I just got back from Game Three of the World Series–the Texas Rangers defeated the San Francisco Giants. This is a comeback game and I needed to find out the patron saint of baseball ASAP.

Here she is…the patroness of hardball…Saint Rita.

Saint Rita’s patronage of baseball is connected to the drilling of the Santa Rita Oil Well in Big Lake, Texas, in 1921. Two Catholic nuns who had invested in the well and named it “Saint Rita Oil Well” in honor of her patronage of “impossible cases.”

Meanwhile, the workers who worked on the well built a baseball field nearby for recreation. The oil well proved extremely profitable, and the nuns hit it rich. Hence, the blessed connection between the Saint Rita’s well and the sport of baseball.

I also discovered an apocryphal tradition stating that the woman who caught Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round The World” was a nun named Sister Helen Rita.

So there you go…

PS: A few months ago, we talked about the Patron Saint of Fly Fishing.