Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic … America’s game: has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere—belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.—walt whitman
ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE WAS A FIFTH grade boy whose sixth-grade friend, in the absence of the boy’s father, marched him to the local community center and signed him up for a youth basketball team. Just a few months later, the same sixth-grade homie marched that fifth grader over to a local park and signed him up for a Little League baseball team. That fifth grader was me. The sixth grader was the homie Stevie.
From then until I graduated from Portland Community College, I played on an organized basketball team. (All-league, too.) But beyond that one season, I never again played organized baseball.
For one thing, it felt like baseball never needed me, to say nothing of
