The crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd … the game of baseball, long part of the American landscape and firmly placed in the hearts of millions, is back.
Writers have always been drawn to the sport, to its practitioners, its meaning and its inherent poetry. Walt Whitman, referring to what was then a relatively new addition to the country’s sports scene, may have once said something along the lines of: “I see great things in baseball. It’s our game — the American game.”
I am not the wildly passionate fan that I was when young, but still, before every season arrives, I reread what I consider the best novel written about baseball, Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural” (1952) — not to be confused with Robert Redford’s “The Natural” film in 1984 — and John Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” a remarkable story in The New Yorker about Ted Williams hitting a home run in his last at-bat in Boston’s Fenway Park in 1960.
