The legends of pastoral fields. The detailed history and meticulous attention to continuity. The sight of kids playing ball. The hush that descends when you walk into the Hall of Fame. Each implicitly casts the universe of baseball as a magical land that touches, but maybe isn't precisely part of, the “real” world in which we live. “The whole history of baseball,” the writer Bernard Malamud once said, “has the quality of mythology.”
Since the game's early days, that mythology has been constructed — often deliberately — to set itself apart. But sometimes things happen that demonstrate otherwise, and reality pokes through.
