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BASEBALL QUOTE
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Baseball
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Baseball is different from other games.
Its strength is inherent, metaphysical. Why?
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First, because the game has a singular and distinctive relationship to time.
Only baseball, among all games, can be called a "pastime."
For baseball is above or outside time.
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Football, basketball, hockey, soccer games are arbitrarily divided into measured quarters, halves, or periods.
They are controlled, even dominated by time.
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Not so baseball, which either ignores time or dominates it.
An inning theoretically can go on forever.
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The same is true of the game.
Interruptions are generally limited to acts of God, such as darkness or rain, or to cultural, religious and quasi-natural occurrences such as curfew or midnight. . .
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Baseball is also played in a unique spatial frame.
Other games are restricted to limited, defined areas, rectangular or near rectangular, floors or rinks.
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Not so baseball.
Baseball is played within the lines of a projection from home plate, starting from the point of a 90 degrees and extending to infinity.
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Were it not for the intervention of fences, buildings, mountains, and other obstacles in space, a baseball traveling within the ultimate projection of the first and third baselines could be fair and fully and infinitely in play.
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Baseballs never absolutely go out of bounds.
They are either fair or foul; and even foul balls are, within limits, playable and part of the game.
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Baseball is distinguished from other games, too in the way in which it is controlled by umpires. An umpire is very different from a referee, a field judge, or a linesman.
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One occasionally hears the cry "fire the referee" but seldom the cry "kill the referee."
That cry is reserved for umpires.
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Umpires have to be dealt with absolutely, for their power is absolute.
Referees are men called or appointed.
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Umpires, by contrast, seem to exist in their own right and exercise undelegated power which is not to be reviewed and from which there is no appeal.
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- Eugene McCarthy, Forward to Lawrence Frank's "Playing Hardball: The Dynamics of Baseball Folk Speech (1984)
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