No one is likely to mistake me for a sports person. I was the despair of my high school basketball coach, being 6 foot 4 but unable to dribble a ball to save my life, or anyone else’s. (My consolation prize: I was the drum major of the marching band.) But I make an exception for baseball.
It’s an exception that goes back to my single-digit years and nickel-a-pack baseball cards, my All Star Baseball tabletop game, and unproductive stints at catcher and first base. But it’s also linked to how much of America I see in baseball. Sure, it’s only a game, and played by professionals in stadiums where I can be nothing more than a spectator. But in baseball, even spectatorship is a kind of American affirmation, fully as much as the spectators of the original Olympic games were for classical Greece. To drink deeply of baseball is to lap up the springs of American culture. And by reverse, it is impossible to think of baseball flourishing anyplace else but in America (the Toronto Blue Jays being the exception that proves the rule).
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