It's beautiful, absorbing, a soap opera that gets more interesting the more attention you pay. Third, and probably most relevant to Diamonds, baseball is played on the fields of the imagination as much as on the diamond, and these fields don't require physical strength or grace. Here are a few of the specific insights that particularly struck me.
Baseball lasts as long as it takes.
My favorite selections were those of Nancy Lemann, Ann Bauleke, and Gail Mazur. I was so enthusiastic about the selection from Lemann's novel Sportsman's Paradise that I immediately got the novel and read it right through. I found Ann Bauleke's account of Kent Hrbek's and her own father's deaths extraordinarily moving. Gail Mazur has three poems in the anthology. Like all good anthologies this is just the tip of an iceberg.