Why Baseball is The Game
As the great player and Hall of Fame manager, Earl Weaver
said, “You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill
the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the damn plate and five the other
man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all. “
America’s
Game
“
The Game” Baseball.
America’s great pastime. The game most boys and some girls have played
at some time in their lives. It’s called
America’s game because it
was one of the first sports played seriously in the
United State
starting 1845. I played in Little League
and then in the Pony League. After that,
not much. High school grades (bad ones)
prevented me from playing in high school and there was no college in my future.
As long as I could play the game of baseball I felt I was
still a kid, I forgot everything when I was playing. The assaults of the world started on me
early. A bad day of playing the game was
always better than any other day I had. I
didn’t have to worry about school, or my parents or friends. All I thought about was hitting the ball and
at other times catching the ball with waiting in-between. And the waiting never bothered me. I was lost in the dream of playing. Even when there was no organized game to play,
we played out in the streets, home plate a hub cap off a car and bases were curbs
and lines in the street. We’d play until
dark and only quit because we could not see the baseball anymore. And only occasionally did one of us get hit
by a car – usually a light tap.
Walt Whitman on America's Pastime
One of the great American poets, Walt Whitman lived at
the time of the founding of baseball
1819 - 1892. He saw the beginning and the development of the game. Horace L. Traubel who wrote about Whitman in , “Walt
Whitman in Camden,”
vol. 2 (stated by Whitman in September 1888): “Whitman spoke more about in
glowing terms: Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic! That's beautiful:
the hurrah game! well—it's our game: that's the chief fact in connection with
it: America's game: has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere—belongs
as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our
constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.
Sports Painting. About the Baseball Art
“The Game” painting by sports artist John Robertson is an image of the batter, catcher and umpire that is almost life-size. The size of the art piece is 6 feet by 10 feet, ink and acrylic on unstretched canvas.
