The Traditional American Game
Author: Jonathon Hardcastle

Like life in traditional society, but unlike football and
basketball, the other two major American team sports, baseball
is not governed by the clock and amazes many foreigners that it
is the "national sport" in a fast-paced United States. Being a
very popular team sport, apart from 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 past the
hitting area of a batter. The batter, who belongs to the other
team, then attempts to hit the ball with a smooth, cylindrical
bat made of wood or metal. The team will score only when the
batter manages to successfully batting the ball and then runs
over four markers existing on the diamond-shaped baseball
field, placed on a ninety feet distance from each other and
called bases, while his opponents try at the same time to catch
the ball and successfully throw it by using their hands to their
teammates located at each of the four bases before the batter
manages to cover the last ninety feet and reach the last base.

While a football game comprises exactly sixty minutes of play
and a basketball game forty or forty-eight minutes, baseball
has no set game duration. The pace of the game is therefore
leisurely and unhurried, like the world was once, before the
deadlines, schedules and hour wages. As a matter of fact,
baseball belongs to that time when people had all day to play a
game. Much 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 during the night, which meant
that this traditional leisure game was over before sunset at
the latest.

Today, the baseball season follows a traditional pace,
following the cycle of the active part of the agricultural
year. Baseball season begins with the coming of spring,
stretches through the long hot days of the summer, and
culminates, like the growing season with its harvest, in the
fall. From November through March, baseball players were
inactive once, 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.
There is the opening day of the season marked by the arrival of
spring. Then the annual All-Star Game matching the best players
from the two major leagues comes in midsummer, and last in
October, the baseball championship competition called "World
Series," often called the "fall classic," begins.

With worldwide famous players, like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and
Joe DiMaggio, baseball's golden age transformed these sports
athletes to epic figures who inspired many and reminded people
why keeping our roots alive should be considered of extreme
importance. In fact, a measure of baseball's standing at the
heart of American life is its transcendence of the boundary
between popular and high culture. More than the other two
favorite American sports, baseball has had a "crossover
appeal," attracting interest from groups with little else in
common. It is first and foremost a form of popular
entertainment. But it has also been the subject of serious
literally treatment and rigorous quantitative analysis. In the
national life of the United States, baseball has made a place
for itself in both the arts and sciences.


About The Author: Jonathon Hardcastle writes articles for
http://baseballstuff.net/ - In addition, Jonathon also writes
articles for http://everythingaboutgames.net/ and
http://universeofentertainment.com/