Baseball and America

The players were only about 20 years old. The stands were half-empty. The ads on the wall were the biggest thing in the place. Still, seeing the class AA Trenton Thunder on a sunny Sunday afternoon in mid-summer was about the most American thing I have done in a long time, and not just because my cousin's four-year-old boy got a real bat from a player at the end of the game.
I know baseball is mythologized to the hilt, but there is something purer about the game than football, our real national pastime. Football represents all things modern American: speed,action, violence and the celebration and deification of all those things. Baseball may be "a picnic for retards," but it is a picnic in its timeless pace and pure enjoyment of environment and company. Especially at the minor league level.
There is something better about the American spirit in that game at that level. No one's rooting for someone to be "killed," as I sometimes say in football games. Instead it is slow strategy, and the ballet of fielding, and the tension and release at the end of the best games.
Bottom of the ninth. Two outs, two strikes and two balls. Game tied 1-1. Trenton batter hits a shot to left, and it falls just before the fielder's glove. Game over, celebration at the plate, and a real Louisville Slugger for my cousin's boy. Pine Tar all over it and everything. Like few things in Digitalized Life, it felt real.