The traditional American game
Much like life in traditional society, but unlike football and basketball, the other two major American team sports, baseball does not run by the clock and astonishes many foreigners that it is the “national sport” in a fast-paced America. Being a very popular team sport, in addition to North America also in Latin America, the Caribbean and East Asia, baseball is a bat-and-ball game in which a pitcher throws a hard ball the size of a fist. beyond the batting area of a batter. The batsman, who belongs to the other team, tries to hit the ball with a smooth cylindrical wooden or metal bat. The team will score only when the batter successfully hits the ball and then passes over four existing markers on the baseball field in the shape of a diamond, placed ninety feet apart and called bases, while their opponents attempt at the same time. time. catch the ball and successfully throw it using their hands to teammates at each of the four bases before the batter has covered the last ninety feet and reached last base.
Whereas a football game comprises exactly sixty minutes of play and a basketball game forty or forty-eight minutes, baseball has no set duration. The pace of the game is therefore leisurely and unhurried, as the world was before deadlines, schedules, and hourly wages. In fact, baseball belongs to that time when people had all day to play a game. Like traditional rural life, baseball moves according to the rhythm of nature, specifically the rotation of the Earth around itself and the Sun. In fact, during its early years, baseball was not played at night, so that this traditional game of leisure ended before sunset at the latest.
Today, the baseball season follows a traditional rhythm, following the cycle of the active part of the agricultural year. Baseball season begins with the arrival of spring, stretches through the hot days of summer, and culminates, like the growing season with its harvest, in the fall. From November through March, baseball players were once inactive, but now most of them migrate to the warmer climates of Central and South America.
Finally, just as rural societies everywhere observed all three phases of the growing season with festivals, so too does baseball. It is the opening day of the season marked by the arrival of spring. Then the annual All-Star Game that pairs the best players from the two major leagues comes around mid-summer, and last October begins baseball’s championship competition called the “World Series,” often called the “fall classic.” “.
With world famous players such as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio, the golden era of baseball transformed these sports athletes into epic figures who inspired many and reminded people why keeping our roots alive should be considered extremely important. In fact, one measure of baseball’s position at the heart of American life is its transcendence of the boundary between popular and high culture. More than the other two favorite American sports, baseball has had “crossover appeal,” drawing interest from groups with little else in common. It is first and foremost a form of popular entertainment. But it has also been the subject of serious literal treatment and rigorous quantitative analysis. In the national life of the United States, baseball has carved a place for itself in both the arts and the sciences.
