We have been warned. Baseball is too serious to be left to the fans. If I want essence, I'll send in Western science.
Baseball is entirely too important for such matters.
It is arithmetic for professionals, culture for anthropologists, class structure for sociologists, data for statisticians, text for punditry. It is, therefore, above irony, beyond poetry, exiled from feeling and, last of all, far removed from that dreadful indulgence of the masses, you know, that terrible goofy thing called . . . But the odd thing is that the 46,902 people here today in the great new-old construct called Oriole Park at Camden Yards, under a sky that surprises all with its marbleized streaks of blue that occasionally permit the sunlight to splash through, seem not to agree with Mr. Tygiel. Why, they sit in a cathedral of color, seething flesh and communal celebration, and everywhere you look they seem to be in a rapture, an ecstasy of possibility, a release from the quotidian. I love it when, after the subterranean sensation of entering the dark chutes and ladders of the stadium, you step out of the tunnel at last and experience the true space of the place, its vastness, its splurge of freedom, its distance and angles.