BASEBALL

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Baseball is different from other games.  Its strength is inherent,
metaphysical. Why? 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. Football,
basketball, hockey, soccer games are arbitrarily divided into measured
quarters, halves, or periods. They are controlled, even dominated by
time. Not so baseball, which either ignores time or dominates it. An
inning theoretically can go on forever. 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. . .

Baseball is also played in a unique spatial frame. Other games are
restricted to limited, defined areas, rectangular or near rectangular,
floors or rinks. 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. 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. 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.

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. One occasionally hears the cry "fire the
referee" but seldom the cry "kill the referee." That cry is reserved for
umpires. Umpires have to be dealt with absolutely, for their power is
absolute. Referees are men called or appointed. 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. - Eugene McCarthy,
Forward to Lawrence Frank's "Playing Hardball: The Dynamics of Baseball
Folk Speech (1984)

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