that reality. In other words, I am not using transcendence here in a technical philosophical sense but literally, as the transcending of the normal, everyday world that I earlier identified with the notion of the “supernatural.” By prototypical human gestures I mean certain reiterated acts and experiences that appear to express essential aspects of man’s being, of the human animal as such.³
Signals of transcendence invade the horizontal plane from a vertical dimension. These signals need not appear in formally religious settings. They are nothing like sacraments, which have robust and settled propositional meanings (think of the sacrament of Communion) and occur with regularity in scripted settings. Os Guinness puts it this way:
Others have used a plethora of words to describe such experiences [signals of transcendence], including clues, hints, spurs, jolts, triggers, homing signals, points of bafflement, scene shifters, epiphanies, transcendent impulses, and metaphysical hunger. But they all attempt to capture experiences that make people realize that there must be “something more” in life…⁴
Peter Berger identifies five kinds of signals, which may have been his alternative to the “five ways” for arguing for God’s existence from St. Thomas Aquinas. These signals include our propensity for order even amidst disorder, play with no utilitarian purpose, hope against the odds, absolute moral condemnation, and humor. These signals are not so much arguments as occasions when another reality breaks into the everyday world. There is also a person-relativity about their effect (but not about the objective reality of the transcendent itself). One person might experience X as a signal of transcendence while another person does not.
While Berger does not include sports as a category, it broadly fits under “play,” although it is play of a structured and goal-oriented kind. As such, it also partakes of the human propensity for order. Berger is worth quoting at length on the relationship of play to joy and to eternity:
Joy is play’s intention. When this intention is actually realized, in joyful play, the time structure of the playful universe takes on a very specific quality—namely, it becomes eternity. This is probably true of all experiences of intense joy, even when they are not enveloped in the separate reality of play. This is the final insight of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in the midnight song: “All joy wills eternity—wills deep, deep eternity!” This intention is, however, particularly patent in the joy experienced in play, precisely because the playful universe has a temporal dimension that is more than momentary and that can be perceived as a distinct structure. In other words, in joyful play it appears as if one were stepping not only from one chronology into another, but from time into eternity. Even as one remains conscious of the poignant reality of that other, “serious” time in which one is moving toward death, one apprehends joy as being, in some barely conceivable way, a joy forever.⁵
Although Berger is not referring to team sports—which can be intensely serious and involve the necessity of performance and the profit motive—there are moments in team sports, such as baseball, where the players perform at a peak of excellence that transcends winning and losing, salaries, and all the vicissitudes of commerce. Back to Elly De La Cruz.
When Elly is at his best—and he is still a rookie with a mediocre batting average who makes too many errors—you see a man in full, a man who is gloriously in the groove at his game. As Scripture says, “The glory of young men is their strength” (Proverbs 20:29). An image bearer of God is shining (Genesis 1:26-27).
Psychologists refer to this kind of peak performance as a “flow state.”⁶ Everything in Elly is perfectly calibrated to what he is doing, and he is performing at the highest level imaginable. Elly, as made in the image and likeness of God, is evidencing something of the glory of God in his athletic excellence. Not only is he transcending the commonplaces of baseball, but he is also a signal of transcendence, a signpost of God’s goodness.
It is not moral goodness as much as aesthetic goodness which is on display as he flies around the bases, stunning the crowds, his teammates, the opposition, and baseball announcers. While animals play in various ways (and sometimes delightfully so), dogs and cats and pigs do not compete in games circumscribed by rules. This is uniquely human. We are, all of us, unique among the living. As the psalmist David wrote, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well (Psalm 139:14).
I am not making the image of God dependent on any kind of achievement. It is, rather, resident in all human beings and gives all of us dignity and a special standing in God’s creation. It is a given of being human, God’s gift of his image in us. However, because we bear the divine image, remarkable abilities emerge through human achievement, including sports. Thus, the best explanation for the extraordinary athletic demonstration of Elly De La Cruz is that he is made in the image and likeness of his Creator. We can behold this and give thanks to God for the tears and chills and amazement. My prayer is that Elly will return praise to God as well, and know Christ as Lord and Savior.
1. Two exceptions are my articles, “Sports and the American Character,” Eternity (sometime in 1987) and “Violence of Football is Becoming Too Difficult to Justify,” Denver Post (April 26, 2016). https://www.denverpost.com/2014/10/21/violence-of-football-is-becoming-too-difficult-to-justify.
2. Natural theology has made a stupendous philosophical comeback in the past four or five decades. See Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2022), chapters 8-20.
3. Berger, Peter L. A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (p. 53). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
4. Guinness, Os. Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion (p. 134). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition. Guinness has written a small but significant book about this, Signals of Transcendence (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2023).
5. Berger, Peter L. A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (pp. 58-59). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
6. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: HarperCollins).
Comments