{"id":398,"date":"2009-04-07T09:31:25","date_gmt":"2009-04-07T09:31:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/wait-till-next-year-nah-play-b.html"},"modified":"2009-04-07T09:31:25","modified_gmt":"2009-04-07T09:31:25","slug":"wait-till-next-year-nah-play-b","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/wait-till-next-year-nah-play-b.html","title":{"rendered":"Wait till next year? Nah. Play ball!"},"content":{"rendered":"

So maybe God isn’t a Catholic<\/a>–or maybe she is, but felt Catholics could use a lesson in humility (another one?!) and thus Villanova had to lose, badly, in the Final Four and North Carolina had to continue its dynastic ways and crush Michigan State to win the NCAA tourney<\/a>. BOH-ring. I liked it better during what The Times’ <\/em>Jack Styczynski noted<\/a> was the zenith of Catholic college hoops, in the 1980s, when seven of the 40 Final Four Teams were from Catholic colleges. (Of course, are they really<\/u> Catholic?).<\/p>\n

\n

But in the 20 years since then, only three achieved the feat–Marquette in 2003, Georgetown in 2007 and now Villanova in 2009.<\/p>\n

The last Catholic school to play in the national championship game?<\/p>\n

Seton Hall in 1989.<\/p>\n

The last Catholic school to win it all?<\/p>\n

You guessed it. Villanova in 1985.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Let it go. Opening Day has come, and the Yankees lost and the Mets won–the magic number is 161–and that’s a beautiful thing. For today. But if you are perverse and insist on rooting for a baseball team in The Bronx, why not go with a true dynasty: The Fordham Rams, which has the most wins–that is the MOST wins–of any N.C.A.A. Division I baseball program. As this Times feature<\/a> reports:<\/p>\n

\n

And it is not close. Fordham has 4,010 wins; Texas is second with 3,117. Of course, Fordham had a huge head start since it began playing baseball 150 years ago, which was 36 seasons before Texas did and more than half a century before many other teams. Still, Fordham proudly relishes having more victories than elite programs like Stanford and Miami.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And they had Vin Scully and the Fordham Flash (below), a.k.a. Frankie Frisch, who held the team’s single-season steals record for 67 years and played 19 seasons in the majors.<\/p>\n

\n\"Fordham<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So maybe God isn’t a Catholic–or maybe she is, but felt Catholics could use a lesson in humility (another one?!) and thus Villanova had to lose, badly, in the Final Four and North Carolina had to continue its dynastic ways and crush Michigan State to win the NCAA tourney. BOH-ring. I liked it better during…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nWait till next year? Nah. Play ball! - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/wait-till-next-year-nah-play-b.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Wait till next year? Nah. Play ball! - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"So maybe God isn’t a Catholic–or maybe she is, but felt Catholics could use a lesson in humility (another one?!) and thus Villanova had to lose, badly, in the Final Four and North Carolina had to continue its dynastic ways and crush Michigan State to win the NCAA tourney. BOH-ring. 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Play ball!"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/","name":"Pontifications","description":"Catholic Faith and Culture","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/#\/schema\/person\/122b0877ab87552bb8f14c366dd43e71","name":"David Gibson","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/19b\/19bb39c535cd2d776c73c7941f42622cx96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/19b\/19bb39c535cd2d776c73c7941f42622cx96.jpg","caption":"David Gibson"},"description":"DAVID GIBSON is an award-winning religion journalist, author, filmmaker, and a convert to Catholicism. He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}