A good umpire, like a good FBI agent, is never noticed if he is doing his job.
Baseball has traditionally possessed a wonderful lack of seriousness. The game's best player, Babe Ruth, was a Rabelaisian fat man, and its most loved manager, Casey Stengel, spoke gibberish. In this lazy sport, only the pitcher pours sweat. Then he ...
The naked pinch hitter takes only one thing to the plate: his raw, and somewhat irrational, confidence in himself. That this confidence is so unreasonable adds to its dignity.
Almost without exception, they are men who dreamed of athletic heroism as children; becoming umpires was their compromise with their own lack of talent.
[B]aseball is diffracted by the town and ballpark where it is played... Does baseball, like a liquid, take the shape of its container?
The crowd and its team had finally understood that in games, as in many things, the ending, the final score, is only part of what matters. The process, the pleasure, the grain of the game count too.
Familiarity, and a few dozen cheap flyballs off the Monster, breed contempt.
