Introduction

Mark Twain called baseball "the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth-century". This book searches the concrete actions typical of baseball games for the meaning of what they represent. For example, the struggles in a game of individuals against a group of enemies organized to put them out represent the struggles of Americans to succeed in a fiercely competitive capitalistic economy. But baseball combines characteristics of both Christian Protestantism and industrial capitalism. So a home run represents a sudden, unexpected success and at the same time a home run embodies in a game a sudden impossible miraculous redemption. We are a people who worship not just what is possible in life but what is impossible and baseball is our national theater.