Why I Love Baseball

Couldn't have said it any better myself.

What I really miss is the feeling of having accomplished something after every afternoon spent with the kids, watching them throw, then practice their swings, and learn to watch the pitchers back foot for the pickoff move. Primary leads and secondary leads and hitting the cut-off man. Calling for the ball and, most importantly, putting it away with two hands. I miss warm afternoons and what a kids baseball field sounds like at dusk when everyone has been picked up and the bases have been stored and the equipment has been bagged and you can sit for a moment and listen and it doesn't sound like work or home and you just want to stay awhile and breathe it in.

And the quote from Giamatti's book "brings it home."

If you did not watch or play baseball, you could read about it. Newspapers grew with the sport, sports papers came into existence; sports writing flowered as baseball enriched the language and the language developed a vast subcontinent of circumlocutions, euphemisms, and new coinages for baseball. Vivid, opinionated, salty, redolent journalism matched the game. The reader found the boxscore; the boxscore provided the diamond in the mind, and more importantly gave statistics, data, arithmetic permutation, lore masquerading as quantifiable reality, history that the mind could encompass and retain. Baseball as scripture was born and developed. Then, as now, intellectuals could moralize about baseball; writers and poets could rhapsodize and mythologize; journalists could cover a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and a world full of colorful characters, nicknames only matched by mobsters, and communal significance. No one who wanted to be in was left out. As America opened her arms to the foreign born and healed the wounds of war, baseball embraced all classes, conditions, regions.

Why I Love Baseball