THE GAME FOR ALL AMERICA (A Definition of Baseball)

Baseball is a president tossing out the first ball of the season and a pudgy school boy playing catch with his dad on a Mississippi farm. A tall thin old man waving a score card from the corner of his dugout, that's Baseball.

And so is a big fat guy with a bulbous nose running home one of his 714 home runs.
There's a man in Mobile who remembers that Honus Wagner hit a triple in Pittsburgh 46 years ago, that's baseball.

And so is a scout reporting that a 16 year old pitcher in Cheyenne is a coming Walter Johnson. Baseball is a spirited game of man against man, reflex against reflex a game of inches.

Every skill is measured, every heroic, every failing, seen and cheered, or booed and then becomes a statistic. In baseball, democracy shines its clearest, the only race that matters is the race to the bag. The creed is a rule book and color mearly something to distinguish one team's uniform from another.

Baseball is a rookie, his experience no bigger than the lump in his throat as he begins fulfillment of his dream. It's a veteran too. A tired, old man of 35 hoping those aching muscles can pull him through another swealtering August and September.

Nicknames are baseball. Names like Zeke and Pie and Kiki and Home Run and Cracker and Dizzy and Dazzy. Baseball is the clear cool eyes of Rogers Hornsby, the flashing spikes of a Ty Cobb and an overaged pixie named Rabbit Moranville.

Baseball, just a game, as simple as a ball and bat and yet as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes. It's a sport, a business, sometimes almost even religion.
Why the fairy tale of Willie Mays making a brillient World Series catch and then dashing off to play stickball in the streets with his teenage pals. That's Baseball.

And so is the husky voice of a doomed Lou Gerhig saying, "I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth." Baseball is cigar smoke, hot roasted peanuts, ladies day, "Down in front!" "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," the seventh inning stretch, and the "Star Spangled Banner"

Baseball is a man named Campanella telling the nation's business leaders "You have to be a man to be a big leaguer, but you have to have a lot of little boy in you too."
This is a game for America, this baseball, a game for boys and for men!

—by Ernie Harwell 1955