The traditional American game

Like life in traditional society, but unlike football and basketball, the other two major American team sports, baseball is not ruled by the clock and amazes many foreigners that it is the “national sport” in America. a fast-paced America. Being a very popular team sport, in addition to North America also in Latin America, the Caribbean and East Asia, baseball is a bat and ball game in which a pitcher throws a fist-sized hard ball beyond the batting area of ​​a batter. The batter, who belongs to the other team, tries to hit the ball with a smooth cylindrical wooden or metal bat. The team will score only when the batter successfully hits the ball and then passes over four existing markers on the diamond-shaped baseball field, placed ninety feet apart and called bases, while their opponents attempt the same. weather. catch the ball and successfully throw it using his hands to his teammates located at each of the four bases before the batter manages to cover the last ninety feet and reach the last base.

Whereas a football game comprises exactly sixty minutes of play and a basketball game forty or forty-eight minutes, baseball does not have a set length. The pace of the game is therefore slow and unhurried, as the world was before deadlines, schedules and hourly wages. In fact, baseball belongs to that time when people had all day to play a game. Like traditional rural life, baseball proceeds according to the rhythm of nature, specifically the rotation of the Earth around itself and the Sun. In fact, during its early years, baseball was not played at night, so that this traditional game of leisure ended before sunset at the latest.

Today, the baseball season follows a traditional rhythm, following the cycle of the active part of the agricultural year. Baseball season begins with the arrival of spring, stretches through the hot days of summer, and culminates, like the growing season with its harvest, in the fall. From November through March, baseball players were once inactive, but now most of them migrate to the warmer climates of Central and South America.

Finally, just as rural societies everywhere observed the three phases of the growing season with festivals, so does baseball. It is the opening day of the season marked by the arrival of spring. Then the annual All-Star Game pairing the best players from the two major leagues comes in mid-summer, and this past October, baseball’s championship competition called the “World Series” begins, often called the “fall classic.” “.

With world famous players such as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio, the golden age of baseball transformed these sports athletes into epic figures who inspired many and reminded people why keeping our roots alive should be considered of utmost importance. Indeed, one measure of baseball’s position at the heart of American life is its transcendence of the boundary between popular and high culture. More so than the other two favorite American sports, baseball has had a “crossover appeal,” drawing interest from groups with little else in common. It is above all a form of popular entertainment. But it has also been the subject of serious literal treatment and rigorous quantitative analysis. In the national life of the United States, baseball has carved out a place for itself in both the arts and sciences.