Hi everybody. Thanks for the nice comments. Here are some good quotes from John Sexton, "Baseball as a Road to God" - very much worth the read:
Quotes from “Baseball as a Road to God” by John Sexton
Quoting from “The Iowa Baseball Confederacy" by W.P. Kinsella, “You’ve got to watch the pitcher, Gideon…. and you’ll appreciate why baseball is a combination of chess and ballet. Watch him back up the bases, watch him get across to first on a grounder to the right side, see how the first baseman leads him, tossing to an empty sack, trusting him to be there. “When it looks like nothing is going on, choose a player and watch him react to every pitch, rising like water, receding like water. Watch a different player every inning. It takes a lot of years watching baseball to learn not to follow the ball every second. The true beauty of the game is the ebb and flow of the fielders, the kaleidoscopic arrangements and rearrangements of the players in response to a foul ball, an extra-base hit, or an attempted stolen base.”"
"Forbes Field is a wonderful example of baseball’s historic role in American life. When the park opened, there wasn’t much a steel-mill worker could afford to do in his precious free time, but he could afford to see a game;"
"and (Pittsburgh) built a new stadium at the end of a trolley line. It was a park built for working families, especially recent arrivals. Pittsburgh was a natural place for immigrants to go, because they were certain to find work—extremely hard work and extremely low-paying. The typical immigrant in the early 1900s would make about fifteen dollars for a sixty-hour workweek. But hard as it was, every once in a while they would find their way to the ballpark and buy a seat for about twenty-five cents. Sometimes, if they saved their money, they could take their family."
"By its very nature and rules, baseball operates outside of ordinary time; in fact, timelessness is at its essence. The length of an inning or game is not set by a clock; it shares the boundless framework of Eliade’s sacred time: It is not linear, with a simple past, present, and future; it is cyclical, building and building again toward certain, quintessential moments."
"For many fans, the most sacred times are Opening Day and the World Series."
"Each spring, just before Easter and Passover, baseball elicits a sense of renewal."
"Midseason brings a weekend in a Cooperstown, the upstate New York village and mythical but not actual birthplace of the game, where new heroes are elevated to sit alongside those from the past—an enactment of what Eliade called the Myth of the Eternal Return, a “revolt against concrete, historical time, their nostalgia for a periodical return to the mythical "time of the beginning of things, to the ‘Great Time.’”
"Today, especially in the West, that word, myth, too often is used as a synonym for falsehood. The Greek word mythos originally meant a truth that is experienced, an awareness that lies beyond words. As theologian Karen Armstrong wrote, “A myth was never intended as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that had in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time.”"