Baseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech — a slightly elevated and concentrated form.

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.

More than any other American sport, baseball creates the magnetic, addictive illusion that it can almost be understood.

Bruce Sutter and his new pitch, the split finger fastball, fascinate the manager of the Cuban national teams. 'We must find out about this new weapon,' he said. 'Are the American hitters plotting to murder him?

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 takes three days off.

[B]aseball is diffracted by the town and ballpark where it is played... Does baseball, like a liquid, take the shape of its container?

A good umpire, like a good FBI agent, is never noticed if he is doing his job.

Familiarity, and a few dozen cheap flyballs off the Monster, breed contempt.

Almost without exception, they are men who dreamed of athletic heroism as children; becoming umpires was their compromise with their own lack of talent.