God in the Clubhouse

Continued from page 1

"Religion is good for baseball," Graham says. "We look to baseball as our game. It's a wonderful clean sport."

But others aren't so sure. Sometimes the faithful have fostered fissures within clubhouses and soured team chemistry.

"You should walk with the Lord," Baltimore Orioles outfielder Pat Kelly once told Earl Weaver, his manager.

"You should learn to walk with the bases loaded," Weaver retorted.

Former Chicago White Sox pitcher Al Worthington, a deeply religious man, once threatened to quit the ball club unless his teammates stopped stealing opponents' signals. Chicago eventually optioned him to the minors, and he later began the baseball program at Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg, Va., now Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

In the late 1970s, the San Francisco Giants were seen by many as contenders. But after several players went public about their newfound Christianity, faith became a lightning rod for criticism when the team slumped on the field.

The Minnesota Twins, the last small-market team to win the World Series, saw their hopes of a dynasty end when Gary Gaetti's proselytizing rubbed teammates Kirby Puckett and Kent Hrbek the wrong way. Gaetti and Hrbek had been roommates since Class A ball. For many years, they had the same passions: baseball, bars, hunting, and fishing. But before the 1988 season, Gaetti found Christ and their friendship suffered.

"I was quoted in the paper as saying it was like a death in the family," Hrbek says. "It was like I'd lost Gary Gaetti someplace. It was like he was a different person. A lot of people took offense to that, saying it can't be that bad. But it was. I'd lost somebody I'd like to chum with and hang out with, stay up to 3 o'clock in the morning and rant and rave all over the place and have a good time."

But faith can also reunite a ball club. The Toronto Blue Jays, the last team to repeat as world champions before the Yankees, did it with two born-again sluggers, Joe Carter and Paul Molitor, leading the way.

"I was a newcomer there," says Molitor, who joined the Blue Jays before the 1993 season. "But I never felt like it. A lot of us were on the same page." When asked if he means spiritually, Molitor nods.

Divine or divisive, baseball's Christian element is the unspoken truth in many clubhouses. From his first year in New York, the Yankees' Pettitte has maintained that pursuing a religious life helps him on the mound.

"In New York, we had an opportunity to share our faith...." he once said. "And maybe the Lord is blessing us for it."