I got Summerland, a novel about fairies and baseball by Michael Chabon, for Christmas. I'm reading Chabon's introduction which is, in and of itself, quite something.
Anyway, partway through it quotes from A. Bartlett Giamatti's "The Green Fields of the Mind," which is maybe the best short piece of writing on baseball I've ever read (though I'd need to reread Don Delillo's "Pafko at the Wall" to decide). So of course I had to go reread it to see if it really is as good as I remember.
It is.
Mark
(Giamatti, by the way, has one of the stranger resumes out there: professor of English to president of Yale to, all too briefly, MLB commissioner.)
You should go read it now, if you haven't already. It reveals that David Bentley Hart baseball essay for the purplish overwrought garbage that it is.
Mark
PS: I should reiterate that I have long felt--ever since watching my grandfather watch the Braves in the early 90s--that I ought to like baseball quite a bit more than I actually do, that my fervent preference for college basketball over baseball is a weakness of character, and so my penance is to read essays, short stories, and novels about baseball that only serve to reinforce that idea.
PPS: The College World Series final in the summer of 2016--in which Coastal Carolina beat Arizona--did convince me that maybe I do have it in me to be a baseball fan. I watched two games in the hotel room at my APUSH training conference. The third was set for my last night there, but it was rain-delayed, and so I watched it via the laptop of the guy in the next row over.
