Baseball draws athletes, of course. Throwing hard or hitting a ball four hundred feet or fielding a grounder that bites the dirt at your toes are all challenges that separate use pretty quickly into the great, the good, the adequate, and the hopeless. Fine athletes are as prized in baseball as in any game, the Mickey Loliches notwithstanding.

Baseball draws fans who like action and drama. Consider the runner and the ball converging at once at the feet of the second baseman, or the perfect peg from right field to catch the astonished runner who has tagged third and assumed he'll score as a matter of routine. Though there is no clock, the winding down of pitchers' duel over the course of nine or more innings can be as tense as any sport in which it is time, rather than energy or concentration or luck, that runs out.

But baseball promises more. As many writers have pointed out, the mathematics of the game are at once elegant and mystical. There are so many threes and multiples of three, and Annie Savoy says there are 108 stitches on a baseball and 108 beads in a Catholic rosary. Beyond that, every distance seems to have been established to fairly challenge the players. The great base runner will almost always steal second on the careless pitcher and the average catcher. But it will be close enough so that if the pitching coach can teach the pitcher to pay attention and maybe work a slide step into his delivery, and the catcher can cut down his release time by a fraction of a second, they'll get the runner the next time. Or maybe they'll plant in the runner's head the conviction that he'll need another step away from first, and then they'll pick him off. Then fans who have been paying attention will have a story to tell.

Baseball has history and mythology going for it because it has been played for a long time and people have apparently always felt compelled to write down everything that happened. In 1909, Pryor "Humpy" McElveen had four hits in thirteen pinch-hitting appearances for the Dodgers. As Casey Stengel liked to say, "You could look it up." But looking it up is only the start. Because baseball has changed so little, you can also picture it. Humpy used a smaller glove than the ones the Dodgers have today, but he faced essentially the same challenges today's ballplayers face. His uniform was baggier than today's double knits, but Humpy had the same dreams about Cristy Mathewson that today's hitters have about Randy Johnson or Pedro Martinez. Baseball’s images are also constant more often than not. You cannot take a picture of anything that isn’t before you, but show an old fan a photograph of Dwight Gooden in a batting cage, and the fan will tell you the names and stories of six dead pitchers who could hit.

It is partly the potential for all those stories that attracts writers to baseball, and the presence of time for thinking about the stories that helps, too. It is perhaps the tension between the promise of order implicit within the foul lines and the infinite, disorderly possibilities of each pitch that attracts the poets.

Of course, before we’re old enough to theorize, baseball grabs us for more elemental reasons. Its requirements seem at first deceptively simple. A little kid can throw and catch and even hit a baseball-sized ball long before being able to toss a football in a spiral or heave a basketball up as high as the rim of the basket. A little later, the little kid learns that even the very best baseball players are only normal size.

And, a little later than that, the child goes to a first game. If he or she is lucky, the grass is impossibly green, the home team’s uniforms are white, and the sun is shining when the child comes up out of the tunnel and sees the field for the first time—and that child’s baseball days have begun.


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