For a time, usually between preschool and early adolescence, baseball cards and the state of one's glove can matter more than anything else. Favorite players may look like gods, remote and perfect, dispensing favors to lesser, grateful mortals. When we grownup fans compare today's game to that of our youth, we tend unconsciously to evoke a time when baseball looked cleaner, brighter, larger, more heroic. A mood of keening nostalgia naturally follows. For a time in childhood, baseball cards and the state of one's glove can matter more than anything else.
Favorite players look like gods, remote and perfect.
Nostalgia has its uses, of course, but it does not encourage clear-eyed historical perception. Walter Johnson demonstrating his sidearm pitching motion, Ty Cobb running the bases, Pete Alexander striking out Tony Lazzeri in the 1926 World Series. But such warm, fuzzy thoughts ultimately overwhelmed the Burns series when it tried to define what baseball means and why we should care. The first episode of the series framed this unifying theme with two familiar nineteenth-century epigraphs. That's the chief fact in connection with it.