Ours has been aptly described as the age of the corporate player. Baseball is a game with the power to restore faith. In its infancy baseball healed the wounds of the Civil War. The Black Sox scandal of 1919 ushered in the '20s and the great Yankee teams featuring America's most famous orphan. Blacks could eventually play major league baseball even if they couldn't sit in the front of the bus.
Resurrection is a fact of baseball, just as it is of religion.
But baseball is as much spirit as substance, as much culture as history. We Americans are a paradoxical and enigmatic lot, and so is baseball. We revel in anything and everything that is new, and yet we are enamored of a game that is essentially changeless. In fact, change is anathema to a true baseball aficionado. Baseball is also a game of optimism, just as America is a nation of optimism.