Mike Matheny, Little League, and Baseball Fundamentalism

"I always said the only team I would coach would be a team of orphans, and now here we are."

Next February, St. Louis Cardinals manager Mike Matheny will become an author. His book The Matheny Manifesto is due to be published by Crown USA, an imprint of Random House. The book is based on a letter Matheny wrote to the parents of his youth baseball team a few years ago that outlined his philosophies on coaching and parenting and  caught fire on the internet because it spoke truth to the overbearing sports moms and dads of the world. It's a little rambly, but it's also very earnest, and comes from a reputable source: a 13-year MLB vet who played cerebral and pugnacious baseball and then became a successful major league manager.

You can read the original manifesto on Matheny's website. It's full of the usual cliches and coachspeak about "playing the right way." Matheny promises the parents of his players that the team will be "classy" and he refers to them as "young men" and he wants to make sure the parents realize that this experience will be "ALL about the boys." Nothing to argue with there.

But the letter is also somewhat disconcerting. It truly is a manifesto: totally certain in its prescriptions for the baseball-playing youth of America, and totally certain in the correctness of its author. There is a fundamentalist bent to it—and I don't just mean religiously, though we'll get into that part in a second—in which the coach's authority is not to be questioned by parent or player, and it possesses a seriousness that goes way beyond the nature of youth baseball, which is generally supposed to be fun:

"My Christian faith is the guide for my life and I have never been one for forcing my faith down someone's throat, but I also believe it to be cowardly, and hypocritical to shy away from what I believe. You as parents need to know for yourselves and for your boys, that when the opportunity presents itself, I will be honest with what I believe."

There's nothing new about religion being a prominent force in the sports world. And Matheny, to his credit, has never been an aggressively evangelical Warner type. Read his blog, for example, and you will discover a thoughtful guy who seems aware of how his faith can rub people a certain way. He even quotes St. Francis Assisi: "Preach the gospel at all times, and when necessary use words."

Then again, Matheny's co-author, Jerry B. Jenkins, is best known for co-writing the bestselling Left Behind series of evangelical Christian sci-fi novels set in a post-Rapture world. The choice of Jenkins sends a clear message about Matheny's thinking, and about what kind of book this will be and who it will be marketed to. It is also emblematic of something already present in the original manifesto: Matheny is 100 percent sure that his way of baseball is the right way. He is a baseball fundamentalist.

There is something inherently suspicious about pure ideological conviction—a suspicion that extends from certitude in academic thinking, in religion,  and in baseball. The whole concept of the Rapture, for example, implies a separation between the righteous, who will be called up to be with Christ, and those of us who will have to suffer through the end times. This is a relatively presumptuous thing to be sure of: You are right and they are wrong. Jerry Jenkins will be saved. The free market is infallible. Sabermetrics are the answer. St. Louis won the World Series because of the "Cardinal Way."

Matheny's manifesto is an example of this sort of certitude. He lays out his beliefs, and expects them to be fully accepted by his players and their parents. And the principle belief—the most fundamental—is in his own authority. He abides no backtalk from the kids, saying that his father taught him "that my coach was always right… even when he was wrong," and bemoaning the lack of respect for authority figures these days. He asks parents to watch games silently, limiting themselves to clapping, because yelling out "come on" puts too much additional pressure on their kids. But really, he is just transferring the pressure so it comes from one concentrated source: himself.

What Matheny is missing is that there's a difference between respecting authority and worshipping at its feet. His prescription for youth baseball might work great when the coach is a former big-league catcher who cares deeply about the game of baseball. It might run into some problems when the coach is a roped-in volunteer who doesn't know the infield fly rule or a win-at-all-costs stepdad. The point of sports isn't to teach kids not to question authority. The point of sports is to be fun.

"As I am writing this, I sound like the little league Nazi, but I believe that this will make things easier for everyone involved."

If you think you sound even slightly like a Nazi, even in a jokey way, you are probably taking Little League way too seriously. This is where Matheny's flaws and the flaws of the entire youth sports-industrial complex—and by extension the entire sports world—synchronize into one beautiful misconception. Little League, AYSO, and Pop Warner are not church groups or Sunday schools. They are social outlets. They are for playing.

So what are coaches supposed to be? When I helped coach Little League, they told us in a seminar that we should be ¨Double Goal Coaches," the first goal being to teach baseball, and the second to teach values. The idea was that coaches would be positive role models, demonstrating appropriate behavior for the players, giving lessons in sportsmanship, etc. This is something Little League has wrestled with for decades, even as its premier event became a major commercial entity that places more pressure on 12-year-old children than Mike Matheny could ever hope to.

When I was a kid, we had to line up on the foul lines and say the Little League Pledge before games:

I trust in God

I love my country

And will respect its laws

I will play fair

And strive to win

But win or lose

I will always do my best

It wasn't mandatory, it was just another little relic of 1950s America. Godless commies were everywhere you looked at the time. Patriotism was hard to come by. But the official slogan of Little League Baseball remains "Character, Courage, Loyalty." Is baseball in itself supposed to provide these traits? Is there something intrinsically moral about the structure of the game?

We live in a culture that expects too much from sports. Just because something is smaller than life, is more contained and easier to understand, does not make it especially meaningful or instructive. Playing baseball does not make you a better person.

And yet we elevate our coaches into sages, geniuses, Gurus of Go, Zen Masters. It's not enough to respect a coach for instructional or tactical or leadership abilities. We must also look to them as priests and rabbis. We want them all to be Eric Taylor from Friday Night Lights, winning state and talking us through great life crises with a steady hand. We want their wisdom—like the Vince Lombardi quotes printed on so many inspirational posters—to guide us to happy, productive lives. Never mind the fact that winning a football game is not the same thing as nurturing a marriage or raising a child.

Last year, Matheny told Joe Posnanski the following in an interview about his manifesto and its sudden fame:

"Some people will say I'm crazy. They will say I'm full of it. I know that. I'm not saying my way is the right way for everybody. It's not. But I am saying that a lot of people see the same things I'm seeing. I'm saying there is another way. There is a way where sports can be used to develop character. There is a way where sports can be joyful for kids. Isn't that what we all want?"

I don't think Matheny is crazy. In fact, I think he's right that it's not about the parents. He's right that it's not about winning and losing. But he's wrong about the way to make sports joyful for kids. The way to do that is not to make baseball fit some system. It's not to make a sport into a job. Not every kid wants to be molded in the heat of competition, or make it to the majors. Some just want to have fun for the sake of fun.

In the final paragraph of his manifesto, Matheny speaks of the rewards of his system: the scholarships, the pro contracts, the "lessons that will go beyond the field." It's not for everybody, he says. He is right about that.

Eric Nusbaum has written for Sports Illustrated, ESPN the Magazine, Deadspin, and other publications. He is an editor of the Classical. Follow him on Twitter.