Why baseball?

With the St. Louis Cardinals, and the baseball playoffs being a common theme in my posts of late, you may be wondering why someone would care so much about something like baseball, when there are so many important things to worry about. To baseball people, it is next to impossible to explain why they like the game so much. Believe me. I tried last year to answer this exact question for my school's yearbook. I would like to share a paragraph from Ken Burns' book Baseball: An Illustrated History, which is a companion to his Baseball documentary. To me, this statement is a glimpse of the tip of the iceberg:

“The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has remarked that we suffer today from 'too much pluribus and not enough unum.' Few things survive in these cynical days to remind us of the Union from which so many of our personal and collective blessings flow, and it is hard not to wonder, in an age when the present moment consumes and overshadows all else – our bright past and our dim unknown future – what finally does endure? What encodes and stores the genetic material of our civilization – passing down to the next generation the best of us, what we hope will mutate into betterness for our children and our posterity? Baseball provides one answer. Nothing in our daily life offers more of the comfort of continuity, the generational connection of belonging to a vast and complicated American family, the powerful sense of home, the freedom from time's constraints, and the great gift of accumulated memory than does our National Pastime.”