BASEBALL IS the most maturing and deepening of all sports, with the possible exception of fishing. And it demands the most theological discipline. Unlike football, in which fans and players can dream of a perfect season, in baseball, as ill life, you never win them all. No matter how much a team prepares, no matter how much it spends on salaries, no matter the size of its market, defeat is fundamental. No batter hits all the time; a "perfect game" is surpassingly rare. Longtime baseball fans and players must learn to accept loss, lots of it. Only five teams in the past century have won 70 percent of their games. No baseball fan is capable of committing the sin of perfectionism.

If the history of baseball is a quintessentially American story, its narrative line owes more to loss, defeat and imperfection than to chest-thumping triumphalism, If, as Walt Whitman claimed, baseball is "our game," then it is above all the game of the outsider, the down-and-out, the folks who expect to lose--the least of these. Cubs fans understand this.

And for most of baseball history, so have the players. In the late 19th century large numbers of second-generation German and Irish immigrants migrated into the game. As the game segregated in the 1890s, transplanted rural southerners, and then second-generation immigrant Italians and Poles, filled the rosters of major league teams. Excluded from white ball until the late 1940s and '50s, African-American players created a remarkable sport of their own, and the players became so skilled that when they first entered the white majors they dominated the sport.

The surge of Latin American ballplayers continues this historical trend. Take the opening game of the series between the Florida Marlins and the Chicago Cubs. It featured home runs by Sammy Sosa, Alex Gonzalez, Juan Encarnacion, Miguel Cabrera, Ivan Rodriguez, Moises Alou and Mike Lowell (who has a Cuban father and was born in Puerto Rico).

In this emotional and theological counternarrative of American history, baseball has helped generations of Americans to develop the spiritual resources to go on with hope, against the probability (in some places, the near-certainty.) of defeat. Except for the Yankees and their fans.