Loving baseball

J'attire votre attention sur un bel article de Joe Posnanski dans le dernier numéro du Sports illustrated. Pour les amateurs...

"Baseball is a game out of time. This is the sport's defining quality, its badge of honor. The people who love baseball—the poets, the stat geeks, the bleacher bums, the second-guessers, the former pitchers, the collectors—we love baseball for its timelessness. It is a game without a clock. "Keep the rally alive," the marvelous Roger Angell wrote, "and you have defeated time."

The people who do not love baseball feel its timelessness too. They lampoon a game that feels ... so ... yesterday. They mock baseball for not having a clock, for its interminable pauses, for sparking so little violence and motion, for struggling to adapt (No replay? Really?), for being measured by numbers well to the right of decimal points. "You made me love baseball," Lisa told Bart on The Simpsons. "Not as a collection of numbers, but as an unpredictable, passionate game beaten in excitement only by every other sport."

Baseball is a game out of time. And that's what started me on this trip. Think about this for a moment: What else but baseball connects us to America of, say, 1891? What else has burned so long in our consciousness? The American population in 1891 was less than one quarter of what it is now. That was before movies, before television, before radio, before Hershey bars, before Wrigley gum, before even Brett Favre. America the Beautiful had not been written. Dracula did not exist, no Roosevelt had yet been president. Football, under different rules, was played only at a few colleges, there was no golf U.S. Open and until the end of that year basketball was a game bouncing around in the fertile mind of a YMCA instructor named James Naismith. The Olympics, more than 1,500 years since their last staging, would not resume for another five years.

But ... America had baseball. Cy Young was not an award but a 24-year-old kid who won 27 games. Sliding Billy Hamilton stole 111 bases. Cap Anson led a segregated National League in RBIs for the eighth time at age 39. A light-hitting but speedy outfielder named Billy Sunday quit baseball to begin a new life as an evangelist. Attendance soared and salaries skyrocketed, leading The New York Times to lament that baseball was "no longer a sport, but a business.""

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1188482/index.htm