Ther are no raging debates in other sports about who gets in and who does not. Baseball's Hall of Fame is filled with the timeless ones, the Hall of Father Figures. Each game of baseball unfolds not unlike Greek tragedy. There is rising action, appropriate masks and costumes, a chorus section, an exposition of hamartia or tragic flaws, and peripateia, the reversal of fortunes. In baseball everything is exposed, from the ultimate individuality of the at-bat offense to the ultimate teamwork of the defense in the field.
Every pitch is magnified, every play is scrutinized.
Bakhtin would have a filed day describing the intertextuality and polyglossia of baseball. Funky country humor and cerebral strategy conspire to make the game appeal equally to the Georgia peanut farmer and the fiction editor at the New Yorker, the kid collecting baseball cards and Robert Coover, Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, the midget who batted once and Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron, who still seems to bat in our memory, whether they played before our time or not. I have an image of every member of my family that relates to baseball. My mother in the days before permanent press would iron shirts every night in the summer. She hated baseball, but she had the games on the radio for background noise, because it soothed her.